So the big tech story this week is obviously Coinbase going public, and I'm not going to rehash the play-by-play here because every outlet with a tech vertical has already run the "what does this mean for crypto" piece three times over. Opened at $381 a share on Wednesday, way above the $250 reference price, closed the day around $328. Fine. You've read it. Moving on to something I actually find more interesting, which is a helicopter on Mars that keeps NOT flying.
Ingenuity, or: the most relatable spacecraft ever built
Quick recap for anyone who hasn't been following: NASA's little 4-pound helicopter, which rode to Mars strapped to the belly of the Perseverance rover, was supposed to make the first powered flight on another planet back on April 11th. Then it got pushed to April 14th. Then, during a high-speed rotor spin test on April 9th, a watchdog timer tripped and the whole test got cut short, and now the flight's been bumped again to no earlier than April 19th while the team pores over the data.
I love this. Not in a schadenfreude way, I genuinely love it. Here's a piece of hardware that cost years of engineering time and is currently 173 million miles away with a comms lag of something like 15 minutes each direction, and the team's response to a weird sensor reading is just... to wait. To not fly it until they're sure. No panic tweets, no "we'll patch it in prod and see." Just very calm people at JPL saying "we'd rather be curious and cautious" (an actual quote from one of their updates) and pushing the date again.
Compare that to how I've been spending my evenings this week, which is refreshing a Discord server full of bots that ping when a retailer restocks a PS5. I have three browser tabs open right now — one on Best Buy, one on GameStop, one on Antonline, which I'd genuinely never heard of before this whole shortage started — and I have caught exactly zero consoles since launch. The chip shortage that's been strangling the auto industry is the same one making this thing impossible to buy, and somehow that fact does not make me feel any better about it. If anything it makes it worse, because now I'm mad at car companies too, which is a new and stupid place for my brain to be.
The actual point, if there is one
There's something almost funny about the contrast. A team of engineers with essentially unlimited patience, working on the single most expensive and irreplaceable object either of them will probably touch in their career, versus me, mashing F5 on a retail website at 11pm on a Tuesday because I want to play Returnal at 60fps instead of on my launch-day PS4 that makes a sound like a jet engine spinning up every time I load a save.
I don't have a tidy lesson to draw from this. I just think it's worth sitting with for a second: the same week that a piece of Silicon Valley finance theater is dominating every front page, there's a much quieter story about a team choosing to be slow on purpose, four separate times now, because the cost of being wrong is a dead helicopter on a planet nobody's visiting again anytime soon. My worst-case scenario is I keep playing games at 30fps for another month. Theirs is losing the whole demonstration. Different stakes, and I think it shows in how each group is acting.
If you want to actually watch the Ingenuity attempt whenever it does happen, NASA's been streaming updates through their usual channels and JPL's Twitter account has been posting the delay updates faster than most news sites can write them up, which is honestly the better way to follow it at this point. I'll probably do a short post whenever it actually flies, assuming the watchdog timer behaves itself. And if anyone has a working restock alert setup that isn't just Discord chaos, genuinely, email me. I'm not proud anymore.