Philae

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, despite being a landmark human achievement where we orbited and then landed a spaceship on a freaking comet, still somehow managed to have something of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week last week anyway. First all that science stuff was overshadowed because one of the scientists wore what many saw as a sexist shirt during an on-camera interview, a story which the internet and media attacked like hungry hyenas on a wounded impala, digging in on both sides of the ideological divide about whether this was discouraging women from pursuing STEM careers or whether criticizing the shirt was political correctness run amok. A classy apology from the scientist didn’t stop it, so welcome to the new culture war. The second problem was that because of the failure of a harpoon system needed to insure a safe, secure landing, the Philae lander didn’t so much land on the comet as bounce off it twice until it fell onto an unknown location about a