Ed at Gin and Tacos marvels that we were able to land machines that worked for six years on Mars using late 1960s technology:

It’s great that people are interested in the space program and I’m sure the entire MSL program was challenging and time consuming for everyone involved. It must have felt great to see it succeed. But now that NASA is cool (at least momentarily) I imagine there are a bunch of old guys who were there in the Seventies looking at Mohawk Guy and thinking “Yeah, we put a probe on Mars when you were in diapers, kid. It was made of transistors, a Pong circuit board, and two cameras we bought at a pawn shop in El Segundo after we did mushrooms at Buzz Aldrin’s condo.”

And don’t even get me started on Voyager 2, sonny. We stole half those parts from Radio Shack and that can of bolts is still working 35 years (!) and nine billion miles (!!!) later. And we didn’t have the youtubes and the crazy haircuts and the memes and all that baloney. Now get off my lawn and get a nice military haircut.

Heh.

Some tangentially related Curiosity thoughts of my own.