Kevin Marshall's America
I don’t know if you noticed or not, but I’ve been mentioning the landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars ever since it went down. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, fuck, I even logged into my Xanga for the first time in six years and posted about it on there.
I think it’s awesome.
I know that this seems strange because I don’t have a background in science, nor have I ever in your experience with me even expressed an interest in science. But trust me, this is something I’ve been following for a long damn time and am very excited about, and that makes me better than most people.
When it happened, one of the first images I saw was footage of NASA Mission Control celebrating the landing, and went “whoa, there’s a guy there with a mohawk!” I immediately found someone tweeting a picture of him and RT’ed it and was like “check out the guy with the mohawk!”
I imagine that he sits around with stuffy, dorky older guys wearing a leather jacket and his arms crossed, slouching slightly because he’s the punk rock cool kid scientist. In the planning stages, when they were designing Curiosity or whatever, they were like “we have to do it this way!” but then he was like “let’s try this” and they were all “you’re a maverick, Mohawk Kid, and you’re gonna get us all killed” but then he proved his new, young, and hipper way to have Curiosity land on Mars was the right one.
I’m kind of like that Mohawk NASA scientist, because I care so much more about Curiosity than you because I like science which makes me smart and better than you.
Man. I can’t wait to see what happens with this mission. Whatever it is.
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One Response to I want you to recognize how great it is that I am excited about the landing of Curiosity on Mars
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STALK ME
Hmmmm….. you might note that Indie Moines and Indie Albany have links to Planetary Society and Road to Endeavour blogs, and that I write a lot about sppace exploration, because it really does excite me. I actually did pause on my family vacation on Sunday to try to get a signal on my phone in the mountains of Wyoming (where I still sit now as I type) to find out if Curiousity’s landing was a success or not. I was really happy to learn that it went well, just as I will be really happy when one of my Naval Academy colleagues assumes command of the International Space Station later this year.
As a kid, I wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut, and that is why I went to the Naval Academy, though bad eyes and a bad back knocked me from contention well before my 21st birthday. So I live my dreams vicariously through Spirit and Opportunity and Curiosity and New Horizons and Cassini Huygens and scores of other space missions.
After Magellan’s crew circumnavigated the globe, it took nearly 80 years before Sir Francis Drake became the second man to duplicate that feat, after which point global commerce grew rapidly as merchants gained confidence in their abilities to tap distant markets and resources.
We hit the moon for the first time in 1969-1973, so if we can get back before 2049, then we are doing better than Magellan and Drake did. My money is on the Chinese to get there next, which is fine, since Drake and Magellen represented different countries, too.
So I think we are living through the glory days of early planetary exploration right now, with Curiousity as an amazing and audacious next step in our ongoing adventure.
But I have never thought that believing this made me some sort of science snob. In fact, if anything, it has always been a manifestation of the arrested adolescent in me, still marvelling at watching rockets go whoosh into space.