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Message:: [QUOTE="gboulton, post: 1506898, member: 27043"]If we're going to commemorate something, I humbly suggest the team that put those machines up there, not the machines. Consider, for a moment, just a few of the achievements by the men and women of the Mars Exploration Program (MEP). The landed a pair of RC cars somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000,000 miles away...by bouncing them in a cocoon of balloons no less...and proceeded to drive them hither and yon...not for the 90 days they had planned for...but for more than a decade. When that first winter rolled around, they had no plan to handle it...the rovers should have reached the end of their life months ago.  Did they write them off, grateful for what extra science they'd been able to do?  Did they report to their bosses that it simply wasn't practical to try to keep them alive for the upcoming months? They did not. They found a way to reduce power consumption, and promptly drove the suckers to a south facing hill...where they captured just enough light to hibernate until longer days returned. Eventually, one got stuck.  Surely this was the end of its useful life, right?  After all, it had lasted many years beyond its expected service time.  It wasn't after all, like they could hook up a winch. Again, the MEP team found a way.  This tim they went out to their parking lot, and built a Mars analog, duplicating, as closely as they could (relying largely on their own observations over the previous years) the terrain, both in composition and features.  Out of mothballs came one of the early rover models, which was promptly buried in the "Martian" terrain. Weeks later, the team felt they had their best guess at how to free the stuck rover...so they sent the instruction up to the old girl.  The command was, essentially, "gun it!" Several hundred meters later, that very same rover would find the first inarguable evidence of water on Mars. The other rover had her problems too...a wheel eventually locking up.  Now, come on...surely THIS would end the rover's life, right?  After all, the thing can't roll! Nope.  They turned it around, learned to drive backwards, and in a gloriously happy accident...just happened to dig up the first water ice ever seen on another planet...with the stuck wheel dragging through the dirt. Somewhere in all of that, a man suggested that the next rover needed to be bigger, heavier, and badder than these two.  And so, the race was on to find a way to land a small SUV on the planet's surface. The suggestion, made in 1998, that we "dangle it from a hovering landing craft" was made...and promptly discarded as "entirely too silly". In 2002, that same suggestion was selected as the method to be used to land Curiosity...and Rover on a Rope was born. =========================== You know what all of these things mean? They mean that the MEP folks get it.  They get that ultimately, what makes us human is an unquenchable drive to learn more than we know now.  We simply can not leave the unknown alone...we must go poke it with a stick and see what happens. The most telling part of JFK's "man on the moon" speech was never that we would land a man there, and return him.  it was that we would do so...and do the other things...because they were hard. We don't lay down our stick because it's heavy...we get help.  We don't stop poking because nothing happened...we poke harder.  We don't give up after a single poke...we poke more. The greatness of Man is that He always finds a way to learn more than He knows right now. Yes, it's frequently difficult.  Yes, there are almost always challenges.  Yes, people get hurt, explorers die, equipment is lost.  But we always find a way. You want to commemorate something on a coin?  Commemorate that.  Commemorate the group of people that, more than any other in the last 30+ years, have reminded us of what it means to be human.[/QUOTE]

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