Word: spacecrafts
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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...
...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...
...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...
...move that could delay or even abort NASA's ambitious plans to send a lander and an orbiter to Mars every 26 months for the next decade. The loss of two straight probes prompts questions about whether the agency isn't cutting too many corners, sending out untested spacecraft without enough built-in redundancies, and it's hoped that an investigation into the apparent failure of the Mars Polar Lander will provide some much-needed answers. In the meantime, NASA stands behind its strategy. "Would you rather go back and spend $2 billion to $3 billion a spacecraft," NASA administrator...
...ready for Part II of the space race. China moved closer to playing in the manned space flight game Sunday following a successful unmanned test flight of a spacecraft designed to carry passengers into Earth orbit. The Shenzhou, China's answer to the Apollo capsule, is based on the design of the Russian Soyuz, and the Russians are also helping to construct the life support system and to train the Chinese "taikonauts." China may be able to conduct a manned flight as early as next fall, and officials have even speculated about possibly sending someone to the moon within...