This week I watched the live feed of NASA’s mission control room during the landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance. It was horrible television.
Sure, I was amazed at the accomplishment and briefly had my cynicism interrupted with something resembling hope for the future of mankind, but the production value left a lot to be desired.
How is an organization that repeatedly invents the universe’s most sophisticated technology unable to get even one of their staff to dish some dirt into a confessional cam?
It’s almost like they paid no attention to the needs of us viewers at home.
NASA really missed the mark by focusing their coverage on science. They need to focus a little less on interstellar stars and a little more on reality stars.
Instead they kept involving children in the coverage to encourage their natural curiosity and treat their questions with dignity and respect. What an insult to reality TV.
Was it inspiring to see a diverse group of public servants tie their life stories into the Rover’s Perseverance theme? Sure, but not as inspiring as watching them flip a table over on the haters who tried to stand in their way.
I had a mix of emotions as I watched the scaled down (for Covid) crew “spontaneously” celebrate their inter-planetary accomplishment when the Rover successfully landed.
There was an admitted twinge of national pride and small flare of existential wonder, but mostly I found myself looking for the human element scanning the faces and body language of each person trying to figure out which ones were truly experiencing euphoria and which ones were secretly hoping for the mission to fail.
I’m not talking about a deep state conspiracy or a private sector saboteur sent to funnel more space pioneering success towards Elon Musk. Just a grumpy employee who’s near enough the top of his profession to be in the mission control room when a Mars Rover lands, but not quite empowered in the way he feels entitled to be.
This malcontent is most likely not hoping for a spectacular failure but rather for an extremely specific failure perhaps down to the millisecond-calibrated timing of a thruster push or simply to spite one person in charge of one aspect of the mission.
He probably wants the overall mission to succeed but if at least one of his superiors comes away looking foolish, he’ll be happy.
I knew there had to be at least one person like this in the room because I recently watched several episodes of The Right Stuff, National Geographic’s dramatization of the first Americans sent into space.
According to that show, NASA is full of hot shot egos, petty workplace dramas, and long-simmering hostilities. That’s what I wanted to see on the live feed.
NASA’s really softened it’s image in the past 60 years. I definitely appreciated the addition of women and minorities (kudos to the casting director) but it would be nice to still see a nicely ironed white shirt every once in a while.
Instead, everyone at NASA was wearing matching polo shirts as if they were all on break from their shifts at Best Buy.
What kind of American hero wears khakis?
For an organization that spends so much time focusing on stars they sure could use one to clean up the mess. Clearly, the season one finale was a bust.
But with over 19 million views on YouTube alone (plus likely millions more on social media and the NASA website), they’ve still got room to fix it.
I’ll look forward to seeing the Perseverance Rover sit down with Andy Cohen next week for a tell all interview. If they’re smart, they’ll patch in the Curiosity Rover and jumpstart a feud to spin off into a new show: The Real Housebots of Mars.
That’s reality television we can really enjoy!
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