In celebration of Curiosity's successful landing on Mars

While NASA might be struggling to get its Starliner crew home, it's worth remembering that circa 12 years ago, the agency was celebrating the successful deployment of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. The six-wheeled trundlebot touched down on the Martian surface on August 5, 2012, showcasing just what the agency's …

[Red Sceptic]

Unlike Boeing, I’m guessing* that NASA is not over-burdened by MBAs shoving in their sixpen’orth about how stuff should/must be done. Amazing, but not unsurprising, what engineers and scientists can accomplish in the right culture.

* evidence base includes but is not limited to no need to be concerned about the share price.

[Ian Johnston]

NASA seems to do some things very well - like landing rovers on Mars - and some things very badly - everything else, basically.

[Richard 12]

For the most part, it seems that NASA do very well when building things in-house and in collaboration with other space agencies, and absolutely terribly when forced by Congress to buy from specific US suppliers.

One could almost think that pork-barrel politics causes cost overruns and quality problems. But nah, can't be.

[Version 1.0]

How wonderful our world would be if every nation worked together with NASA to start exploring and evaluating our solar system planets and then start looking at others in our Galaxy ... that would not be easy to do but NASA is far more likely to get it done if everyone in the world was working together.

Until we get this all done then we're only just monkeys evolved to post on social media and hack each other - let's all evolve much better to become monkeys on the moon and then exploring space!

[that one in the corner]

> if every nation worked together with NASA to start exploring and evaluating our solar system planets

You mean like the way that NASA works with ESA and with JAXA?[1]

Oh, and it isn't up to other the other nations - if NASA wants to work with another agency, it is up to NASA to ask (and vice versa).

> and then start looking at others in our Galaxy

You do know that we have been looking at other stars and planetary systems in our galaxy for a while now? Little things like the JWST - although, as far as the stars go, NASA is way behind the curve, people all over the world have been looking at those for, oooh, years - a good few thousand if them at least, going by recorded observations.

> NASA is far more likely to get it done if everyone in the world was working together.

NASA is not the be-all and end-all of "looking at other stars and planetary systems"; actually, they do very little of the looking, but do do more of the sending robots for some very specific little bits of in-situ work.

[1] and others, but you could try googling for those yourself