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Happy Friday! It's been a couple weeks since my last post because we've been busy moving, from our quaint 1-bedroom on the main floor of an old house into a bright 2-bedroom on the 28th floor of an old apartment building. As J. put it, he's a big boy now and we needed a new big apartment with lots of big rooms for the big boy to run around in. It's already been a rollercoaster of a Friday here, as we woke up to discover that the cat had pulled the drain filter out of the sink and sunk M.'s favourite ring down the hole -- thankfully the building has a handyman who very cheerfully retrieved it for her from the bend in the pipe. In the process some of the old bathroom fittings broke, and as he was replacing them he commented ruefully to me, "Never start anything on a Friday."
The Perseverance Rover landed on Mars on a Thursday, which accounts for its successful touchdown. The rover and its lander were equipped with high definition cameras specifically to record video of the landing, sending footage back to NASA mission control that makes Mars feel simultaneously more local and even more alien. The Expanse novels and tv series is set in a future when Mars is colonized and undergoing an ambitious terraforming project, which proves to be more powerful as a dream to unite a people than a reality to provide them a home.
Seeing the landing makes Mars deceptively accessible, the landscape red, rocky, and unfamiliar but still within the capacity of terrestrial language to describe. It's what you can't see that's truly inhospitable. The lack of a magnetosphere means that the still mountains are scoured by the solar wind, and the atmosphere is thin enough to boil the fluid in your lungs.
The Perseverance landing represents the dream of Mars, the ambition that's most recently swallowed Elon Musk in the headlines but that has a long, full backstory. The 3m26s of Perseverance's descent is offset by NASA's many other hours of uploaded footage, though, which reveals a reality of space travel that is much slower (at least narratively), technical, and focused on the nuts and bolts of space technology. Literally: here's today's livestreamed spacewalk from the International Space Station, following Kate Rubins (NASA) and Soichi Noguchi (JAXA) as they complete some exterior tasks on the station. It's fascinating to get such a long, slow look at human life in space, with the gorgeous colours of Earth hanging in the background.
What I find exciting about all this is that reality is already the stuff of dreams.
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