The gold-class landing of the Curiosity rover on the Red Planet on August 6th was an awe-inspiring feat of human ingenuity. It was also a quintessentially American feat, as Dr. John Holdren emphasized in a speech immediately after Curiosity’s successful landing:
“If anybody has been harboring doubts about the status of U.S. leadership in space,” he said, “there’s a one-ton, automobile-size piece of American ingenuity...sitting on the surface of Mars now.”
President Obama similarly praised this event as “a point of national pride far into the future” and a symbol of “our preeminence – not just in space, but here on Earth.”
“In your face, China!” was the not-so-subtle subtext, as Michael Brooks pointed out.
The foreign policy peanut gallery also had a field day. The Telegraph paraphrased one Mars expert as suggesting that the untimely loss of Curiosity “could have meant effectively an end to the U.S. venturing into space for at least a generation, and the keys to the solar system would have been handed to the Chinese.” The paper added: “But for now, the Red Planet is firmly in American hands.”
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