At 5:30AM, London time, on August 6th, as a bleary-eyed Gabby Douglas was stirring in the Olympic Village in preparation for the uneven bars final, another gymnast was readying himself for the signature event of his short career.
It would be one of the most difficult acrobatic routines ever attempted, with an astronomical degree of difficulty. Seven minutes of gut-wrenching twists and turns — not to mention neck-snapping g-forces — would culminate in a cat-like dismount of otherworldly grace.
Either that, or a spectacular crash-and-burn.
Tens of thousands of Americans, feverish fans of the sport, woke in the wee hours that Monday morning to watch the event live on the Internet, too impatient to wait for time-delayed coverage sclerotic with commercials.
Their eyes glued to their monitors, they watched and waited, grateful for the color commentary, which helped decipher the highly technical and somewhat obscure competition.
And then the news that was hoped for: success! Not just a trip to the podium, but all the glory, since the American was the only athlete who showed up for the meet.
In the end, he stood alone on his six shapely titanium legs.
Not two, but six: six gloriously shiny, insectoidal gams, each one culminating in a sporty aluminum wheel, complete with a sponsor’s logo in four proud letters: N-A-S-A.
The name of America’s newest athlete-celebrity? Curiosity.
His accomplishment? Tumbling down to the surface of Mars, and, with the help of a trusty heat shield, a giant parachute, retrorockets, and a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption dubbed the “Sky Crane,” making a spectacular landing in Gale Crater, in the shadow of three-mile-high Mount Sharp.
As part of the media blitz that is part and parcel of selling today’s space program to the American public, NASA produced a movie trailer about the landing called “Seven Minutes of Terror” to help dramatize everything that had to go right for Curiosity to touch down safely on Mars. It’s easy to find with a quick search on Youtube, and well worth the five minutes, even if, at times, the video crosses the line into breathless Hollywood hyperbole.
I have to confess that when I first watched “Seven Minutes of Terror,” I concluded that NASA had gone insane, and that the seven truly terrifying minutes were going to be the ones during the Congressional inquiry that was sure to follow the fiery loss of the spacecraft; i.e., the long, awkward, microphone-squeezing pause between the question, “Can you give the American people one good reason why NASA should get another penny after you flushed 2.5 billion dollars down the toilet on Curiosity?” and the Administrator’s rueful answer, “Um, yeah, it was a stupid design, Senator — really, really stupid — way too complicated, what with the retrorockets and the Sky Crane and whatnot. But it would have been so cool if it worked!”
As it turns out, it did work, much to everyone’s amazement, including the Russians’, whose latest space embarrassment, the failed launch of two satellites, coincided deliciously with NASA’s triumph.
Unlike a gymnastics routine, which concludes with the landing, Curiosity’s mission has just begun. Safely depositing a one-ton nuclear-powered robotic science lab on Mars was just the opening act. In the weeks and months to come, Curiosity will slowly stretch, flex its muscles, deploy its instruments, and start its daily workouts: crawling across the Martian landscape; boring into rocks; vaporizing soil samples; analyzing mineral composition; taking ambient readings; and, of course, sending plenty of headline-garnering glamour shots back to Earth.
Curiosity’s scientific mission isn’t quite as sexy as its initial plunge from orbit: it’s to determine whether the conditions for life as we know it were ever met on the surface of Mars.
(As a recovering rock hound, things like geological strata interest me, especially when they happen to comprise a Martian mountain, but I know I’m in the minority on this one.)
Back in 2004, after an initial burst of patriotic pride, the public seemed to lose interest in Curiosity’s direct ancestors, the adorable Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. They were only supposed to last for 90 days, but in the NASA equivalent of getting two million miles out of an old Subaru, Spirit kept on chugging for six years after its deployment on Mars; Opportunity, which also went live in 2004, is still active to this day.
Spirit and Opportunity outlasted their 90-day missions by a factor of at least 20. Curiosity’s mission is officially one Mars-year, or about 687 Earth-days, but if it manages to live up to its forebears, it might still be going strong in 2057, the year Gabby Douglas becomes eligible for Social Security.
The question is: will anyone down here on Earth still care?
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 16 August 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
