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When we spoke on Nov. 29, I suggested you invest in The Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA) as a play on the boom in Asian air travel.
Ordinarily, I would not come right back so quickly and tell you to take a look at another aerospace stock. But that's exactly what I'm doing today.
And for a very good reason. See, just last week, NASA made another historic landing on the surface of Mars.
After a journey that took seven months and covered 301 million miles, the NASA InSight lander touched down and got right to work by beaming down a picture of the red planet.
That photograph is only the beginning. The robotic craft will spend the next two years gathering and transmitting important data back to Earth.
Doing so will reap insight about the geography and history of Mars. It will help scientists better understand the planet's long-term climate, and why water no longer exists on the surface there.
It's fascinating work. But there's more happening here than simply compiling and analyzing enormous swaths of planetary data. Much more.
That's why today, I want to let you know about the big-cap aerospace leader that played a pivotal role in InSight's successful landing, and why this firm is poised for long-term appreciation…
Check it out…
The Mars Fascination
It's almost impossible to overstate man's fascination with Mars. It literally dates back thousands of years. Egyptian astronomers wrote about Mars hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, as did the ancient Chinese.
In the more modern era, science fiction writers have popularized it in thousands of books, articles, TV shows, and movies.
Indeed, the 2015 movie "The Martian," about an astronaut who gets stranded on the planet but finds a way back to Earth, was a critical success. It earned a 91% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Of course, there's no risk of an astronaut being trapped on Mars – at least not yet. We all know that Elon Musk of SpaceX fame wants to travel to the red planet. Musk even recently said he'd love to try living there for a while.
But as I like to tell my daughters when they get all wound up, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Mars' "Thorough Checkup"
NASA's InSight program is deeply rooted in science fact. It's all about discovering more about a planet that may tell us much about the creation of the solar system, and shed light on what we can expect here on Earth as our planet ages.
Though other probes have landed on Mars before, NASA notes this is the first time the planet has received a "thorough checkup" since it formed 4.5 billion years ago.
The space science agency says this is the first outer-space robotic explorer to study in-depth the "inner space," or geology, of Mars, including its crust, mantle, and core.
Equipped with a six-foot robotic arm, the lander uses cutting-edge instruments to drill deep beneath the surface. In turn, the arm will deploy a heat flow probe that will burrow 16 feet into the ground. That's deeper than any instrument that has ever been to Mars has gone.
Add it all up and you can see that this is quite a technical achievement, one that speaks volumes about the quality of the company that played a big role in building the InSight lander.
Leading the Journey to the Final Frontier
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About the Author
Michael A. Robinson is one of the top financial analysts working today. His book "Overdrawn: The Bailout of American Savings" was a prescient look at the anatomy of the nation's S&L crisis, long before the word "bailout" became part of our daily lexicon. He's a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and reporter, lauded by the Columbia Journalism Review for his aggressive style. His 30-year track record as a leading tech analyst has garnered him rave reviews, too. Today he is the editor of the monthly tech investing newsletter Nova-X Report as well as Radical Technology Profits, where he covers truly radical technologies – ones that have the power to sweep across the globe and change the very fabric of our lives – and profit opportunities they give rise to. He also explores "what's next" in the tech investing world at Strategic Tech Investor.
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