Word: drake
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...flight plans and sketching out vehicles that--so they say--could make manned landings on the Red Planet not only possible but also economically practical. The hardware, they believe, is largely in hand. The funds, they argue, could be within reach. "Within 25 years," says NASA's Bret Drake, director of mission studies at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, "I project that we could have human exploration of Mars being conducted routinely...
...Center, engineers are thus looking at other Mars scenarios that still include frugal, on-site fuel manufacturing but also call for six-person crews, bigger vehicles and Apollo-style motherships in Martian orbit. "We're trying to take the best ideas and fold them into a reasonable approach," says Drake...
...such pessimism represents a minority view among scientists, at least those with their eyes on the stars. "In this business, you have to remain optimistic," says radio astronomer Frank Drake, who kicked off the original Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in 1960 with his whimsically named Project Ozma (after the satiric Oz books). He "looked" briefly at several nearby sunlike stars in the hope that they might be orbited by planets whose inhabitants were sending out intelligible signals, like the flood of radio and TV broadcasts we've been inadvertently blasting into space for the past 80 years. ("Hey there...
...Drake, alas, detected nary a peep. Nor has anyone else since then. Even after spending thousands of hours scanning the skies, at myriad frequencies, at a cost of more than $100 million astronomers have yet to detect a single credible signal, though the most distant star probed is barely 1% of the way across the galaxy...
...Still, Drake, 70, who devised the definitive equation for calculating the possible number of technologically advanced civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy, remains convinced that he will be around when one of them calls. "We're just at the beginning of our search," says Drake, who reckons that there are some 10,000 high-tech worlds scattered among the Milky Way's 100 billion or more stars. That's a much more modest figure than the late Carl Sagan's estimate of 1 million intelligent civilizations in just our galaxy--one of perhaps 100 billion galaxies scattered through the universe...