Going by remote

It's pretty exciting when you think about it. An unmanned mission to Mars, a minimum distance of 34.8 million miles. A roving device as big as a Volkswagen Beetle stuck on a rocket which puts it on a trajectory that gets the device to the planet where its entry into the atmosphere and a multi-stage landing process is all pre-programmed.

The called it 7 Minutes of Terror:


I recorded the NASA channel in order to get their view of it but that was a dud. A lot of time watching a bunch of geeks in blue shirts sitting in from a rows of computer screens and speaking a language that may as well have been Tagalog (a language of the Philippines) for me.

And then, in the midst of all this, they pull out a bunch of jars of peanuts and hand them out. It seems that back in the day when they were having a lot of failures in the Ranger program, number 7 worked fine. And someone noticed that someone (or maybe someones) was eating peanuts. They decided that must have been the factor and have done this on every important launch since.

Makes you wonder about rocket scientists... all that training, all that education, all that cold, scientific thought... and they are as superstitious as the guy next door.