Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

We still have time to mess this up!

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

How stupid are these people?

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / It Stuck That Landing

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55Comments

  4. 4.

    Maude

    Wow, just wow. They said that they couldn’t have done this even a few years ago because the tech wasn’t around.
    What a great day for the US and NASA.
    It made me realize how awful and negative the Republicans are. Always harping on what’s wrong.
    We need to have the tech to send every last one of them far away.

  6. 6.

    MattF

    Amazing. I was very doubtful about the retro-rocket-sky-crane thing, but sheesh, it worked.

  7. 7.

    amk

    Great accomplishment from the geeks of NASA & JPL. From 20,000km/hr to a soft landing at 570 million miles away is mind boggling stuff.

  8. 8.

    AnonPhenom

    For all the Freemarketeers who get dollar signs in their eyes when they look skyward and whos shrunken hearts fill with envy every time NASA proves the collective effort is greater than the individual effort; Suck. On. This.

  9. 9.

    AnonPhenom

    For all the Freemarketeers who get dollar signs in their eyes when they look skyward and whos shrunken hearts fill with envy every time NASA proves the collective effort is greater than the individual effort; Suck. On. This.

  13. 13.

    Cermet

    As the NASA manager said “For under seven dollars per American, a great movie of Mars has been given …” or there about.

    Congrats to NASA – with real budgets and a Government not ruled by teabaggers, science shows exactly what can be achieved.

    Science Rules!

  17. 17.

    Cermet

    By the way, note all the Mars landing parties that occured in the early morning hours? And that hundreds of people got together in Times Square in New York city just to watch and celibrate NASA’s landing? Fuck off you rightwingers and eat shit you asswipes. Government IS the solution!

    Science rules and real Americans on both the coasts are with it. You midlanders had better get on board because the train for the modern world is running and its going to the future and modern world.

  18. 18.

    Linda Featheringill

    @Cermet:

    Science rules and real Americans on both the coasts are with it. You midlanders had better get on board because the train for the modern world is running and its going to the future and modern world.

    It’s not that easy to distinguish between the sane and the not-sane. Many of us midlanders are science geeks.

    But yes, the anti-science people are really kinda nuts.

  19. 19.

    Derek

    Humanity, fuck yeah! Sometimes we do good things, purely good things. That’s a fucking picture from another planet. That is still mind-blowing to me, all the stuff I know and can do is here on this one rock, and people sent a robot to another.

    Science is cool.

  20. 20.

    Walker

    I stayed up to watch the landing while doing some over work. I foolishly thought to myself “I haven’t watched cable news in years. This is supposed to be what they are good for, right?

    I lasted three minutes before I had to turn that off and go back to the JPL feed. Even the amateur commentators and interviews on the JPL feed were better than what was on CNN.

  22. 22.

    jp

    Love the video of all the joyful, happy dweebs! And seeing quite a few women in the mix also warmed the cockles of my generally bitter and cynical heart. Progress, bitchez!

  23. 23.

    Cermet

    @Linda Featheringill: No disrespect intended for the educated and/or with it midlanders. But I am so sick of the right-wing asswipes and their fuckland (often misspelled heartland) amerika pushing. The East and West coasts have been the real heartlands of this country in fact. Yes, the midlands are important and has a lot of great people but the teabaggers and their parasitic others can only hate everyone on the coasts. Hence, my return hate and the in their faces post.

  26. 26.

    Pen

    @Cermet: Orange County, Cali.

    Still think you’re superior?

    (And yes, I’m tired and cranky. My Midland ass had a Curiosity party last night and a toddler to wake up for 5 hours later, sue me.)

  31. 31.

    JGabriel

    __
    __
    Curiousity Rover:

    GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!

    … And in other news, Ohio resident and area woman Gale Crater is suing NASA for sexual harassment.

    “It’s just not right!” Ms. Crater exclaimed to reporters. “NASA is plastering my name all over the internets, and telling the world I’m a slut who does it with a dog named Rover. I’m suing those bastards for everything they’ve got! How can a government agency do that to its own citizens?!”

    .

  32. 32.

    Brachiator

    Very cool that a student, Clara Ma, proposed the name for the Curiosity rover in a contest three years ago via a NASA/JPL sponsored contest. She was a guest at JPL during the successful landing.

  33. 33.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Lurking Canadian: It’s a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), not a “battery” which uses electrochemistry to create electrical current. The Pu-238 fuel is hot due to radioactive decay and the heat difference creates electricity using thermocouples. Similar RTGs are on the Voyager and Pioneer probes and some other deep-space missions like Cassini flying far from the Sun where solar cells don’t work very well.

    The excess heat from the RTG will keep the rover’s systems warm even during the Mars winter and it doesn’t have the problems the other rovers have of dust obscuring their solar cells and reducing their power availability.

  34. 34.

    JGabriel

    Cermet:

    By the way, note all the Mars landing parties that occured in the early morning hours? And that hundreds of people got together in Times Square in New York city just to watch and celibrate NASA’s landing? Fuck off you rightwingers and eat shit you asswipes. Government IS the solution!

    __
    The most terrifying words in the English language have become: “Hi! I’m from a consulting company, and I’m here to help.”

    .

  35. 35.

    redshirt

    It’s all about the methane. Where does it come from? Geology, or life? This could be revolutionary news.

    I wonder how the Wingnuts will respond to confirmation of life on another planet? Deny it? Conspiracy? Martian Jesus?

    They’ll make it political, I have little doubt.

  39. 39.

    AnonPhenom

    @JGabriel:

    The most terrifying words in the English language have become: “Hi! I’m Mitt Romney from a consulting private equity company, and I’m here to help.”

    Fixdit4U

  40. 40.

    Pen

    @redshirt: Oh, of that i’m sure. My guess for a Fox headline? “Those idiots at NASA contaminated their sample, now back to our missing spouse of the week.”

    Most of our country still refuses to believe evolution happens, do you really think they’re going to believe that aliens exist? I figure that if we find microbial life that’s amazing, but people won’t believe it until something shoots back at us.

  42. 42.

    gypsy howell

    NASA Curiosity Routine

    Degree of difficulty: 10.0
    Performance: 10.0
    Total score: 20.0

  43. 43.

    redshirt

    @Pen: I once naively thought the discovery of life on another planet would be the death knell of all religions (FSM BE PRAISED!). Alas! In my dotage, I now realized there’s no amount of dissonance that cannot be cognated.

    I do predict some kind of “Alien Jesus” re-formulation of the myth with the garden of eden in some kind of Narnia like proto-Earth dimension and a God who takes the form of his followers, yadda yadda. Anything to keep the money train rolling.

  44. 44.

    John

    Umm…so the Mars Lander has a twitter account? Have machines finally achieved self-awareness? This is troubling.

  50. 50.

    yopd1

    Did anybody else feel older watching that video. It’s the first time I’ve watched video from a NASA landing where it looked like at least half the people were younger then me. I’m 41.

    I’m happy about it as well, because it gives hope that we will have a whole new generation of rocket scientists.

  51. 51.

    burnspbesq

    The question has to be asked.

    If Caltech can safely land a vehicle the size of a Mini Cooper on Mars, why can’t it win in basketball?

  52. 52.

    Another North Carolinian

    One of my NASA buddies tells me that the average age of the console guys during Apollo was 27. I was 13, so they were twice my age. The JPL gang last night looked to be about the same age as the Apollo group. That makes them half my age; that’s nice symmetry. I saw fewer ties, some women and a mohawk; that’s nice progress.

  54. 54.

    Citizen_X

    @dmsilev: I’d like to emphasize that, all that complicated stuff they did for the landing sequence? They did it with a rover THE SIZE OF A FUCKING CAR.

    (The first rovers were almost ottoman-size.)

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