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Last Night in Times Square, 100 People Watched NASA Watch a Mars Landing

Maybe the best way to watch a new NASA Mars rover touch down on the red planet is to sidle up next to scientists and celebs and share in the celebration at the agency's world-famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But the second-best is surely to head to...

Maybe the best way to watch a new NASA Mars rover touch down on the red planet is to sidle up next to scientists and celebs and share in the celebration at the agency’s world-famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But the second-best is surely to head to Times Square, where the landing is being simulcast above a tower of Dunkin’ Donuts and Bud Light ads, and usher in the hallmark with tourists, sci-fi fans, students, a small army of reporters, NASA supporters, and assorted glorious weirdos.

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Was there a guy with three talking parrots roosting on his shoulders or someone bearing a ‘Need Money 4 Weed’ sign at JPL? I think not.

When I arrived at 42nd Street at a quarter past midnight to watch NASA’s Curiosity take its final terrifying plunge the crowd was sparse. A handful of space exploration diehards had planted lawn chairs on the prime real estate, but, as is so often the case with events with tailor-made media hooks like these, journalists seemed to outnumber casual observers.

Not hard to see why—the landing was only being shown on a singe screen atop a noisy pillar of advertisements standing 50 stories high. Bud Light graffiti, Total Recall previews, Get the Wall Street Journal Online ticker tape, America loves Dunkin’, and, squint, there’s NASA. At first, I just assumed that the broadcast was on ad break or something, until I remembered it was streaming live from NASA’s feed, and Toshiba was hosting the thing uninterrupted on its screen. It was just way up there at the top:

Branding NASA

“The NASA Mars landing, brought to you by Toshiba,” quipped Rob Conger, one of the early-arriving rover fans. Conger was clearly enthused about the Curiosity’s potential. “I mean, it’s going to measure a lot of things, right? It’s going to measure radiation, all kinds of geological data. And who knows? Maybe they’ll find some weird fungus. Maybe they’ll find Rick Santorum.”

The broadcast itself comprised mostly of shots of mission control and scientists and engineers at their now-classic stations:

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There was no audio broadcast in the square, so anyone that wanted to listen to what was going on inside JPL had to either stream NASA’s broadcast or download an app—both of which were subject to a 1-minute delay that made watching the action on the obscured screen an even odder undertaking. That was one of the top three complaints registered at the observation party at Times Square for the Mars landing (which, in honor of NASA’s love of acronyms, shall henceforth be referred to as OPTS ML), along with #1: Broadcast not happening on all screens and #3: No surround sound or speakers.

Besides the requisite grumbling—complaining, after all comes naturally to strangers gathered into crowds—the mood was pretty electric. From geeks and fanboys to space lovers of the more general variety, there was a surreal amount of informed comment and intellectual speculation occurring in a place designed to sell you t-shirts and chain restaurant food. And more and more spectators filtered in as the 1:31 am landing drew nearer, a growing hord of neck-craned onlookers with iPhones pressed to their ears.

“I’m a Stark Trek fan, and I saw this on the Colbert Report the other day, and I figured I’d come down and see it,” said Andrew Perdigon, a city college student. “I’m glad that there’s people here.” Perdigon’s interest in the Curiosity?

“In disproving religion; that’s what’s exciting about it to me,” he says. “You know, the whole Creation myth that they go through in the Bible—God created the heavens and the earth, but he doesn’t make any mention of anything else. He doesn’t mention Mars.”

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Kristen Schrantz was there with her aunt to watch her brother Brian, an engineer at JPL, make his Times Square debut. They had their iPhone cams ready, and whenever his face graced the screen, they’d grin and snap a photo.

A long-haired gentleman reclining against a storefront just outside of the action had a sign that read: Will Talk About Anything For Free. So we talked about the Mars landing for free:

“Honestly, we’ve done it before,” he said. “When I saw all the people I was like, are we putting people up there? No? Then why are we so excited?” He couldn’t say much more; another guy had just given him two dollars to talk about Australian politics.

NASA in Times Square in Ten Years

I asked everyone I stumbled upon what they’d expect to see on the big/little screen if they were attending an event like this in 10 years. So here, in order of popularity of response, is what we should expect to see when watching NASA watch a mission in Times Square a decade from now:

1. A manned spacecraft landing on Mars
2. Nothing. NASA will be broke
3. A craft landing on Mars with the capability of returning to earth
4. A rover touching down on one of Saturn’s moons
5 The same happening on one of Jupiter’s moons
6. “Me, going to the moon. I’ll be the first celebrity in space. I’ll do the moonwalk on the moon. I’ll show Michael Jackson some shit” -Actor, musician Andrew Footman

The Curiosity Lands

By the time 1:30 rolled around, OPTS ML had swelled; there were at least a hundred or so NASAites gathered around. Then came the seven minutes of terror; the brief but excruciating window wherein NASA would lose control and contact with the rover, with nothing to do but wait and cross its fingers that nothing went wrong and the Curiosity didn’t end up a crash-landed rumpled heap on a Martian crater.

The suspense was contagious:

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It probably got as quiet as Times Square is physically capable of being; that is, not very. There were still steel workers and buskers and disinterested tourists cruising through, after all. But word came down that the launch was a success; cheers erupted. It looked like this:

Then, while everyone awaited the first Curiosity images of Mars, OPTS ML was roused into some bro-licious fist-pumping chants. First, “USA! USA! USA!” Then, “NASA! NASA! NASA!”

It might have been the most testosterone-fueled display of gratitude I’d ever seen directed at scientists, which was kind of amazing, seeing as how such demonstrations are usually reserved for football games and killing perpetrators of 9/11. These were some seriously happy people, and it was good to get even a fleeting sense of communion over this, one of the unlikeliest shared experiences to grace Times Square—together, cheering scientific progress and lauding the quest to expand the boundaries of our knowledge; all of it infused into the normalized spectacle that rolls over Broadway every night. So yeah, absolutely: NASA! NASA! NASA!

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