I’m pretty excited about the news that the European Space Agency landed a module on a comet. Although, I’m kind of bummed that the harpoons didn’t work. Saying we harpooned a comet makes humans seem pretty badass. And right now, the situation might be precarious. With almost no gravity, the lander weighs less than a sheet of paper on earth and the comet is outgassing as it approaches the sun which apparently creates a bit of a wind. The screws on the landing legs may be securing the lander, but it will be a while before we know for sure.
But, even without the harpoons, the planning and math necessary to land a tiny spacecraft on a comet 30 million miles away is audacious.
As Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy blog puts it:
After 10 years of travel through the depths of space, and at least that long beforehand filled with meetings, designs, construction, and a launch in 2004, the Philae spacecraft was successfully released from its Rosetta mothership. Then, seven hours later, it made history.
. . .
It’s difficult to overstate this achievement. The comet is moving on an elliptical orbit that takes it just outside the orbit of Jupiter (850 million kilometers from the Sun) and as close as 186 million km sunward (just inside the orbit of Mars). The Rosetta spacecraft had to travel for a decade through space to catch up to its target, flying past two asteroids—Lutetia and Steins—as well as getting a gravitational boost by swinging past Mars and even Earth. It was a long, cold journey, which finally brought it alongside 67P in August 2014.
Humans can ban together collectively and achieve amazing things. We forget that way too often, envisioning ourselves as reasonably competent individuals surrounded by idiots in a world that only gets worse and never better. (Never mind, as Louis CK points out, everything’s amazing.)
Wow, is it true that this project was conceived and implemented by people who were “not” American? Where is JFK when we need him? (I’m being sarcastic. Congrats on this astounding accomplishment. I was not aware this was being attempted and I am impressed.)
Well, but this page could have loaded faster.
Pretty amazing.
And yet still we Americans can’t manage to get all American covered with health insurance.
Strange non-sequitur. A different set of abilities is required to pull people together for each type of project thus the two should not be compared.
However if you wanted to make an more interesting but equally disconnected statement then you could pull in the fact that this was done by the European Space Agency and that many, but not all, European countries have universal health care. Try this:
Pretty amazing. The Europeans who have universal health care can land a spacecraft on a comet while Americans not only do not have any space missions to comets but also can not manage to get all Americans covered with health insurance.
A culture of devil-take-the-hindmost individualism doesn’t lend itself to group efforts that aren’t immediately profitable.