I was up way too late on a Sunday for this, but I don't regret it one bit.
If you were anywhere near a computer in the early hours of August 6th, you know what I'm talking about: Curiosity touched down in Gale Crater at 1:32am Eastern, and for about seven minutes before that everybody with a NASA feed open was collectively holding their breath. They'd been calling it "seven minutes of terror" in the promo video for weeks, which sounded like marketing hype right up until it wasn't. Landing a one-ton rover on another planet using a sky crane that lowers it on cables like some kind of interplanetary crane game is objectively insane, and it worked on the first try. I had the JPL livestream open in one tab and Twitter in another and honestly the Twitter tab was more useful, because the video kept buckling right when it mattered (of course it did, every major NASA stream I've ever watched chokes at the worst possible moment, you'd think theyd learn).
But that's not really what I want to write about, because every tech blog on the internet already did the "holy cow we landed on Mars" post last week and I don't have much to add to that pile. What I actually can't stop thinking about is Bobak Ferdowsi.
He's one of the flight directors on the mission, an actual rocket scientist with a real job making sure a nuclear-powered robot didn't turn into an expensive crater, and he showed up to work that night with a mohawk dyed black and blond with little yellow stars shaved into the sides. The cameras caught him a bunch during the broadcast because he was right there in mission control doing his job, and within about a day the internet had fully adopted him as "Mohawk Guy." People started digging up his old profiles, his Twitter following exploded overnight, and there were already fan-made image macros floating around by the next morning. A guy who spent years of his life on trajectory calculations became famous because of his haircut, which is such a specifically internet thing to have happen that it almost undersells how good the actual science was.
And I think that's kind of the point, or at least the part of it I find most interesting. NASA's PR problem for years has been that space is either presented as impossibly boring (charts, acronyms, guys in short-sleeve dress shirts) or impossibly remote (billions of miles, light-years, numbers nobody can hold in their head). Mohawk Guy collapsed that distance in about four seconds. He wasn't a symbol of anything, he was just a person who does very hard math for a living and also happens to have a great haircut, and people latched onto that immediately. The @MarsCuriosity Twitter account has been doing something similar too, tweeting in first person as if the rover itself has opinions about the drive it just did, which is a little goofy but it clearly works, I've seen people who couldn't tell you the difference between an orbiter and a lander retweeting rover jokes all week.
Little bit of a tangent, but it bugs me every time I see someone in the replies going "must be nice to have money for mohawks and rovers while people here can't find jobs," as if NASA's entire annual budget isn't something like half a percent of federal spending. I get that its an easy line, it just isn't a very informed one. The mission cost about $2.5 billion spread out over close to a decade of development, which sounds huge until you remember thats roughly what a couple weeks of a much bigger federal program runs. Anyway.
What I keep coming back to is that the first photo we got off the rover was this tiny, low-res, dusty little thumbnail of one of its own wheels sitting on Martian dirt, and it was somehow one of the most exciting images I've seen all year. Not because it was pretty — it very much wasn't — but because a machine we built took it, on another planet, and beamed it back for us to look at over breakfast. The high-res color shots have been trickling in over the last few days and they're better, obviously, but that scrappy little wheel photo is the one I actually saved to my desktop.
Curiosity's only just getting started too. It's got a two-year primary mission ahead of it, assuming nothing goes wrong, which given how the landing went, I'm feeling pretty good about.