

Sudoku #28

Category: Sudoku
Wed, 20 Jul 2005, 08:34

On this day, 36 years ago, two men from Earth landed on another celestial body, the Moon. In doing so, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were well on their way to successfully completing a challenge made by President Kennedy eight years earlier.

The primary goal of Apollo was political - to beat the Russians to the Moon. If it weren't for the early successes of the Soviet Union in launching first satellites and later men into orbit, the United States wouldn't have been in such a hurry to showcase its own technological prowess.

Since 1972, there have been no manned space flights to the Moon, or any other planet. Why not? There simply haven't been any good political reasons to do so. One might argue that scientific curiousity is a good reason, but good science can be done much more effectively with unmanned space probes. Just look at what's happening now on Mars. There are two automated rovers crawling on its surface, and a number of satellites are busy doing remote sensing from orbit. The amount of scientific information about obtained from unmanned probes dwarfs the amount of science done by NASA's manned programs, at a fraction of the cost.

What about the so-called "spinoff benefits" from the manned spaceflight programs? First, studies have shown that the spinoff benefits are greatly exaggerated. Second, if you want advances in specific areas, like cancer research, the best approach is to fund those areas directly, and not to count on the rare possible spinoff from spaceflight research.

And now with my rant out of the way, here's todays challenge.


9   1
9 3  
  8 7
6   2
5 4  
  1 6
9   3

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