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It's amazing to me how normalized these accomplishments has become. Humanity didn't master rocketry until the mid-20th century, and now we regularly have roboti

It's amazing to me how normalized these accomplishments has become. Humanity didn't master rocketry until the mid-20th century, and now we regularly have robotic vehicles flying around other planets (and sending photos to us). Perhaps it's an example of how humans naturally notice only change. This is just more of the same, I suppose. And we also hear how incompetent and inefficient NASA and the whole U.S. government are. They certainly could improve but they also just flew a craft around Saturn, for 12 years. What was it that you were working on again?

Rapzid 9y ago
The mission duration will end up being about a month shy of 20 years; even more impressive:)
theNewMicrosoft 9y ago
Humanity is very vague, it was the Nazi Germany (wernher von braun) who mastered the rocketry, without them the space program would have been years if not decades behind. btw i don't get the amazement when 28 years ago we had Voyager's 2 flyby photos of Neptune.
Kattywumpus 9y ago
You also have to compare NASA's incredible success rate to others in their field. In 2013, China's Yutu moon rover broke down in less than a month. In 2014, the ESA's Philae lander failed to launch its harpoons and fire the thruster necessary to attach the probe to the comet's surface, and ultimately bounced into a dark crater. In 2011, Russia's ambitious Phobos-Grunt mission to return a sample of Martian soil never got beyond low Earth orbit because of a rocket misfire. I'm not saying other space agencies aren't doing impressive and amazing work. (Both Yutu and Philae were able to keep functioning and achieve at least some of their mission objectives.) I'm just saying space exploration is Really Hard. And NASA and its partners keep succeeding, even when they try crazy new things, like landing the SUV-sized Curiosity rover with the Rube Goldberg-like "Sky Crane maneuver", or sending a nearly two-decade-old spacecraft through the narrow gap between Saturn's rings and the planet's atmosphere. We take their successes for granted, like this stuff is easy, but it's not, even for teams of well-funded geniuses. Worth taking a second to appreciate the engineering achievement as well as the science.

Rapzid 9y ago

The mission duration will end up being about a month shy of 20 years; even more impressive:)

theNewMicrosoft 9y ago

Humanity is very vague, it was the Nazi Germany (wernher von braun) who mastered the rocketry, without them the space program would have been years if not decades behind. btw i don't get the amazement when 28 years ago we had Voyager's 2 flyby photos of Neptune.

Kattywumpus 9y ago

You also have to compare NASA's incredible success rate to others in their field. In 2013, China's Yutu moon rover broke down in less than a month. In 2014, the ESA's Philae lander failed to launch its harpoons and fire the thruster necessary to attach the probe to the comet's surface, and ultimately bounced into a dark crater. In 2011, Russia's ambitious Phobos-Grunt mission to return a sample of Martian soil never got beyond low Earth orbit because of a rocket misfire. I'm not saying other space agencies aren't doing impressive and amazing work. (Both Yutu and Philae were able to keep functioning and achieve at least some of their mission objectives.) I'm just saying space exploration is Really Hard. And NASA and its partners keep succeeding, even when they try crazy new things, like landing the SUV-sized Curiosity rover with the Rube Goldberg-like "Sky Crane maneuver", or sending a nearly two-decade-old spacecraft through the narrow gap between Saturn's rings and the planet's atmosphere. We take their successes for granted, like this stuff is easy, but it's not, even for teams of well-funded geniuses. Worth taking a second to appreciate the engineering achievement as well as the science.