Posted by tourdemars to General News at April 20, 2004 11:12 PM

If the images coming back from Mars looked an awful lot like Arizona, there was little familiar about the exuberant young engineers whooping it up in the control room of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena — talking on cellphones, cracking jokes, wearing funny T-shirts. Gone are the days when space geeks were (only) poker-faced pocket-protector guys with narrow ties and crew cuts. The rocket scientists at the JPL are surfer dudes, sky divers, rock climbers — even "Survivor" survivors. Far from the seemingly bloodless clones of the Apollo era, the young faces on the screen were as sunny, as animated, as varied as Southern California itself.