Dear NASA Damage Control
CC: Laurie Leshin,
I don’t know what Girl Scouts of the USA badge I earned for this one. But it was never about a badge. It was about making sure no one gets in an accident on a helicopter. Why me though?
Why not ask the AI? Or the Air Force? Why someone in the Army? Well, my relationship to aircraft is “get out of them as soon as possible and carry the pilot(s) and the bud/s home with you.”
That’s it. I don’t have the laser beams or the doomsday cannon. I’m just, along for the ride and have bandaids and a barf bag.
So someone asked — what flight experience do you have?
Well. A long time ago, I knew someone really inspiring. And becoming a pilot meant a lot to him. For some reason, our command convinced him I was going to take his flight school slot. But if they offered me that school, I would say — the choice is not up to me.
So we got what we both wanted.
My flights include: SV-22, Ka-52M, YSH-2G, SH-2G.
And that’s it. I’m no one special. The vehicles are. The other pilots are.
Why those? Because those are the ones that are used for the important people. But they are also dangerous to fly. So I wanted to make sure I understood how these work before someone I cared about stepped into them and took to the skies.
Still, people get the wrong idea because small things on Mars can cast huge shadows. I worked on the Mars Helicopter, not because I was “good” at this (see above — I was last pick for flight school). It was because I wanted to make sure that as the pandemic happened, my colleagues didn’t lose their job. They hired me to write the “control mechanism” that shuts down the helicopter and then the 200+ engineers and 20000+ contractors go home, and have nothing to do, because there would have never been another project like that for awhile, and the private Mars helicopter industry is still very small.
So I just took home a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory laptop, and fixed the descent and landing and simulation code instead. For safety. But also, another secret thing: to keep people from starving.
That is why it was named the Artemis project — a long time ago, a group of people who were all unified by just… not being as smart as Athena nor as tough as Zeus nor as beautiful as Aphrodite and certainly not as rich as Hades … found themselves stuck in a dusty office with burnt out electronics and Dell Xeon Workstations that Voted for Bill Clinton… and just got to work with their bolts and arrows in the forests of La Cañada-Flintridge in case the rest of the village’s voyage at sea netted no fish.
We did this because we volunteered. We didn’t see it as “getting fired” — we saw this as buying time.
Every rotation of each rotor on Mars, taught everyone on Earth something about helicopters and how the atmosphere affects their reliability. Why did we do this on Mars?
So some day, somewhere, even some bad guy’s life might be saved. It’s just that important.
Sincerely,
That One Astronaut who missed the Bus but didn’t get the memo
PS: Where are you? Mars isn’t that bad!