Mars Is Also Childs Play

To many people, participation in the space program seems com­pletely unreachable. It requires too much training, too much spe­cialized knowledge, and the hardware is too expensive for nonex­perts to understand the issues, let alone be players. This mind-set ignores the great facility of the Net Generation with computers, games, and simulations, and it ignores the soaring aspirations of young people who have not yet tested their limits. To baby boom­ers who lived through the fallow years that followed the Apollo Moon shots, space travel is hard. To Millennials who are witness­ing the opening of space to the commercial sector for the first time, space travel is natural and inevitable.

The Student Astronaut program and its precursors were spurred by an unusual collaboration between a nonprofit advocacy organi­zation, the Planetary Society, an agency of the federal government, NASA, and a well-known corporation, the Lego Company. Their project was called “Red Rover Goes to Mars.” It was preceded by a project called “Red Rover, Red Rover” which began in 1995. The executive director of the Planetary Society, Louis Friedman, saw a teacher at an educational workshop using a Lego product called Control Lab, which let students build motorized devices that could be controlled by a computer. He immediately saw a parallel to the robotic exploration of Mars. If kids could sit at a computer and control a rover in another room, or another country, they could experience the challenges of controlling a rover on another planet, a world that can only be explored through the limited senses of a robot. Starting in 2003, a network of “Mars Stations” was set up around the United States, and in Britain and Israel, each equipped with a different Mars-l ike terrain and a Lego rover with a web camera. Anyone who wants to can drive these rovers over the In – ternet.34 Lego Education has products such that any kid can build and drive their own rover, assuming their parents don’t object to the creation of an artificial Mars in the family home.

Another idea designed to appeal to kids was the inclusion of a Lego mini-figure on each of the Mars Exploration Rovers. Biff Starling and Sandy Moondust were named in another competition and they each “authored” freewheeling online diaries as the rov­ers explored Mars. Each Lego figure was attached to a mini-DVD, and before the rovers rolled off into the Martian dust, they took a few pictures looking back—it’s a little incongruous to see Lego on Mars. Four million people have their names on the mini-DVDs; many are members of the Planetary Society and the rest signed up on the Planetary Society’s special website.35 This was only the sec­ond time privately developed hardware has flown on a planetary mission. Through these partnerships, the lure of space travel has been extended to a very wide audience. The Martian dreams of today’s kids are very different from the dreams of kids four genera­tions ago, which were fueled only by pulp fiction and fantasy.