As a child of the great days of the space program, I grew up with with visible proof that through diligent study, teamwork, insatiable curiosity and the willingness to dream bigger than anyone should think rational, human beings could accomplish amazing things. A man didn’t walk on the surface of the moon because he was rich, powerful, or famous; because he had a great public relations agent or the right connections. A man walked on the moon because a veritable army of exceptionally smart and dedicated people toiled unceasingly in anonymity to advance a society’s technology to the point where it was possible for him to do so.

Needless to say, while the reality behind such amazing scientific and technological accomplishments, or great accomplishments of most any sort for that matter, remains very similar today as it did back in the sixties and seventies of my youth, too often the perception of it has become distorted. Fame too commonly now precedes accomplishment. Style overwhelms substance. Fortune too often determines success. Teamwork and cooperation are deemed inferior to rugged individualism and go-it-alone heroics. For one who grew up witnessing just how much people working together could accomplish, it all too often becomes frustrating to the point of depression.

Thus when sitting in front of my laptop late Sunday night watching the live feed from the control room of the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory – something that in my youth would have been broadcast with pride on all three television networks but could that night not be found on any of the hundreds of channels now turning our public airwaves into a jumble of inane chatter and mindless twaddle – as the final minutes before the successful landing of the Curiosity on the surface of the planet Mars ticked down, I could feel the same emotions I recalled from the days of my youth. And when it was confirmed that the Curiosity had landed safely and the room full of pale-blue-shirted scientists, engineers, and other team members simultaneously erupted in cheers, hugs and high-fives, I found my eyes welling up with tears of joy in witnessing that the teamwork I remembered from my youth still existed – that a room full of people, largely if not entirely disregarded by the popular media and much of the society at large, working together to the very best of their abilities had accomplished something truly amazing.

I grabbed my laptop from my desk and ran upstairs to share the event with my then sleeping twelve-year-old daughter – a self-described “math nerd” who aspires someday to work in a scientific field. As she looked at the screen and saw the celebrations, she smiled and with half-closed eyes said “smart people truly rule.” Once the celebrating had subsided a bit and the work resumed (landing the Curiosity was just the first step in what is to be a long journey of discovery), NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver gave a brief interview that she concluded with the statement “let the science begin.”

For a middle-aged man who has in recent years grown more than just a bit cynical about the world and increasingly longs for some of what he remembers as the honest enthusiasms of his youth to be rekindled in the society at large, these two sentences have become balm in Gilead indeed, for I have seen something I feared I’d never see again, and I have heard from the lips of my own child something that fills my heart with joy each time I recall it.

To all those who worked so hard for so long to accomplish the remarkable landing of the Curiosity on Mars, and who will continue to apply their highly-disciplined and inspired minds to gathering from it all that can be learned from its discoveries there, I offer my most deeply heart-felt congratulations and gratitude.

“Smart people truly rule.”

“Let the science begin.”