So it's been four days since Curiosity actually touched down on Mars, and I feel like I should have something smart to say about the "seven minutes of terror" landing sequence, or the size of Gale Crater, or whatever. But honestly the thing I keep thinking about is the mohawk guy.
You know who I mean. Bobak Ferdowsi, one of the flight directors in the JPL control room, has a mohawk with little stars buzzed into the sides, and somewhere around 1:30am Eastern on Monday morning, half of Twitter apparently decided he was the most interesting person on the planet, or off it. I was watching the NASA feed on my laptop at the kitchen table (yes, I stayed up, no, I do not regret it, my 9am meeting the next day definitely did) and I remember the room erupting when the "touchdown confirmed" call came through. About ninety seconds later my own timeline had already pivoted from "oh my god we landed on Mars" to "who is the mohawk guy."
By Tuesday there were already at least three separate "everything to know about Mohawk Guy" posts floating around, and I read approximately none of them all the way through because they were all the same four facts rearranged in a different order. His Twitter following reportedly went from a couple hundred people to something like tens of thousands within about a day, which is a genuinely bananas rate of growth for a man whose actual job that week was monitoring a nuclear powered robot on another planet.
Here's my actual opinion on this, and I know it's a little contrarian for a tech blog: I think it's great, and I don't think it's as shallow as the "can we please talk about the SCIENCE" crowd wants it to be. NASA has spent decades being kind of terrible at making people care about what they do in between the big headline moments. A huge chunk of the country can probably name an astronaut from 1969 and cannot name a single person currently working at JPL. If a guy with a good haircut is the on-ramp that gets some 14 year old to go look up what Curiosity's laser is actually for, I will take it every single time over nobody paying attention at all.
What I do think is a little much is how fast it curdled into thirst-tweeting a federal employee at his own desk. There's a difference between "this is delightful, NASA people are humans with personalities" and treating the guy like a contestant on a dating show while he's trying to do his actual job, which involves keeping a billion dollar rover alive on a planet that has already eaten several of its predecessors. I don't think anyone tweeting a joke about it is a bad person. I just think by about Wednesday the whole thing had stopped being about the mission at all, and that's the part that always happens with these internet moments and always kind of bugs me, even when I'm laughing along with it.
Meanwhile, actual Curiosity news, in case anyone besides me still cares: NASA's been releasing the first color images out of Gale Crater this week, and they're doing that classic JPL thing where every photo gets its own little press moment, even the ones that are basically test shots of the rover's own wheel to check for shipping damage. I get why they do it. Attention is attention, and this mission is going to need public goodwill for the next two years while it slowly drives around looking for old evidence that Mars could once support life. It's just a very different kind of publicity than "look at this man's hair," and it's a little funny that the hair is currently winning by a mile.
I'm not going to pretend I'm above any of it. I looked him up too, obviously, that's how I know all this. I just think in six months nobody will remember the mohawk and everyone will still be looking at rock samples, and that feels like the correct order of things, even if it is not the order the internet chose this week.