TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Burkhard Bilger has a wonderful profile of the Mars Curiosity mission:

She wasn’t wrong, exactly, just off by a few decades. All nine of Curiosity’s principal investigators were middle-aged men. Lined up behind the lectern in polo shirts or jacket and tie, they could have been spliced seamlessly into an old Apollo newsreel. But elsewhere in the hierarchy lay a horde of engineers who’d come to J.P.L. from all over the world since the moon landings. Miguel San Martín, the chief engineer for Curiosity’s guidance, navigation, and control systems, grew up in Buenos Aires and Patagonia, listening to shortwave broadcasts about the Viking missions. Vandi Tompkins, the lone woman among the sixteen rover drivers, came from a small town in India. Their work bore witness to the undimmed romance of space, and to the wonders that an epic government program can still accomplish. Curiosity had taken ten years to build and cost two and a half billion dollars. And within forty-eight hours it would crash or land.