barackobama:

“Tonight, on the planet Mars, the United States of America made history.”

—

Statement by the President on Curiosity landing on Mars

take note

All of America made history, not just NASA or MSL or some private firm

because every household pays some kind of tax, whether it’s income tax or sales tax or maybe you don’t make taxable levels of income but you buy things from stores that pay taxes on their income, that helped even in some small way to pay for NASA and MSL to design and deploy this thing

like if you ever bought a soda and the store you bought your soda from paid tax on the revenue it earned and that tax went to the federal government and a half a penny of that tax went to NASA, all those half pennies add up to whole pennies and then dollars and then hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars

and you buying that Coke five years ago helped send Curiosity to Mars today. Congratulations.