The Official Sites
NASA
JPL
The Mars Society
The Planetary Society
If your computer is set to run one of those silly flying
toasters things, or a maze, or whatever, maybe you should think about doing
something usefull with all of that processing power. After all, when
you computer is "sleeping", the processor is usually running overtime to
draw all of that stuff. Instead, how about crunching some data for
UC Berkeley's SETI@home project? The program is a screen-saver, and
only runs when your normal screen-saver would run--while your computer
is otherwise not in use.
NASA design studies (that never made it)
One of the most interesting activities of NASA is their
summer research groups, where they pull(ed) together a large number of
professors and the like to attack various long-range planning problems,
such as building a serious space station. As far as I know, none
of the proposals made by these groups was ever put into action, mostly
because they were extremely grand projects which did not lead where NASA
wanted to go, or Congress would fund. However, most of them are quite
complete design studies which have not gone out of date, but are rather
more possible now with current technology. It can be expected that
someone will eventually pick up these free design studies and run with
them, given different motives than a governmental agency primarily interested
in "pure science" and constrained by Congressional budgets.
10,000-Occupant
Space Station
Self-Replicating
Moonbase
Would you like to see your link here??? Drop me a line...