Tuesday, 1/30

The first time I saw the music video it really touched me. And now that one of its real-life inspirations is gone, it touches me even more.

The music video to which I'm referring is for Harry Styles' “Satellite”. It's an interesting piece of work; basically the story of a Mars-like rover on Earth and how it's trying to find home. As its battery slowly wears out the video ends with it making it to the Kennedy Space Center where it shuts down, having found “home”, causing space geeks around the world to go “aaaah” and try to hold back a tear or two.

Or at least that's what happened to one space geek whose name we shall not reveal.

Anyway, the video popped into my head last week when word came down that the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which was sent up with the Perseverance rover, broke a rotor, can no longer fly, and is being left behind as Perseverance moves on. No one should really shed a tear for Ingenuity; after all, it was made of out (among other things) parts of a cell phone and was designed to fly five times. It ended taking to the Martian skies over 70 times, showing that humans really sometimes know what they're doing.

Sometimes.

Perseverance, which has its own first-person social media accounts, send out a picture of Ingenuity as it was being left behind, and my brain immediately flashed back to the Harry Styles video, especially the very sad ending because, I guess, Ingenuity never had the chance to make it “home”. It did things it was never expected to do, and maybe that's why just leaving it on the surface of another planet is sad, in a bizarre way.

It's strange how we as humans anthropomorphize things, especially machines, and especially Mars rovers. Whenever one of them—Spirit, Opportunity, you name them—dies, some of us feel as much sadness as we might if a pet had died. And it's strange; after all, these are just machines sent to another planet. But because they do things no one expected, and they do them for much longer than expected, we think they'll be doing these amazing things forever. But when they reach their inevitable end, for some reason we're shocked. We shouldn't be, because space is hard. But that's how we feel.

Just like some of did when the news of Ingenuity's “passing” came down.

Here—the video that started it all.

(jim@wmqt.com)