Ground Control to Major Motion Picture

To note today's Phoenix launch, Nasa has debuted a video series on the challenge of getting to Mars. The first installment is satisfyingly militaristic, featuring the standard submarine-movie soundtrack and the text that appears across the bottom of the screen to identify time and location but more importantly bleep in such a way to let you know that government/potentially classified text is being typed.

Unfortunately, it's dreadfully dull. The short is about how it's hard to ship satellite-sized packages from Colorado to Cape Canaveral. Granted, it did rain during the drive from the lab to the military base for transport—but that can't possibly even be on the list of worst-case scenarios, since rain poses no threat of the satellite exploding. Nasa doesn't even show the viewer how the convoy caravan would respond to (for instance) an attack by the Taliban.

But another movie about interplanetary bacteria is much better. It's got a picture of a hypothetical far-distant planet that looks like Earth but with rings, along with a British scientist—that's crucial—explaining that there are no shortcuts in the search for trace organic compounds in the dirt. Now we're getting somewhere.

Yet Nasa's still missing the big picture—the defining element that makes Nasa movies Nasa movies.

Ed Harris. And nerds who erupt into fist-pumping cheers in Houston. Probably just a loop of that would do.