To Infinity…

You know what I love about Silicon Valley? When you go to an event at a place like the Computer History Museum to hear someone talk about something like the exploration of Mars, it’s not some guy from the local university. It’s a guy from NASA. In fact, it’s Peter Theisinger, the former Project Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project. You can’t beat that – and hey, even if it was just a guy from the local university, the local university is Stanford, so that wouldn’t have been too shabby either.

Peter delivered a pretty detailed and animated retelling of the history of the Mars Rover project, starting with the conception of the project shortly after the Mars Polar Lander splattered into the surface of Mars due to a are-we-using-meters-or-feet? software error. The pace of the project sounds absolutely breakneck – missing the launch window means you can’t launch for another two years.

The technological challenges overcome by Peter’s team to get to Mars were just incredible. Sure there were the mundane problems – like, “Whoops! The other airbag we were hoping to salvage and use from another mission appears to be irreparably damaged!” Then there were the other, slightly more difficult issues, such as “Gee! We have to slow the spacecraft from 12,000 mph to Mach 2, at which speed we need to deploy a parachute without turning it into Cheese Whiz!” Despite all of these setbacks, including the positively suicidal entry, descent and landing sequence dubbed the “Six Minutes of Terror“, and the parachute design (solved using the wind tunnel at NASA Ames Research Center, just up the road from our apartment), all of these problems were solved in time for the launch.

Except the software for the robot – that was developed en route to Mars.

Is it just me, or is this a damning statement on the state of software development? “We can send a robot to Mars, but we can’t develop the software for the robot prior to the launch date!” Oh well, at least they got the units right this time – they chose feet, right? No, wait! Meters! Aaaaaah!

Peter closed the evening on a mixed note. First, he talked about why NASA works on these projects: to inspire others, especially kids, to get interested in science. Great stuff. But then he talked about a team member whose son graduated school one month, got married the next, got deployed to Iraq in the third month, and was killed in action in the fourth. It was the flag from his son’s casket that graced the wall of the control room during the landing of the Mars rovers.

I’m not sure how I was supposed to feel about this piece of information – it seemed incongruous. It made me feel vaguely uneasy. Was Peter’s message “the world’s a bad place, we’re trying to make it better, we wish this stuff didn’t happen”? Or was it “we have to stop the terrorists and we support our military despite the costs?” I’m not sure – in the absence of additional clues, I think I’ll choose to interpret it solely as Peter’s recognition of another, less technological yet considerably more daunting, social challenge the team had to overcome to be successful, and that all of humankind has to overcome as we hurtle through space on our journey to infinity.