So I'm running on maybe four hours of sleep right now and it was worth every minute of it.
If you were anywhere near a computer late Sunday night you probably know why. NASA landed a car-sized rover on Mars using a sky crane that lowers the thing down on cables like some kind of Rube Goldberg machine designed by very serious engineers with a sense of humor. Touchdown was confirmed at 1:32 am Eastern, which meant those of us on the east coast go to bed responsibly and set an alarm, watch it live and stumble through Monday looking like extras from a zombie movie. I did not go to bed responsibly. I sat on my couch with a laptop, a phone, and a mug of coffee I'd made way too strong, streaming NASA TV through a browser tab that kept buffering at the worst possible moments.
The stream itself was rough, honestly. Kept freezing right when the mission control room started cheering, which meant I'd hear the noise a half second before the video caught up, like watching a badly dubbed movie. Not NASA's fault, I assume half the internet was hitting that same feed at once. Still, I complain about it because that's what you do when you're watching history happen through a pixelated JPEG-quality stream at one in the morning.
The part that actually got me wasn't the landing itself, though "seven minutes of terror" is a genuinely great piece of branding for an unmanned descent sequence. It was watching that control room. You had a couple hundred engineers, most of them looking barely old enough to rent a car, just losing it the second telemetry confirmed touchdown. Hugging, crying, one guy doing what can only be described as an aggressive fist pump directly into the ceiling. It didn't look like a press event. It looked like a group of people who had spent years of their lives on something that had about a fifty percent chance of smashing into a canyon at highway speed, and it worked.
And then there's Bobak Ferdowsi. If you weren't on Twitter Sunday night you missed the birth of "Mohawk Guy," a NASA flight director who showed up to the biggest night of his career with a mohawk dyed red and blue with actual stars shaved into the sides. Somebody screenshotted him mid-celebration and by Monday morning he had thousands of new Twitter followers and his own trending topic. He did a Reddit AMA the next day too, answering questions about the mission with the same energy he apparently brings to landing spacecraft. I don't know why this delighted me as much as it did. Maybe because it's such a departure from the buttoned-up NASA-of-the-70s image everyone still has in their head. Turns out the people building an interplanetary laser-shooting chemistry lab also have opinions about hair dye.
I'll say this too, and it's a small thing but it's stuck with me: the mission cost something like two and a half billion dollars, spread out over close to a decade of work, all riding on a landing sequence nobody could test in real conditions ahead of time. No dress rehearsal on actual Mars. You build the thing, you run the simulations as many times as you can afford, and then you commit and watch. That's an uncomfortable amount of faith to put in your own engineering, and it paid off, and I think that's rarer than we like to admit in software where we ship things constantly and just patch whatever breaks after the fact.
Anyway. Curiosity is on Mars now, presumably taking pictures of rocks and dust that are going to look, to my untrained eye, exactly like every other picture of rocks and dust. I don't care. I'm still riding the high of watching a room full of nerds lose their minds over something they built landing safely on another planet, ninety-some million miles away, on the first try. My coffee's cold, I've got work in six hours, and I regret absolutely nothing about last night.