Meh, the way I see it is some NASA people saw the Army drop a humvee from a blackhawk at an airshow and said "hey, let's try that" and then solved all the the p

Meh, the way I see it is some NASA people saw the Army drop a humvee from a blackhawk at an airshow and said "hey, let's try that" and then solved all the the prerequisite problems in order to make it happen. It's not a hard problem but pulling it off on Mars is an exercise in attention to detail. You have to get thousands of little things right to pull it off.