America's Olympic Athletes, Mars Rovers and Military Capability

It seems fitting that on the day when Michael Phelps won his 18th and last ever Olympic Gold Medal in swimming, and on the day when America is on top of the 2012 London Olympic Games medal table, that another typically American feat is about to occur.
On Monday morning at 1:31 am EST, the US Mars rover Curiosity is expected to touch down on the martian surface.
It follows in the footsteps of the two prior Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, which landed on Mars in 2004. The twin rovers lifted off from Cape Canaveral in June 2003 aboard separate Delta II rockets and landed successfully the following January, bouncing onto the surface inside a cocoon of air bags. Spirit went silent in May 2010, but Opportunity continues to work and send back valuable information to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Opportunity was expected to survive for 90 days on Mars’ harsh surface climate, but it is still working after 3,000 days, and after being half-buried in a sandstorm, injured on one of its shoulders, and surviving five martian winters at temperatures of -80°C (-112°F).
The two rovers cost $800 Million to build and launch. It seems money well spent. They have analyzed martian rock and soil and convinced NASA that there once was water on Mars. Opportunity later found a vein of gypsum, a mineral that also confirmed the prior existence of surface water. Opportunity has also sent back 100,000 pictures from Mars.
Opportunity and Spirit were 5 feet long and weighed 380 pounds.
But, Curiosity is much larger, weighing 2,000 pounds. It also benefits from the lessons learned from Spirit and Opportunity, and was designed with a longer, more advanced robot arm, a hammer drill that can crack apart rocks and a laser that reduces rock to a hot plasma, allowing an on-board spectrograph to determine its composition.
Curiosity will land in the area known as the Meridiani Planum, a sandy desert located a few degrees south and west of the martian equator, and halfway around the planet from Spirit's location. It can travel 100 meters (325 feet) per day and can climb 30-degree slopes.
The average distance between the Earth and Mars is 225 million miles, varying widely during the year as both planets orbit the sun. When farthest apart (about 400 million miles), a radio signal from NASA takes more than half an hour to reach a rover. And every day, a rover receives a message giving it the instructions for the day. The rover then carries out the program and beams the data back to Earth via two satellites circling the Red Planet, the Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The instructions must be completed by the time those satellites are in range, adding one more degree of difficulty to the Jet Propulsion Lab’s task and calculations.
Why, dear readers, is it fitting that Curiosity should land on Mars while Michael Phelps and the United States are atop the Olympic charts?
Because Americans have tended to forget since 9.11 that what America does best is not fight wars, although she is very good at that.
What America does best is push technology and science and engineering to its limits - and then push some more.
Just like Phelps and all the other American athletes now in London are pushing the limits of sports competitiveness farther and farther, America’s scientists and engineers are world class pushers of the boundaries of what is possible technically.
That is America’s real strength. It is not in the numbers of soldiers who can be placed anywhere in the world within hours. It is in the technology that makes their placement possible. And in the equipment and support systems that make them so effective when they are in position.
It is for this reason that America is great and the protector of others not able to protect themselves. If it were merely a race for sheer numbers, we would fall far behind China or Russia.
But, America has always depended on more than her soldiers, critical as they are. She has depended on knowledge and skill and on the execution of those parameters.
Please don’t write to say that I am belittling America’s armed forces. Without the best trained, most dedicated soldiers, sailors, marines and air personnel, all the equipment and technology in the world would not carry the day.
But, without the best equipment and technology in the world, the best trained, most dedicated soldiers, sailors, marines and air personnel in the world would not prevail.
That is why it is so important to separate America’s military budget from the overall mess surrounding the fiscal cliff and forced cutbacks, including those for the military, which the combined suicidal tendencies of President Obama and Congress produced last year.
Senators John Mc Cain and Lindsey Graham are now barnstorming, trying to alert average Americans to the fact that their military is in grave danger of becoming second-rate if the forced cutbacks occur.
Michael Phelps - Curiosity - the American military. They have one thing in common. It takes talent, but it also takes the equipment and the money to provide for the development of the talent. And that is what makes all of them the champions they are today.