NASA TV feed of 10:31 pm PDT Curiosity landing

Not on Mars no (Beagle 2 was a bit anomalous, having a budget that would barely cover Nasa's stationary costs each year and wasn't secure until about half way through the project anyway. Very embarrassing from a PM point of view). But don't discount Huygens! That was pretty spectacular, especially given how much less we know about Titan.

Asside: I asked a few people who worked on the Huygens landing system why that worked so well but why ESA hasn't been able to recreate that success. They said, quick as a flash, project management. ESA used to PM their projects with a small, powerful project office. Now the sub a lot of the PM out to the big contractors, who seem to just do MS Word documents about how they can't deliver anything and it's someone else's fault.

You need good PMs (we all know this anyway right?). The MSL PM is also the MER (spirit and opportunity) PM, Pete Theisinger. He is a great man. There's a fantastic talk he gave a few years ago, that should delight anyone into ambitious and cool engineering projects, about the development of MER. You can see that he's the kind of guy you'd like to work for:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ZBLklsUys

Edit: typo.

Granted, lots of other countries do excellent work, there's no doubt about that, but the commitment level is different by a huge margin.

Just take a look at what NASA is doing right this very second. They just landed a rover on Mars; they have 2 satellites around Mars; they have satellites around Saturn, Mercury, and Vesta; they have spacecraft on their way to Jupiter and Pluto; they have a planet hunting space telescope which has discovered hundreds of extra-solar planets already; they have Hubble; they have an X-ray telescope; they have a gamma-ray telescope which just recently provided potential confirmation on the origin and nature of dark matter. Oh, and they have another operational rover on Mars. And this isn't even everything, nor does it touch manned spaceflight.

The ESA has been doing some pretty amazing work in the past few years (with Mars Express, Huygens, Rosetta, Planck/Herschel, XMM, Cluster, SOHO, and their cooperation on NASA missions and others) and Japan and others have been doing good work as well, but the budgetary commitment as a percentage of GDP is just not comparable. We shouldn't take NASA's successes and say "oh, well, a bunch of other nations helped out some too, so, go world!" We should give NASA their due, and we should give other space agencies their due as well, and we should challenge the world to support space science missions to the level they deserve.

yet more evidence that scientists hate america

it's about the landing of the spirit rover. You can see the same people that were in the room today talking about it!