Science Quote by Steven Squyres

There is a quiet radicalism in Squyres framing Mars exploration as an "adventure" with room for everybody. He is not describing a mission plan so much as a social contract: the science only fully lands when it is emotionally legible to people who will never touch a rover wheel. That word "feel" does heavy lifting. It signals that the goal isn’t just to publish results, but to manufacture proximity-to make distant geology register as lived experience.

The intent is partly democratic and partly strategic. Planetary science runs on public money, political patience, and a fragile attention economy. Inviting "as many people as possible" into the story is outreach, yes, but also insulation: a public that identifies with the work becomes a constituency that defends it when budgets tighten or priorities shift. Squyres is arguing, implicitly, that wonder is not a byproduct of science; it is infrastructure.

The subtext also pushes back against the stereotype of exploration as elite heroism. "Give everybody a sense" recasts discovery as something mediated and shared, not owned by astronauts or a handful of engineers. In the era of rover missions-where the "surface of another world" is seen through panoramas, press briefings, and curated images-the experience is necessarily secondhand. Squyres leans into that limitation and turns it into a promise: not authenticity in the literal sense, but authenticity of sensation. He’s selling presence, and in doing so, he’s explaining why Mars mattered then (and still does): not only as data, but as a public imagination project.