What I find fascinating about this story is I've seen much larger and much more elaborate cable lacing jobs that look just as good at telco central offices and data centers, but its always very vague about what exact part of my NDA or employment agreement I'd be violating by posting (or taking, or distributing) pictures. These mars pictures, cropped, may be the only chance for a civilian non-employee to ever legally see professionally done cable lacing, weird but true. There's a zillion other places to see the surface of mars, but only a few to see cable lacing.
Its interesting that in advertising pictures they always use superglue to make the cables look "PHB-good". So you can't see cable lacing in ads, which is too bad.
Done correctly, cable lacing is, literally, an art form. One guy I worked with "knitted" geometric patterns as he spaced the lacing in various locations and used different colors. Also I saw at least one large example of AT+T being "dot matrixed" into a large bundle of cables by careful spacing of lacing.
Artistic cable lacing is kind of an "apprentice" masterpiece situation, you learn lacing well enough to do art, then you show it to other techs (and your boss) to prove you're not an apprentice anymore, then, sadly, for most techs, no more lacing art work. Oh well.