NASA’s livestream coverage of the Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars was was practically as flawless as the landing itself, a refreshing alternative to all that troubled Olympics coverage. The broadcast—full of suspense, lucky peanut-eating, and ecstatic congratulations—was slow and hard to reach at times, but NASA servers never failed. Along with burnishing its online publicity credentials, NASA had prepared for a global audience of millions.
But NASA couldn’t prepare for everything. An hour or so after Curiosity’s 1:31 AM EST landing in Gale Crater, I noticed that the space agency’s main YouTube channel had posted a 13-minute excerpt of the stream. Its title was in an uncharacteristic but completely justified all caps: “NASA LANDS CAR-SIZE ROVER BESIDE MARTIAN MOUNTAIN.” When I returned to the page ten minutes later, I saw this:
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Read the rest over at Motherboard.
