In this year of the summer Olympics, it is only fitting that NASA scored a gold medal when it “stuck the landing” on its Curiosity rover, the most ambitious lander ever sent to another planet. In the wee hours of Monday morning, space geeks (most wear that label proudly) celebrated the news that Curiosity had survived the so-called “seven minutes of terror.” Information sent to and from Curiosity when it arrived at the Red Planet took seven minutes to travel the same 354 million miles that the craft had spent more than eight months traversing, so Curiosity was left to accomplish the touchdown on its own. By the time its NASA handlers could have identified and reacted to any possible hiccups during the descent, Curiosity would already have joined the ranks of failed missions. Sixty percent of exploration missions to the planet have failed to complete their objectives, and if Curiosity's automatic landing had not worked perfectly, Mars would have gained a new crater.
A lifelong aviation enthusiast who joined AIN in 2007, Curt came to the publication from the broadcast industry where he was a national science and technology television reporter and producer. He writes on the FBO field, aviation finance, and sustainable aviation and occasionally contributes to AIN sister publication Business Jet Traveler. Curt was a member of the AINtv reporting staff that won the 2008 Aerospace Journalist of the Year award for Best Airshow Daily. That same year, he was a finalist for another AJOYA award. He earned an AJOYA for Best Business Aviation Submission in 2018 and was a finalist in that category in 2021. He received the National Air Transportation Association’s Aviation Journalist Award in 2012 and won a Pegasus Sapphire Business Aviation Award for outstanding journalism in 2021.
Before joining AIN, Curt worked with Consumer Reports’ television division, CRTV, and for several local television news staffs. An honors graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he earned a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University in 1995. Curt lives in New York State with his wife and two young sons.
