Curiosity.
As you probably know, last night a team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (an academically-associated NASA contractor much like my own employer) successfully landed an SUV-sized rover on the surface of Mars through a series of re-entry technologies strung together into a Rube Goldberg-like monstrosity few could bring themselves to believe would work. It worked. An old Mars-orbiting satellite managed to transmit near-live information about the landing back to Earth, mostly by chance, and anyone with a reasonably fast internet connection could watch Mission Control find out after only a few minutes true delay that their years of work had paid off. With a mission to search for signs of past or present life on the red planet and radiation detectors sending back information that can and will be used to extrapolate human survivability, this international gamble (yes, international, as much as NASA and JPL deserve the lion's share of the credit they will get) will be a major payoff for science.
As you may not know, last night a crowd watching a live internet feed on the boards at New York's Times Square chanted "Science! Science!", many of NASA and JPL's websites buckled under overwhelming traffic, Twitter overflowed with quotes of an outreach staffer's carefully-worded "GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU", and from the depths of Tumblr sprung fully formed a fan page for a young flight engineer sporting a red and blue mohawk with stars bleached into the sides, the new darling of an official NASA internet and cable channel that is usually little more than dead air. Curiosity is a public relations miracle, too.
I don't know who all are responsible for that newfound public enthusiasm, though I am sure Neil DeGrasse Tyson is indirectly involved, but just for this moment the sheer nigh-impossibility of it all has captured hearts like nothing since moon landings. Most importantly, it has captured young hearts, hearts grown up with this thing called the internet, hearts that we need to inspire if scientific discovery is going to keep rolling forward, hearts that can only be inspired if shown that space science didn't stop at slide rules, stodgy pseudomilitary agencies, and a now-alien geek culture of their parents' and grandparents' generations. Somehow, and this is a recent development, some folks working for the world's space agencies have figured out how. I am as happy about that interpersonal achievement as any technical ones, not because my job depends on it (it does), but because I am a person on this planet who firmly believes no money spent on the intersection of wonder, hope, and pragmatic engineering leaps applicable to survival in inhospitable landscapes is wasted. I deeply hope Curiosity goes as far beyond expectations its smaller cousins already have. I can pretty definitively say it's already given we professional space geeks more faith in people and science than we expected it would. And this blue-haired weirdo may have cried.
As you may not know, last night a crowd watching a live internet feed on the boards at New York's Times Square chanted "Science! Science!", many of NASA and JPL's websites buckled under overwhelming traffic, Twitter overflowed with quotes of an outreach staffer's carefully-worded "GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU", and from the depths of Tumblr sprung fully formed a fan page for a young flight engineer sporting a red and blue mohawk with stars bleached into the sides, the new darling of an official NASA internet and cable channel that is usually little more than dead air. Curiosity is a public relations miracle, too.
I don't know who all are responsible for that newfound public enthusiasm, though I am sure Neil DeGrasse Tyson is indirectly involved, but just for this moment the sheer nigh-impossibility of it all has captured hearts like nothing since moon landings. Most importantly, it has captured young hearts, hearts grown up with this thing called the internet, hearts that we need to inspire if scientific discovery is going to keep rolling forward, hearts that can only be inspired if shown that space science didn't stop at slide rules, stodgy pseudomilitary agencies, and a now-alien geek culture of their parents' and grandparents' generations. Somehow, and this is a recent development, some folks working for the world's space agencies have figured out how. I am as happy about that interpersonal achievement as any technical ones, not because my job depends on it (it does), but because I am a person on this planet who firmly believes no money spent on the intersection of wonder, hope, and pragmatic engineering leaps applicable to survival in inhospitable landscapes is wasted. I deeply hope Curiosity goes as far beyond expectations its smaller cousins already have. I can pretty definitively say it's already given we professional space geeks more faith in people and science than we expected it would. And this blue-haired weirdo may have cried.