So what, then, accounts for their ubiquity-in our imagination, if not in our airspace? Why are the spaceships of Star Trek and Star Wars and Independence Day shaped the way they are?
That the LDSD would be so subject to environmental vagaries explains in large part why its broader category of craft-the flying saucer-has figured relatively rarely in NASA's engineering repertoire. The experimental craft was meant to launch last week this weekend, that launch was postponed because of a very earthly impediment: uncooperative winds. Payloads, the thinking went, that could include humans. NASA's supersonic braking device-technically known as the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, less technically an enormous inflatable disk-was designed to deliver heavy payloads to the surface of Mars.
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