Its almost 9pm here and Ive got the laptop balanced on my knee with NBCs closing ceremony coverage running in one tab and raw.nasa.gov open in the other, because apparently I cannot commit to watching just one thing tonight. Two screens, one couch, zero productivity. This is basically how the last two weeks have gone.
I'll say the quiet part first: Ive been annoyed at NBC this entire Olympics. Not in a "boycott the network" way, more in a "why is this so needlessly complicated" way. To watch anything live online you have to log in with your cable provider credentials, which is fine if youre the kind of person who remembers your cable password, and I am very much not that kind of person. I spent probably twenty minutes on opening weekend just trying to get the stream to recognize that yes, I do in fact pay for television. Meanwhile the actual broadcast is tape delayed by hours so half of Twitter has already spoiled the results before NBC gets around to airing them in primetime. Ive muted more keywords in the last two weeks than I have in the entire rest of the year combined.
Anyway. The ceremony itself is fine, lots of fireworks, a genuinely funny bit with a fake Queen Elizabeth parachuting out of a helicopter a week and a half ago that I still think about, and now tonight its Spice Girls and a giant octopus car and I honestly cant tell if Im watching a concert or a fever dream. Closing ceremonies are always a little unhinged and I mean that as a compliment.
But the tab Im actually more excited about is the NASA one. Its been a week since Curiosity touched down on Mars, and Im still kind of amazed by the whole thing. I watched the landing live last Sunday night, or more accurately I watched a room full of people at JPL in matching blue polo shirts lose their minds over a live feed that was mostly just numbers and a green checkmark, and it was one of the more genuinely thrilling things Ive watched on a livestream in a while. Seven minutes of terror and then this room full of very smart, very tired engineers just erupting. Ive rewatched the clip of the room going off when the "touchdown confirmed" call comes through more times than I want to admit.
The guy with the mohawk, Bobak Ferdowsi, has basically become the unofficial mascot of the whole mission at this point, which I love. Hes an actual flight director, not some intern they pulled aside for a photo op, and he dyed his hair with red and blue stars for landing night on a bit of a whim and now hes got people redesigning their own hair after him. Its a small thing but it did more for making NASA feel human and approachable to a general audience than any press release could. The rover itself has a Twitter account written in first person too ("I am safely on the surface of Mars, etc") which I know is a little corny but it works, Ill admit it works on me every time.
The photos coming back so far are still mostly grainy black and white thumbnails from the hazard cameras, low res shots of the rovers own shadow and some gravel, nothing dramatic yet. But knowing that a nuclear powered SUV sized robot is sitting on another planet right now sending back pictures of its own tires is the kind of thing that still gets me, even secondhand, even through a browser tab, at 9pm on a Sunday while a giant inflatable octopus rolls across a stadium in London on my other screen.
Not sure theres a neat way to tie these two things together except that both of them are, in their own way, proof that a huge coordinated effort by a lot of people can still pull off something spectacular when it actually goes right. Which feels like a nice thought to end a Sunday on, even if one of those efforts also made me forget my cable login three separate times this month.
Okay, back to watching. I think theyre setting something else on fire.