Word: sagan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even proponents believe the U.S. should approach a joint effort with the Soviets in gradual steps, perhaps starting with an unmanned mission to bring back soil samples from Mars in 1998. Many, like Sagan, are convinced that the advantages of a cooperative mission would override the possible risks. Besides sharply reducing the enormous costs of going to Mars alone, such a venture, says Sagan, "would revitalize a dispirited and unraveling NASA" and provide a "coherent focus for the U.S. space program...
...joint mission might help draw the U.S. and the Soviet Union closer together. He dismisses fears that such a mission would risk giving away U.S. technology to the Soviets, pointing out that the Soviets are a decade ahead of the U.S. in several areas of spaceflight. "Technology transfer," Sagan concludes, "is likely to flow both ways...
...These missions are novel and trail-blazing," says Cornell University Astronomer Carl Sagan, president of the Planetary Society and the man who first proposed a joint manned mission to Mars. "In terms of science, we'll all find out a lot about Phobos." Furthermore, he says, "in the long run, Phobos could act as a staging platform for human missions to Mars. It could also be a place where humans could live and work while they control robotic explorers on the surface of Mars...
...miles, transmitting 22 television pictures of a bleak, moonlike landscape, pockmarked by craters and showing no signs of life. Even so, hope persisted. To demonstrate that a Mariner flyby at a distance of thousands of miles might completely overlook a thriving civilization, a young and still unknown Carl Sagan that same year sifted through a thousand pictures of earth shot by a weather satellite orbiting only 300 miles up. In a paper entitled "Is There Life on Earth?" he reported that only one photograph, of a snow-covered superhighway cutting a straight line through a forest, showed any evidence...
...disagree with Randi on specific points," says Carl Sagan, "but we ignore him at our peril." "He's a national treasure," says Author Isaac Asimov. Randi's targets are less enthusiastic. A Popoff staff member calls him "the devil" and an atheist. He has been the object of hate-mail campaigns by some of his foes. All to no avail. Says Randi: "No blackmail, no threats, can cause me to back away from my chosen work...