And it could. The little Ingenuity helicopter actually did it this week! It took flight on Mars. And then, just to show off, it did it again —- 183 million miles away from where we’re watching it.

The copter’s first flight lasted 40 seconds, and it traveled up 10 feet. On the second flight, it flew over 51 seconds, hovered at 16 feet, executed a lateral turn, and then made another tidy landing. Each of its next planned flights will test how high, fast and far it can travel in the low gravity and thin air of the eerie Martian world, so that, eventually, man won’t have to boldly go where no man has gone before without getting it checked out first.

All the time the small 4 pound Ingenuity is at work, it’s constantly feeding and receiving a colossal stream of information to and from the NASA/JPL engineers on earth. Not directly though. The copter needs the Perseverance rover for that.

Ingenuity’s relationship with the rover is the same as Star Wars’ Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio. In spite of the impressive cyber-intelligence of Artoo-Detoo, it didn’t know how to communicate with humans and other creatures, and had to use See-Threepio as its transmitter. It’s exactly the same for Ingenuity who streams and receives all its information to and from Perseverance — who is hanging on every word to and from those intensely interested astro-engineers and physicists on Earth.

I just can’t get over it. We’ve just watched powered controlled flight on another planet! And that isn’t even all that went on this week on Mars.

According to BBC News, “All told, it’s been a stunning week for the NASA space agency, which also successfully demonstrated how you could make oxygen (O₂) from Mars’ carbon dioxide (CO₂) atmosphere.

“An O2 generator device called Moxie was able to generate 5g of O₂ – an amount of gas sufficient for an astronaut on the Red Planet to breathe for 10 minutes. 

“Nasa’s thinking is that future human missions would take scaled-up versions of Moxie with them to Mars rather than try to carry from Earth all the oxygen needed to sustain them.”

Unbelievable, but true. A machine that can generate oxygen from carbon dioxide. I could use one of those when I’m wearing my Covid masks, or the next time I get trapped in my overcrowded closet.

Here’s the video Perseverance recorded of Ingenuity’s second flight.

Just in case you’re less than impressed with the copter’s spectacular performance, consider this: Ingenuity’s first flight was 40 seconds long and rose up into 10 feet of the Martian atmosphere before it carefully landed itself back on the surface. Compare that to 1903 when two high school dropouts, named Wilbur and Orville Wright, stunned the world when Orville piloted their crazy new-fangled gasoline-powered flying machine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — and stayed aloft for 12 seconds. We can watch it here….

What the Wright boys lacked in formal education was more than compensated for by their extraordinary technical skill and sophisticated approach to solving problems in mechanical design – kind of like MacGyver — or the wizards at NASA/JPL.

These guys also thought they could. And they did.

The similarities in the event at Kitty Hawk and on the Mars’s flights isn’t lost on the scientists. That’s why the airfield Perseverance so carefully selected, swept, and staged for Ingenuity’s flights, has been named The Wright Brothers Airfield on Mars. Kinda chokes me up! (But then again, I guess you have to remember that I’m easily moved. I cry at supermarket openings.)

The truth is though that we are truly sharing together a spectacular moment in history. This is it, guys. This is what all those Star Trek episodes prepared us for…. Space. The final frontier.