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Originally Posted by CaptainDoggles
Agree 100%. The "sky-crane" concept is as novel as it is ambitious, and I felt a lot of tension as it was coming down. With the airbag landings they used for Spirit and Opportunity, it was sort of assumed that unless the bags failed to inflate it was pretty much impossible for the mission to fail once it got on-target for the landing zone.
With the Sky Crane it seemed that things could so easily go awry at each stage.
If anyone can do this, it's NASA. Proving again they're the cream of the crop.
I hope I live to see a manned mission to Mars.
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I read Steve Squyres (lead scientist on the Spirit and Opportunity rover mission) book and they didn't have too much faith in the big-bags method of getting the payload onto Mars. I think this is their answer to get something this big and heavy safely down and in working order.
Fingers crossed so far!
For all the slagging NASA gets they certainly are unrivalled. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers had an expected working life of something like 60 days but incredibly eight years after landing on Mars Opportunity rover is still going!!!
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/missi...tunityAll.html