In August 2012, 3.5 million Americans stayed up past midnight to watch a nuclear-powered robot the size of a small car fall out of the sky and land on Mars. They cheered in Times Square. They cried in living rooms. For one bright summer, a machine with a laser gun and a rock-vaporizing temper was the most beloved object in America.
Then we moved on. Which is exactly what we do now.
Thirteen years later, Curiosity is still up there. Still working. Still climbing Mount Sharp, still zapping rocks, still drilling holes into alien stone at the pace of about one inch per second, because nobody is rushing it and nobody is watching. The rover has driven more than 20 miles across a planet that wants it dead. Its plutonium heart is running down. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory know the end is coming—a wheel finally stuck, a memory bank finally fried, a signal that simply never comes back.
Here is the part that should bother you. According to the latest Pew data, roughly four in ten Americans now say they pay little or no attention to space exploration. We used to name our children after astronauts. Now we can't name a single active mission. The Mars rover that once united a fractured country now files its reports into a void. NASA's social media posts about Curiosity get a fraction of the engagement of a stranger's airport sandwich.
This is not really about Mars. It is about us. We have become a society that can only love something while it is landing. The long middle—the grinding, unglamorous, decade-long work of keeping a promise—bores us senseless. We did it to our pandemic response. We do it to our teachers, our bridges, our marriages. We gave Curiosity a ticker-tape parade and then ghosted it like a second date.
Consider what the rover actually represents. It is a $2.5 billion monument to the idea that Americans can still do something hard, slowly, together, for no immediate profit. It launched in 2011, back when Congress could still agree on funding science, back when a Republican and a Democrat could both show up at a JPL press conference and look genuinely proud. Curiosity has outlasted six NASA administrators, four presidential terms, and our collective attention span.
Somewhere in Pasadena, a team of engineers still shows up every morning to drive a robot across a crater 140 million miles away. They do it with the same care they did when the whole world was watching. Nobody claps anymore. They don't seem to need it. That might be the most American thing left in this country—the quiet, unwitnessed decision to keep going after the cameras leave.
We should be ashamed that we stopped watching. But we should also be inspired that Curiosity didn't stop working just because we did.
It is easy to love a landing. It is holy to love the climb.