Episode 425: Super Successes and Fantastic Failures

On this episode of Talking Space, we discuss the hottest space topic of the last two weeks: the successful landing of the Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity. We then discuss the Commercial Crew integrated Capability initiative and who's getting money, who isn't, and who we feel should or should not have received any funding for furthering work on commercial efforts to send humans into space. We then go from the success of Mars to a couple of recent failures. We discuss the recent Proton upper stage failure, which has now been the cause of 3 satellites entering incorrect orbits in 1 year. We also discuss the major explosion of the Morpheus test vehicle. We then discuss the newest head of the astronaut office and what that title actually is. We then discuss a new website offering an interesting look at NASA spinoffs. Lastly, we read a listener letter discussing the much-talked-about subject on our show of the location of Saturn V blueprints. Special thanks to Evan Burton for sending us a listener letter. You can send any comments or questions to us by email at mailbag@talkingspaceonline.com, sending us a tweet @talkingspace, or writing us on our Facebook wall at http://facebook.com/talkingspace For more pictures from Mars, visit http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl To see the Morpheus test flight, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hvlG2JtMts For information on Sally Ride, visit http://sallyridescience.com