5th Anniversary, Curiosity on Mars

I can't think of anything more inspiration than to see history in the making.  Knowing you are there, seeing something happen that will be a big deal in books and movies for years to come is...well, it fascinates me.  NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars during August 5-6 of 2012.  I was eyeballing it like everyone else.  Later on, I talked about it:




As I write this in the middle of August 5, 2017: there is no media real coverage of this anniversary.  You can look at it as no big deal--or--a sign that we've gotten used to this sort of thing.  In my own way, for my own reasons, this was and still is one of those events that motivates me to write.

A part of me wants to believe that someday, in our distant future, 23rd Century people will wonder what took us so long to colonize Mars, or build a permanent installation on the moon.  It's going to be hard for them to see this from our point of view, world politics will be so much different that we're going to seem backward or lazy.  All I can say to those future skeptics is: somebody had to do it first.

History is full of "firsts" that happen by accident, or came out of nowhere because the majority of us were not expect it (whatever it was).  Because little things make a big thing, we should remember that space travel is going to be a lot of little things that have to work properly.  That's why so much of what I tend to write deals with accidents and the risks associated with complex technology.

With all that in mind, I mark this date with my own minor insignificant blog post.  Somewhere on this planet--right now--thousands of engineers and scientists are working hard to figure this out.  They'll give us space flight and we'll still be ungrateful for it, even in the future.