Today as I was adjusting to my new sight, I was still under ‘take it easy’ orders so I was doing exactly that. I decided to watch the landing of Perseverance, the latest Mars probe. It was streaming live (as live can be when the action is really 127 million miles away and there is an 11-minute delay in communications) on the NASA site with all of the ‘play by play’ you’d expect from an NFL game. When you watch all of this on TV, it’s sometimes difficult to really comprehend what you’re watching until you stop and think about it.
The probe, Perseverance, was originally launched July 30th of last year. Even though this is the fifth Martian probe that the US has successfully landed on the Red Planet, it is still a bit mind-boggling to think about just getting a probe there, let alone getting it to land softly on the Martian surface. The earth is hurtling through space at about 67,000 mile/hour. Mars is moving through its orbit at about 54,000 miles/hour. Both Mars and Earth are also rotating about their axes. And we were able to launch a rocket 6 ½ months ago to not only intersect Mars’ orbit but to land a probe at a specific place on the surface of the planet. The technology to do this is just mind bending.
Perseverance is the most technologically advanced probe yet to land on Mars. It even has a small helicopter named, Ingenuity, that it will use for scouting terrain. It will be extracting coring samples that will eventually be returned to earth for analysis to see if there are any signs of previous microbial life on Mars. There will be numerous cameras and there are even a couple of microphones on this rover. The whole thing is just amazing. What is even more amazing is that the team that did this had to do so while working remotely at JPL because of the Covid pandemic.
This was a really, really hard problem to solve and it took the combined resources of NASA, JPL, the European Space Agency, and hundreds of people working together toward a common goal through very adverse conditions to make this a success. It begs the question, why do we find it so difficult to solve some of the more mundane yet challenging problems that are facing our country? The clear answer is politics.
Having spent most of my career working on complex defense programs, sometimes in very challenging environments, I am sure, based upon that experience, that during the course of developing the latest Mars probe and landing it safely on the planet, there were many, many opinions expressed along the way about how to solve a specific problem. I suspect that some of the team meetings that took place along the way got fairly heated with people championing different approaches to solving a problem. But in the end, once the team had hammered their way through the various approaches and settled on an approach, everyone got on board and they were all focused on the success of the mission. There is just no room for politics when you are trying to land a rover on a planet that is 130 million miles away. It has to work.
There are those, of course, who would argue that the entire space program is a waste of government funds and we shouldn’t spend these billions of dollars on putting rovers on Mars. These are probably the same people who would have told Magellan to stay home or insisted the Lewis and Clarke not leave St. Louis. But, beyond that, I would argue that you could take the entire NASA budget and give it back to the government and none of the problems that you’d like to see solved would actually be solved.
The point is that we, the richest country in the world (at least for the time being) have the brain power, the technology and the financial resources to solve some of the huge problems facing this country but we are stuck in a quagmire of divisive politics, corporate greed, and just plain ignorance.
The development of the Covid vaccine was a perfect example of what can be accomplished when resources are mobilized, people are focused and politics get out of the way. The debacle of how the virus was initially handled in this country and the subsequent polarization around CDC guidelines regarding masks, social distancing, and gatherings is the exact opposite of how to solve complex problems because politics got in the way.
Until such time that our politicians and our citizens start acting more like the teams that put Perseverance on Mars and less like enemies, we are doomed to continue to fail in solving some of the existential problems facing our children and grandchildren. It is OK to disagree and for people to offer differing approaches to solving problems. Sometimes it is possible and/or preferable to find a compromise solution. However, it is not OK to sabotage a mission if your particular solution is not the one chosen.
Perseverance landed successfully on Mars because of teamwork, adequate resources, listening to multiple points of view followed by compromise during the design and testing phases, and an unwavering focus on mission success. The Congress and the American public could learn a lot – but we won’t.
What you have said about the Mars landing so true. I believe we have achieved these wonderful feats because of teamwork. Today’s politics tend to be focused on the exact opposite. Instead of working together and encouraging each other they seem to be only interested in self preservation and what kind of dirt they could find on others to improve their success.