Word: landers
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Evidently, NASA has been leaning toward the latter. Just three weeks before Polar Lander was set to arrive at Mars, a NASA panel issued its report on the Climate Orbiter failure in September. The prime cause of that disaster, as everyone now knows, was a truly dumb mistake: the spacecraft's builder, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, provided one set of specifications in old-fashioned English units, while its operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory were using metric...
...maybe not. With the Mars Polar Lander all but written off as a total loss, and the catastrophic failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter three months earlier, NASA is fast becoming the Dan Quayle of government agencies. Late-night comics have been roasting it mercilessly, while the Washington Post offered a Top 10 list of NASA excuses for the latest fiasco. (No. 10: Be patient. Mars Lander is trying to dial in on an AOL account.) Some cyberpranksters offered the Polar Lander for sale on eBay and got 16 bids...
Because the Polar Lander was built by Lockheed Martin as well, and because it was to use Climate Orbiter as a communications relay, the panel looked into that probe too--and found the same weak management. "A recurring theme in the board's deliberations," reads the report, "was one of 'Who's in charge?'" It also raised questions about the probe's landing technology, which was complex, risky and largely untested...
With Polar Lander nearing its final plunge, NASA promised to respond to the concerns, and the agency did address a couple of them. But by then, the die was largely cast. Maybe the lander was done in by something unforeseeable--a badly placed boulder, perhaps, or a crevasse--which no probe could have avoided. And given the complexities of getting a spacecraft to Mars and having it work properly, it's no surprise that something should...
...advantages to the faster-cheaper-better approach, in fact, is that when probes inevitably do fail, the loss is relatively small. Mars Observer, which vanished without a trace just before Goldin took office, cost the nation more than $1 billion; Climate Orbiter and the Polar Lander have set taxpayers back only $319 million between them. "We launched 10 spacecraft in 10 months," said Goldin. "We used to launch two a year. We have to be prepared for failure if we're going to explore...