Word: one
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...high-, medium- and low-price range. Expect to pay up to $4,199 and to get what you pay for. Real professional quality means a camera with three CCDs--that is, three separate prisms to capture red, green and blue light--and a shotgun microphone, like the one boasted by the $2,500 Canon GL-1. But, hey, who said anything about professional quality? This is the Blair Witch era, after all. Grain is chic. Save your pennies with a serviceable Canon Ultura ($1,200) or a Sony Digital8...
...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...
...hospital with fevers, diarrhea and loss of appetite, once for a six-week stay. Nine months after the transplant, his new immune system began attacking his own cells, inflaming his liver and intestines. Strong immunosuppressive drugs brought that emergency under control before any permanent damage occurred. Still, no one was breathing easy, least of all the physicians...
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...
...One of the big 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...