Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...GOLDIN NASA boss sees Mars probes screw up. Time to put Pikachu in space...
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 the ribbing is a little unfair. Despite NASA's can-do public attitude, expecting a perfect record when you're sending machines across 50 million miles of empty space to an alien world would be naive. But trying to do it in a slapdash fashion doesn't help. "There's a difference," grouses John Pike, a space expert with the Federation of American Scientists, "between cheap and cheaper...
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...
...Even NASA's critics agree that doing things faster, better and cheaper makes sense--if it's done right. Says Pike: "This should provide an opportunity for a midcourse correction." Some sort of correction may already be under way. Goldin has launched a new investigation to look into the Polar Lander loss, and NASA chief of space science Edward Weiler said last week the agency would rethink its ambitious schedule of sending multiple missions to Mars every 26 months through 2007. After years of tipping the other way, "better" may finally be getting the same attention as "faster" and "cheaper...