What’s it like to do something hard for a long time and to succeed? Look at Mimi Aung, lead engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as she hears the data that confirms NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has flown above the surface of Mars.
Bill Whittle, Stephen Green and Scott Ott create 20 new episodes of Right Angle each month thanks to our Members. Join us now at https://BillWhittle.com
Video below hosted at Rumble.
23 replies on “The Triumph of Perseverance and Ingenuity: Mimi Aung’s Joy Hovers Above the Surface of Mars”
I just want to make sure you read “Liftoff” by Eric Berger about the early days of SpaceX, so much of which is reflective of what this is about. Seriously, seriously good stuff.
I certainly applaud those scientists in Houston for this great achievement. But why are those scientists wearing one, two or three masks?
Piece of cloth and wood in 1969
We had pretty cool radio-controlled toy helicopters in 1973. So now we’ve grown up and created one for Mars. Wow. Thanks NASA. (Exhibit A of our cultural rot.)
What were the NASA proposals for funding that lost? First Slinky on Mars? First Etch-a-Sketch on Mars?
Steve: Permit me to edit your reaction. D-Day saved us. This event helps prove that we were worth saving.
So refreshing to see the guys amped up about something positive.
The cesspool of leftist “politics” is soul-crushing.
I’m surprised everyone seems to be commenting on face masks. Thanks, Bill and Scott and Steve for a very inspiring show!
When I graduated from college with my degree in Electrical Engineering, we (the USA) were only graduating roughly 50% of the electrical engineers that we needed. I would bet that the statistic is still the same today, if not worse. One of my sons is a Chemical Engineer, and I know his field also does not graduate enough engineers to fill all the jobs in the USA. The rest of the engineers come from overseas – India, China, and Japan predominantly. Until we fix our education system, we will continue down the road to mediocrity while our chief competition overseas, i.e. China, continues to move ahead.
What is it about flight and Ohio? The Wright brothers. 25 astronauts are from Ohio. Notable names: Jim Lovell, John Glenn (who played college football with my now deceased father) and Neil Armstrong (who I met. Old blog on this site titled “My encounter with Neil Armstrong” Not really that interesting. He said three words to me.)
Speaking of the Wright brothers, an acquaintance of mine wrote a screenplay for a film about the Wright Brothers. He explains that this screenplay is not about how the brothers accomplished their historic flight, but rather, it’s about how they became the kind of people who were able to accomplish the feat. His screenplay garnered some interest in Hollywood and was optioned by a production company, whose first task was to rewrite the script. The rewrite was more of a hatchet job, giving the script what I call “the Hollywood treatment”. As an example of that they did to the script, they included a scene where the Wright brothers visit a house of prostitution… a scene that was not in the original script and for which there is no historic evidence. My friend was pleased that the film was never made, the option has expired (I’m assuming… not quite sure how the terms of such options work), and he would love to find a production company that would not butcher the script and tell the story that he wrote.
Suggest your friend approach one of the production companies who specialize in Christian-themed films. His take on the Wrights clearly focuses on strength of character and, religious component or not, that sort of story appeals to backers (and audiences) of films with a faith message.
I live near the Glen Curtiss museum in upstate NY, and have visited it countless times. I just visited the museum in Kitty Hawk, NC, and have to say that the omission of any mention of Glen Curtiss and his contributions made the Wright brothers mere mortals to me. I had really enjoyed the same Wright biography Scott had read. I would love it if sometime Bill addressed the incredible engineering mind of Curtiss and his contributions. Glen Curtiss is one of the best documented and least well known adrenalin junkies American history has to offer.
Have to admit, it got dusty in here watching her unmitigated joy. Congratulations to the team.
Too bad the NASA employees’ voices were muffled and their faces of joy were obstructed by those damn masks. I would have ripped off my mask that day!
When they have a planned event like this, why can’t they quarantine themselves together beforehand like astronauts do? They’re probably practically living on site anyway. Then no masks are necessary.
They’re science people working on millions and millions of dollars worth of hardware and manpower investments. They should have been at the top of the list for the vaccine, then gotten vaccinated and ditched the masks. As it stands while I do not know for sure if they have or not, I’m willing to bet most or all of them have been vaccinated by now even so.
Which tells us that the masks are a sociopolitical construct and not an actual health protection issue. No matter what they did; get vaccinated, quarantined themselves, nor any other measure would have been sufficient to get rid of those damnable masks and appear in public without them.
Exactly my point. They certainly could have taken very easy steps to enable them to ditch the masks, whether vaccines or quarantines or something else. The fact that they did not suggests an alternative agenda to preventing the spread of disease. (By the decisionmakers, not by the scientists in that room themselves, who no doubt were following rigid orders on pain of dismissal.)
I wonder how long before someone’s communications, muffled by a mask, leads to some catastrophic failure.
I’ve had a bit of experience with radio communications (military, civilian and I’m a licenced amateur “Ham” radio operator) so I can vouch for the fact that it’s easy enough to garble something even without a mask. That’s precisely why the International Phonetic Alphabet was invented, for the sake of clarity.
So that’s probably already happened somewhere, it just wasn’t spectacular enough to make the news. Think more along the lines of a police car being dispatched to the wrong place rather than an airlines mid-air collision. It’s just a matter of time if this ridiculous universal virtue mask thing keeps up.
AMEN. Cringing behind the face diaper: The New Federally-Approved American Lifestyle.
Federally required. sorta
Knew it. A incredibly fantasic achievement and all some people can do is whine about the masks.
SMH.
No matter how expert one is in their chosen profession, so-called experts still do stupid things that make no sense, like wearing masks that don’t work. Yes, I will continue to whine about stupid mask-wearing until the control-freaks stop trying to run our lives.
I’m right with you on protesting the insistence of mask wearing. I was just wondering whether the celebration of this incredible acheivement was a reasonable place to do it.
I mean, most of us groaned (at least) when, after NASA(?) landed a spacecraft on an asteroid, a group kicked up a fuss about one of the guys on the program wearing a ‘sexist’ shirt.