Sunday night, NASA’s Curiosity rover completed a ridiculously
complicated landing sequence to safely grace the surface of
Mars, where it is now beaming back exciting images and other
data. I feel like this is a good time to thank our federal
government for one of its few entities that I really enjoy – the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I want to start
out by admitting that I just really like space exploration,
whether the funding is coming from the government or private
investors and customers. Space is so huge, and we’ve been coming
up with better ways to look at it since Galileo, but we’ve only
actually been sending stuff into it for a few decades! I think
it’s really cool when we learn more about what’s out there; I
was excited as a young boy when Pathfinder hit Mars in 1997, and
I was just as excited as a young man when Curiosity landed last
weekend. So I’m a little biased for NASA. There are plenty of
popular arguments that NASA’s work is a public good, from all
the trickle-down technolog