Phil Plait has a video NASA put out re how they’re going to land the nearly one tonne of Curiosity on Mars.

It’s… impressive. We start out with a heat shield and some aerobraking in the thin Martian atmosphere…

Then the chute. A really freaking big supersonic chute…

Then the rockets, starting with a snazzy maneuver to fly out from under the chute…

Then there’s this sky crane deal beneath the rockets…

Then the descent stage bit full o’ rockets detaches from the rover, and buggers off in high style by flying off into the wild blue-or-possibly-kinda-reddish yonder…

… all automated, natch, with the computer using radar to finesse the last bits and arrange for the thing to touch down properly where the crust actually happens to be, since it takes 7 minutes to land, and the radio round trip back to mission control would be like 28 minutes.

No, I’m not kidding. That’s really what they’re gonna do. Go. Watch.

Question: does it somehow help if I say out loud, bad TV-writing style: ‘It’s just crazy enough to work’?