The world watched in awe last week as ESA, the European Space Agency, successfully landed a probe on Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the comet also known as 67P.

The landing didn’t go exactly as planned. A retro-rocket failed to fire, as did the harpoons that were designed to bite into the surface and secure the craft, so the 220 pound instrument package called Philae bounced around a bit before landing awkwardly in a shady spot.

Shade is the enemy of solar panels, and since Philae is dependent on solar power to extend its mission, the landing wasn’t optimal.

But even a non-optimal landing was a miracle of engineering, given the challenges the ESA team faced. The first was simply catching up to the comet, a ten year chase that used the earth and Mars as planetary sling-shots. Then there was the diminutive size of the comet, a target roughly the size of Central Park, hurtling through space at speeds of up to 80,000 miles per hour. To cap it all off, the energy demands of the journey required the flight team to put the main vehicle, called Rosetta, to sleep for two and a half years near the end of its voyage.

Such exacting mission requirements would test the limits of any space program, but ESA, which is a consortium of European countries, faced an additional challenge: the lack of a common language. It’s no accident that the mission designers chose the name Rosetta for their spacecraft, or the name Philae for the lander. The Rosetta stone was the famous tri-lingual artifact that enabled archeologists to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics; Philae was an island in the Nile River where an obelisk was found that aided in the translations.

Watching the live Webcast of the landing last Wednesday, I was reminded of the great privilege of being a native English speaker. English is the unofficial language of international scientific discourse, and the mission specialists took the podium with varying degrees of fluency. My heart went out to elderly Dr. Churyumov, the co-discover of the comet, who mopped his forehead as he took the microphone, and whose speech wandered into a no-man’s land between Russian and English as he got more and more flustered.

On the whole, though, these Europeans acquitted themselves astonishingly well in English — far better, I’d hazard a guess, than their American counterparts would fare delivering mission updates in German, Italian, Spanish, or French.

The jubilation in the far-flung ESA control centers seemed to be about more than just the success of the mission; there was a palpable sense of pride in the international collaboration itself. After all, the experiment of a united Europe is still in its infancy, and the outcome is far from certain. The member nations need days like last Wednesday to demonstrate that there’s more to Europe than grudging co-existence and a common currency.

As the exhausted mission specialists basked in the preliminary evidence of their success, I reflected on the length of a journey I’d only caught up with a few days before.

Rosetta was conceived in 1986, in the wake of several successful flights to study Halley’s Comet, which had passed close to earth that year. It took nearly seven years to design the mission, and another ten years to build the spacecraft, which ESA planned to launch in 2003. A setback delayed the launch for a year, and Rosetta finally lifted off in March, 2004. For the past ten years, the craft has been hurtling through space.

The Rosetta mission has taken nearly thirty years to come to fruition: in other words, more than a generation. Some of the key architects didn’t live to see its successful conclusion.

We tend to define civilizations in terms of multi-generational projects. The pyramids come to mind; so, too, the Great Wall of China, the cathedral of Notre Dame. One wonders what project will define our own civilization. As civilizations go, we seem to have a short attention span. The ebb and flow of our democratic process ensures that no single ambition dominates civic life for more than a decade or two. The space race defined us for a while, but space is no longer the exclusive club it once was.

The question remains: what have we built as a nation that will echo through the ages? Our vaunted military, the mightiest in history? Our storied skylines? Or will it be something more abstract, something virtual, the chronicle of our own democratic experiment, perhaps, the world’s first nation founded on ideas?

I’m open to suggestions. Meanwhile, I’d like to tip my hat to ESA for adding to our understanding of comets and the formation of our solar system, and for reminding us that science transcends nations and empires, and constitutes a powerful legacy all its own.