On Perseverance

Three-hundred million miles. That's how far NASA's Perseverance Rover travelled inside a custom space capsule on its way to Mars between July of 2020 and February of 2021. But chances are, it was only the last one-hundred-forty-two miles that you heard anything about. The descent that journalists have variously described as "harrowing," "acrobatic," or "perilous," and that NASA called "seven minutes of terror."

It's compelling as narratives go, and NASA recorded most of it using six on-board HD cameras. How the capsule slammed into the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour; how its protective shield heated up to more than 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit; how a 70-foot-wide parachute deployed and then shuddered and flapped as it slowed the capsule to just 200 miles per hour; how the heat shield fell away, revealing the rover inside the capsule, encased in a complex rocket-propelled rigging called a "sky crane"; how, in just a few seconds, the radar and onboard computers scanned the planet surface for a safe landing zone and then dropped the rover/sky crane assembly out of the capsule into freefall; how the empty capsule and parachute then floated away out of the story and the sky crane's retro-rockets ignited, slowing the rover to a hover just 60 feet above the surface. And finally, how the sky crane, held aloft by its retro-rockets, released its hold on the rover, except for three nylon ropes, and with those ropes, lowered the one-ton vehicle safely to the ground.

The whole thing felt like watching a gymnast vault off the empire state building and land on a balance beam in the middle of 5th Avenue. But not a soul saw it happen in real-time. That's the terror NASA is talking about—all those scientists at mission control holding their breath through the eleven-minute radio delay, waiting for the first indication that their years of calculating and programming had paid off. Even a few days later, when we sat in our living rooms and watched the replay on YouTube, the stakes felt high enough—the jolt of the capsule as the parachute expanded, the way the Martian ground rushes up toward the cameras, the cheers at mission control when Perseverance touched down. We'd seen some impressive computer simulations of how the landing was supposed to work, but Hollywood special effects can't compare to actual footage of it happening.

This, as David Shields might say, is the reality many of us hunger for—the phenomenon of experience not our own, mysterious and impossible to know, somehow captured and reframed in a way that allows us to bear witness. So much of life goes by in a monotonous blur, like a seven-month burn through the black void of space, until something happens. It might be harrowing and acrobatic, it might be subtle and mundane, and we might completely miss it if not for the lowly writer willing to make note.

This September we mark eighteen months of a global pandemic, and as discouraging as it is to watch neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations fail at the basics of the social contract, there's some optimism to glean from a Martian rover named Perseverance, from the collaboration, chutzpa, and hope that got it up there into space, and from the visionary choice to record it all in high definition for the rest of us, not to mention the faith such an effort represents in our collective ability to learn from one another. In a small way, it puts us in mind of the voices we've gathered here in this latest issue of Fourth Genre, their will to record and reframe so many somethings, and their sometimes-harrowing, sometimes-acrobatic approach to figuring out what all those somethings might mean.