The location: Mara Lake, British Columbia. The date: July 1969. The boy: a 6 year old Scottish lad. The shirt: a red sport-tee with a #10 emblazoned upon my massive frame. The television: a black and white 19” RCA located on the freezer at the back of the confectionery store/bait shop/ shuffleboard rental place. The event: one Neil ‘Moonwalker’ Armstrong placing his silvery sized 14 moonboots on one distant luna object ie. the Moon. Not since Sizzlers were invented had there been anything more exciting, or confounding to a six year old Scottish lad than this marshmallow man’s first steps on the moon. Was I excited? I think so. Was I sure what the moon really was. Was it made of Wemsleydale? I didn’t know but based on the elder’s reactions you could tell it was indeed a big deal. Flash forward to 2012 and one slightly taller, older, more intelligent, better looking Scotsman watches again in disbelief as some Gen-Y, just out of high school, NASA kid with a Road Warrior styled haircut attempts to Playstation live a $2.5 billion dollar super rover onto Mars’ rusty surface. Memories of Mara Lake and Neil Armstrong come a flashing back! I’m pretty sure I had goosebumps when they landed Curious. See what you people miss by going to bed before 3:00 am? Also brought back memories of an early-days, black/white video game known as ‘Lunar Lander’. Simple premise: land the lunar lander on the highlighted landing pads on the planet for 4X points. Simple enough, except when you add in stuff like gravity, diagonal descent trajectory, limited fuel, and landing pads not much larger than VW Passat. Roughly 87.9% of the time the 8-bit screen would scold me in 8-bit type for not putting the craft down in a delicate manner and thereby splaying $100 million dollar spacecrafts
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across the lunar surface. Back to NASA and the real deal. Anyone/team who can put a 2-ton , 6-wheeled space vehicle named Curiosity, on a planet 150 million miles
CULTIVATING THE away, using advanced Colecovision skillsets deserves their own TLC reality show. Because this sci-fi trek, unlike Lunar Lander, came with no resets. So by now we’ve all seen hi-res images relayed back from our red-rock-roving Curiosity and its orbiting wingman showing the wicked-awesome hi speed entry. The deploying of the speed-brake chute at 900 mph, followed by the ejection of the beloved heat shield, and the jet pack assisted touchdown. I mean holy shit people. Holy shit. I watched this live, with my new BFF superbrained NASA types on my Toshiba laptop from my kitchen table. I understand how complacency can saturate societies psyche via digital excess and noise, but this was kind of a big deal people. Curiosity has been on the job for over a month now and continues to send back surreal martian images, morse code signals, and laser blasted rock bits from Mars dusty red wastelands. And with each image and update, all those spatial nerdlings amongst us, experience a tiny space episode in their NASA approved space pants. So given that elemente’s revised tagline is ‘Cultivation of the Curious’ we felt it only fitting to feature this otherworldly Martian SUV and a sampling of its venture to date. Personally I could have done an entire issue on this but where would I put the cutting boards Lamborghini copy?