Getting to Mars without breaking the bank this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

I'm inspired to know that there are people who don't just

think that we can send humans to Mars, they think we can send them affordably.

That's what Harley Thronsen of the American Astronautical Society will tell us today, but only after we hear

from Emily Lachowala, about the latest from Curiosity, and from Bill Nye about another rover that

may soon head for the moon.

And just to prove that dreams, or at least nightmares, do come true, you'll hear how you can

actually see Bruce Betts and me record this week's What's Up.

Here's the Planetary Society senior editor.

Emily, a nice long blog entry that you posted on the 13th about curiosity,

which I hope has made it through a particularly difficult part of its

path?

I don't know about difficult, but it was the first time they've ever tried to cross a large-ish

sand dune with curiosity, they were being very very cautious

but curiosity handled it with absolutely no problem and now the rover is

starting to rack up the meters again as she drives to the west.

You have some great pictures that have been taken.

I guess it took a fair amount of bandwidth to do this.

Of the wheels, those pockmarked holy wheels.

I guess this is still a concern. You know they started

noticing a couple of months ago that the rate at which the wheels were

...