The Astronaut's Mom

The Child, Curiosity

To: Piper Smith
From: Mike Stidd
Date: November 15th, 2038
Subject: Apology

Dear Ms. Smith,

I guess I need to start out with gratitude and an apology. Thank you for getting me in touch with my son. It's been far too long, and I am entirely responsible for that. My letter to him is attached. As per your demand, you may read it. Please don't share it with anyone else but Michael.

And now for the apology: It was my coding that's been giving you such fits in terms of programming Curiosity. I understand you are eager to hear the whole story of how that came about, so here goes.

When Michael was selected for MSC back in 2016, I thought it was a pretty cool gig that would look great on his resume when he applied for a real job. I supported him through all the training exercises and such, but only because I never for one moment thought they were ever actually going to leave the ground. When they set a launch date, I told myself it would get postponed. Even the company that built their rocket said they were not ready to land on Mars. No way were these amateurs actually going to launch my son into interplanetary space. It just wasn't going to happen. The day came, and I showed up at the launch pad, still thinking the mission would be aborted at the last second. I would take my son home, a hand on his shoulder, and assure him that his day would come.

When that rocket launched, I stripped a gear. As far as I was concerned, MSC had just murdered my son.

Meanwhile, Rick, who was about the same age as my son, quit JPL and went to work for MSC, first as a roboticist, and then as an astronaut on the second flight. He kept writing to me with his radical theories on robotics, and he became the focus of all my rage. Not only did I say some really crappy things to him, I made sure that none of his theories would ever get put into play on Curiosity.

Now here it is, twelve years later, and my son is still alive, a worldwide hero, but I have no relationship with him. Rick's robotics theories turned out to be brilliant, but now he's dead, and so my opportunity to apologize to him is irrevocably gone. You are Rick's legacy, so on his behalf as well as your own, please accept my heartfelt apology for all those wasted years.

Attached, you will find 23 lines of code you should remove or countermand in Curiosity that might allow him to start living up to his potential. Good luck, and I mean that. Rick used to say that the average human couldn't think like a robotics coder, but what you are doing with the Mars rovers is more like raising a child, and that's even tougher to do right.