A moment of silence, please! A moment of reverence for our departed brother so far away. A moment of joy, please! Dearly beloved, we gather to celebrate an arrival, not mourn a departure. Let us feel a heart-beat of empathy and a flicker of nostalgia. Let us give thanks for what is ahead; not gone and behind.

Conversation dies and silence gathers. The minutes tick-tick-tick toward 12:39 in the afternoon of a Southern California day. There's something in the air: tangible, exciting, dreadful. Something is about to happen.

I'm in a narrow hallway that runs half around the glassed-in operations room, jammed cheek-by-jowl with fifty other people. We gaze through transparent walls at another thirty or so people wedged into the small room. The big guy is in there: Dan Golden, NASA administrator, who walked by me moments ago wearing a mask over his persona, no clue at all to his thoughts, to take a place toward the back of the room, a gray eminence watching quietly and lethally. There's Richard Cook, the Project Manager, and bird-like Ed Stone, JPL director, close beside him. There's Mike Watkins, the navigation representative, and John McNamee, project developer, looking intensely haunted and somber. Phil Knocke, mission engineer, mans a console, and Dan Burkhart, navigator, yet another. There's NASA's Weiler and JPL's Casani, and a dozen other luminaries and secondaries.

In the hallway I stand right behind Sarah Gavit, the Microprobe project leader. She shifts from foot to foot, worried look on her face. I could lean forward and put my arms around her and hug if I wanted. I restrain myself. Mark Ryne, fellow navigator, is just to my right. We both wonder, where are we? Where are we going?

Golden watches intently from the back of the room. "Take more risks," he said. "Don't be afraid of failure," he pronounced at the dawn of Faster, Better, Cheaper. More recently he added a stern codicil: "But don't fail."

Today we take a risk. Actually we've been at risk for eleven months since little brother became irretrievable at launch on January 3rd, 1999, but today the odds are palpable. Now it is December 3rd, 1999, and something very definitive is about to happen. A probability distribution -- an ominous cloud of uncertainty -- is about to precipitate into reality.

Eager-eyed clean-shaven Sam Thurman, rising young star in the NASA firmament of Martian exploration, settles firmly into the saddle of control at the main console. He's a jockey bringing whip to the horse-of-the-moment: the Deep Space Network team which listens for the first available peep from our dearly departed little brother, Mars Polar Lander.

The dice have already rolled to a stop, everyone knows that. Like Schrodinger's Cat, the answer lies in a mixed state of failure and success inside a black impenetrable box; we are simply waiting for the lid to rise so that we can peer in, delayed by fourteen irritating minutes of physics: the time it takes light and news and collapsing probability distributions to propagate from Mars to Earth. Is the cat alive or dead? The cloud has already condensed into reality, we just won't know what that reality is for several minutes yet, thirteen, twelve, eleven ...

You have to roll dice in the space biz, there is no getting around that fundamental law. Risk versus gain, you must open yourself to defeat if you ever hope to know the joy of victory. Everyone in that room and hallway has something of his life on the line. For the science investigators and spacecraft engineers like Sara Gavit and Sam Thurman, a few years of their lives and careers are at risk. For others like myself, only a few weeks of commitment are at stake as one of the auxiliary navigators trying to figure out where the hell we are and where we are going. Only a few weeks? Wrong! It has been an agony of weekends, long nights, and Thanksgiving holidays sacrificed to the demanding God of Exploration. It paid for my ticket to this moment of history in this hallway. It bought me a Mars sticker to add to my suitcase, beside the ones for Venus, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The God of Exploration! We worship Him, and He has been benevolent and kind in the past, to Viking and Voyager and Galileo and Pathfinder, and He has been cruel, to Mars Observer and Mars Climate Observer. It's just a matter of providing the right sacrifice of time, money, talent, and ingenuity to appease Him. The God of Exploration doesn't bless you and provide safe passage to Mars for peanuts, you have to pay the price, you have to bleed and sacrifice a virgin or two.

... eight, seven, six, ...

Where are we and where are we going? We are about to find out. All conversation -- moments ago loud and boisterous -- ceases abruptly! All eyes turn toward the display of the spectrum analyzer piped into the control room from the Deep Space Network. A green fuzzy-flat line lies horizontally across the range of frequencies expected from our departed kin.

... three, two, one ...

Collective intake of breath. In moments we will shout with joy to see a tiny needle-sharp peak of signal rise from that fuzzy-flat line and tell us that our dearly departed is dearly arrived, yet ...

Yet it is at this moment that the possibility of failure congeals and becomes real for everyone in this room and hallway. Until NOW it was an abstract and empty concept, had no flesh, was simply the dark underside of a probability cloud drifting far away, occasionally illuminated by flashes of benign heat lightning from within.

Time! The inviolable speed limit of light has been obeyed and a nugget of information has propagated over fourteen minutes of light-travel-time from Mars to Earth, to the Deep Space Network, piped to this control room, to this display, to these eyes. Time. The probability cloud roils overhead, leaden black underbelly churning malevolently. A lightning stroke -- sharp, abrupt, powerful -- strikes nearby. Reality arrives.

The flat line remains flat-line. The nugget of information is the null bit, the absence of a needle-sharp peak, the lack of signal where signal is wanted.

Wait. Maybe the timing is off, maybe the receivers need tweaking, maybe the antenna is mispointed, maybe ... A lot of significance was invested in this first possible moment of signal recovery, but wait, maybe ...

Silence. A downpour of cold wet reality begins, soaking the mind, depressing the soul. Golden's face darkens; Sam Thurman hunches over his console; Ed Stone stares into the spectrum display; Dan Burkhart inspects stale navigation data; John McNamee gazes into space.

... five, six, seven ...

Speculation begins in whispers. Maybe it's in safing mode, maybe it landed in a depression and the earth is temporarily out of sight, maybe ...

There are a hundred possibilities, a thousand! Over the next few days I will watch Richard Cook's and Sam Thurman's faces fill TV screens in press conferences, optimistic, upbeat, always with one more thing to try, but I feel in my heart from that first moment, as do most us assembled here, dearly beloved, that the roll has come up snake eyes. Our dearly departed has truly departed, smeared all over the landscape inside the confines of our navigation error ellipse, or perhaps rolled into a ball at the foot of a steep slope, or perhaps ...

There are a hundred possibilities, but we will not know, I think, for a hundred years when the first human explorers reach the forbidding southern climes of Mars and finally learn the truth of what happened to the Mars Polar Lander.

Meanwhile, we have our failure to deal with: breast beating, investigation boards, program restructuring, launch cancellations, and ...

And there will be growth, and lessons learned, and a chance to do it better the next time, because we WILL do it better, again and again, because we melt in the crucible of failure and mold to something better, but more fundamentally because we, as human beings, worship the God of Exploration and will sacrifice for the future.

Dearly beloved, let us feel a heart-beat of empathy and a flicker of nostalgia. Let us give thanks for what is ahead; not gone and behind. Where are we and where are we going? To Mars and beyond.