It was a little more than a week ago, very early in the morning on the East Coast and even earlier here in the Western US, and not many people were watching. The eyes of the news were on mass shootings, police killings of black Americans and the Chauvin trial. But I happened across a link just as the NASA live feed was starting, so I got to see evidence of the first successful flight of a powered vehicle on another planet (or at least the first initiated by humans, that we know of) at the same time the people at NASA did.
They were a dozen or so people around hotel convention tables arranged in a horseshow, all of them masked up, most of them wearing NASA orange smocks or golf shirts, peering at their own laptops and glancing up at the big screen at the end of the room. Many of them had been working on this specific project for 6 years or more.
They were waiting to learn whether the flight of Ingenuity, a tiny Kleenix box of instruments attached to very long and ungainly shaped rotors, had actually flown a little earlier, since it takes hours for signals to traverse the distance between Mars and Earth. Nobody really knew if flying would work in an atmosphere less than a percent of Earth's.
The NASA channel—which, when I had it on our cable TV system and the Shuttles and Space Station had cameras always pointed towards Earth, I sometimes let just run with this portrait of our planet in real time, in the background—did a fine job of covering this Ingenuity flight story. A brightly smiling interviewer elicited the pertinent information from various participants in the room, though the answers got less and less coherent as the big moment got closer and closer.
Then she did something pretty striking: she shut up, so we could just witness what went on in that room. As I watched the screen full of people watching their screens, I reflected on the deceptive amount of computer power in those laptops and inside that interplanetary tissue box on Mars, and the fact that the Apollo missions that landed humans on the moon had at their disposal much less computer power than a smartphone.
We who were watching (and some were: they had sent in questions through various social media) were primed on what to watch for. So we got the quiet excitement when the initial data package came in, and it looked “nominal” (NASAspeak for A-OK.) The data went from one analyst to another, each adding more information until we all together got the first visual confirmation: a simple diagram, sent by Ingenuity via several links, that mapped its flight: it went straight up, flew sideways, stopped and came straight down, and landed. That diagram was as exciting as HD video. It meant it happened. The first cheer went up in the room.
A few seconds later we saw the first photo: a black and white snapshot taken by Ingenuity’s camera pointed straight down from the air, looking like a film photography negative, in which the shadow is Ingenuity itself. There would be other photos and other flights this week, but this will remain the historic one. More cheers in the room, though social distancing meant no hugs. But the project manager did jump up and down, in place.
So it meant something to me to be watching this in real time, a memory to set beside seeing in real time the first human step onto the surface of another world When Neil Armstrong touched the Moon, we all did, in a way. It was the same with Ingenuity’s flight.
Ingenuity has flown farther and for a longer time, and will probably be pushed beyond its limits. It’s a proof of concept device, and is unlikely to have a life even as long as the Martian rovers. None of them are coming back. It won’t be resting in the Smithsonian—at least, not anytime soon.
This event, set against the others making news, like those irrational killings, and the raging flames of white supremacy, and within the complicated context of the pandemic, all the madness about masks and vaccines, reminded me again of a conversation I had several Christmases ago with young tech people in Menlo Park, about prospects for the future. Though we had different intuitions of the outcome, we shared the basic idea of it being like a race—that is, a foot race or vehicle race—between the positive and negative, the creative and the destructive.
Because it seems clear that as a society we are rushing furiously in two opposite directions at once (with many wiggling lines within the main ones going off slightly in other directions.) Moreover, the race is timed. Though we don’t know exactly when the game will be over, there may come such a moment that if destruction is winning, then self-destruction it will be. And in terms of Earth as environment, that time is fast approaching.
Who knows if flying a helicopter on Mars is going to contribute to saving the Earth. (Not if it encourages the Elon Musks of this world to believe they can just leave this planet behind and start this madness all over again elsewhere.) But those nerdy people in the orange shirts—Asian, black, and immigrant prominently among them—worked hard on this one problem for a long time, and they did something wonderful. And they know it—they attached a shred of the first manned aircraft from Kitty Hawk to Ingenuity for its first flight. Maybe future generations won’t care, but seeing something like this we call historic is at least a special experience for the now living.
