From the NASA press release:

The Seven Minutes of Terror has turned into the Seven Minutes of Triumph,” said NASA Associate Administrator for Science John Grunsfeld. “My immense joy in the success of this mission is matched only by overwhelming pride I feel for the women and men of the mission’s team.”

The feeling I had just reading about this at 1:30 a.m. is nothing compared to the joy of those working on this project. But it was definitely a strange but wonderful sense of personal triumph, like “I’m a human, and humans did this amazing thing, and that is awesome.”

I wish it didn’t look trite as I typed the words, but it’s true.

There was something stranger in that feeling, too, if no less wonderful: it was a sense of patriotism. I’m a patriotic person, despite harboring a certain cynicism about modern American politics. But my Curiosity Rover patriotism is a patriotism I rarely feel, and it’s what I always imagined people felt when we landed on the moon, and when they watched numerous other early launches by NASA.

Humanity will go farther, on Earth and in space, if well-meaning nations work together. But there is something so moving about watching a chronically underfunded national agency, whose importance to our past, present, and future is always underestimated, put almost two-thousand pounds of advanced technology on another planet.

And the best part? This is really just the beginning of the mission.