Climb That Mountain
"Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain?" – JFK
In any circumstance, reaching the top has but one constant: it is exhausting. Hours of climbing – literally or metaphorically – can make anyone question why they are even doing it in the first place. What’s more, for outsiders, it is more often than not interpreted as a glorified form of self-torture, where the reason is never logical, and the individual might have reached some sort of high-altitude confusion even before the hike started.
It might sound funny enough for you, then, when I tell you that Crew Montes’ mission was to reach the tallest peaks (aka Montes) from the very beginning. In Sol 4, three of our finest astronauts – Genie, Murph and Messiah – set out to explore Hab Ridge on a strenuous EVA up the hill. If the steep trail wasn’t fun enough, the hike surely got an extra kick from their 30 lb astronaut backpacks. A successful collection of valuable rock samples, as well as in-situ data log via ElectroMagnetic Frequency instrumentation, could be interpreted as the logical motivation behind this journey. But deep down, I am sure that there were more important things that could be drawn from this experience. And I’m not talking about the sick pictures that they took.
While half the crew was out for the EVA, the remaining astronauts from Montes were also doing their part to successfully explore Mars. Spy and Mr. Fix co-led the CAPCOM role, providing all necessary inputs that would lead our EVA team towards success. In the meantime, I worked on fixing our mascot, DRONE, who had its LIDAR mount sharply damaged during yesterday’s EVA. A backup mount was adapted to our needs and smoothly installed, making the DRONE ready for another set of flights tomorrow, where we will go to the same spot for more data collection and drone reckoning. One might ask me if I’m afraid or excited to go on a task that knocked out some of my crewmates for 2 straight hours after the EVA, but if you’ve been following my reports, you’ll know that the answer is obvious.
Well, no one told us exploring Mars would be easy. In fact, they said quite the opposite. To be more precise, we all heard that is about the hardest thing that humans would ever accomplish (if successful). We don’t even have to hike up the tallest mountain in the solar system, Olympus Mons, to interpret the Mars endeavor as the highest mountain we set out to climb. But this shared purpose goes beyond time and space. JFK’s speech from 1960, or the collective dream from all over the world proves that colonizing Mars is anything but a fluke. That leads us once again to the question we started with: why climb the highest mountain in the first place?
I believe that the quest to something bigger than ourselves, on Mars or on Earth, is a natural human instinct. Without such a purpose, our lives could end up defined by a boring and cumbersome experience. After all, we’re not in this Earth (or Mars!) on probation – our true responsibility is to make the best of the gift of life, exploring all kinds of mountains in the process. That’s how we improve ourselves and, once what was hard becomes less hard, we can eventually achieve greater and greater heights. A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.
Let’s climb that mountain.
Hermit out.