Comments on: NASA: Mars Probe Doomed By Human Error

Report Finds Error Triggered Battery To Fail On Mars Global Surveyor Last Year

[sjc_1]

NASA does an amazingly good job with the budget they get. This craft had a good service life and was nearing the end. NASA will learn a lot from all of this and will make future probes even more reliable based on what they have learned.

[jonny_chaos]

see, lazy and incompetent. i forgot to chack my math. not week for sure.

[jonny_chaos]

hmmm... laziness and ineptude, fairly common. especially with political appointiees. my guess is 154 million is the sales tax off dollar soda pops for a warm week. say 7.5% average tax on a buck. not going to do the math, but thats like a drop in the bucket. the key is building a few 154 million sports arenas so the guys that arent intrested in much beyond girls gone wild and beer can get theirs to. equal funding, off the taxes from playboy and discover magazines. could get rind of a few government contrats, blackwater, and pay for the whole trip in a week.

[rafterman1]

"We could do so much for humanity here on earth with that money."

Yeah and when that asteroid hits us some day that wipes out all life because we didn't have a space program to get humans off this rock someday and we go extinct as a species, think of all the trillions of dollars wasted on humanity then.

Talk about shortsighted.

[arthurcl1]

I worked at JPL and did a great job and got Laid Off. All of the cost cutting moves NASA does it get rid of the experienced people so they can hire in the inexperienced right out of school for lower cost. This is what they get. NASA is LOST IN SPACE.

[jon_mccain]

But the problems actually began in 2005, when a routine technical update to onboard computers caused inconsistencies in the spacecraft's memory.

LOL!! Done in by a critical windows update from Microsoft.

[pensacola8-2009]

Pre 1996 Unmanned Space Program procedures seemed to follow their brother's foot steps - Manned Space Program. Computer simulations and meticulous procedures for the different "What if's" required teams of engineers to write, to avoid the "Gotcha's painful sting". Lots of imagination is required to create the scenarios and play them out. A few months ago, the Air Force was operating a remotely piloted vehicle and accidently turned off the engine during the hand-off, causing loss of the aircraft vehicle. The cause was failure to follow the checklist. This Global Surveyor is exponentially more complicated and requires a learning curve. My confidence in NASA or JPL will not be disuaded by accidents. We are in a new era for scientific exploration and the returns for our investments are opening the way for more changes to our lives that improve it.

[tucson23]

Judging the way in which Bush has managed other government scientists, my guess would be that they fired anyone who raised concerns and replaced him with a political hack who graduated from Al's Skool of Outer Space and Stuff.

[delfmast]

Is it possible that NASA never lets Safety or Quality considerations interfere with a good days work, an arrogant contracting officer, or a faster cheaper schedule. Until the two foot long shelf of books about how to do quality, that are left forgotten, in the excellent NASA technical library get checked out, for the first time in years, and are carefully read, and sensibly implemented, quality at NASA may be problematic. If even a few of those old reliable pearls of Quality wisdom could be read, and used, with conviction, by NASA's top management, and a committed Quality approach inculcated into every stakeholder in NASA, the recurring wastes of taxpayer's dollars, and astronaut's lives that mar NASA's record of brilliant conquests can be ended. Just the single decades old yellow paperback copy of Phil Cosby's "Quality is Free" book, located in the center of that shelf, would be sufficient, if anybody could be convinced to read it, and to commit NASA to do the simple things it suggests. The record of NASA personnel who have read a quality book in the past decade, if it is only that recorded on the date stamped library record, pasted in the fly leafs, of each of those books may tell part of the story of NASA quality. Somebody ought to look at that technical library's records, and ponder the state of NASA Quality those reader's records may imply.

[delfmast]

Is it possible that NASA never lets Safety or Quality considerations interfere with a good days work, an arrogant contracting officer, or a faster cheaper schedule. Until the two foot long shelf of books about how to do quality, that are left forgotten, in the excellent NASA technical library get checked out, for the first time in years, and are carefully read, and sensibly implemented, quality at NASA may be problematic. If even a few of those old reliable pearls of Quality wisdom could be read, and used, with conviction, by NASA's top management, and a committed Quality approach inculcated into every stakeholder in NASA, the recurring wastes of taxpayer's dollars, and astronaut's lives that mar NASA's record of brilliant conquests can be ended. Just the single decades old yellow paperback copy of Phil Cosby's "Quality is Free" book, located in the center of that shelf, would be sufficient, if anybody could be convinced to read it, and to commit NASA to do the simple things it suggests. The record of NASA personnel who have read a quality book in the past decade, if it is only that recorded on the date stamped library record, pasted in the fly leafs, of each of those books may tell part of the story of NASA quality. Somebody ought to look at that technical library's records, and ponder the state of NASA Quality those reader's records may imply.

[delfmast]

Is it possible that NASA never lets Safety or Quality considerations interfere with a good days work, an arrogant contracting officer, or a faster cheaper schedule. Until the two foot long shelf of books about how to do quality, that are left forgotten, in the excellent NASA technical library get checked out, for the first time in years, and are carefully read, and sensibly implemented, quality at NASA may be problematic. If even a few of those old reliable pearls of Quality wisdom could be read, and used, with conviction, by NASA's top management, and a committed Quality approach inculcated into every stakeholder in NASA, the continuing wastes of taxpayers dollars, and astronauts lives that mar NASA's record of brilliant conquests can be ended. Just the single decades old yellow paperback copy of Phil Cosby's "Quality is Free" book, located in the center of that shelf, would be sufficient, if anybody could be convinced to read it, and to commit NASA to do the simple things it suggests. The record of NASA personnel who have read a quality book in the past decade, if it is only that recorded on the date stamped library record, pasted in the fly leafs, of each of those books may tell the whole story of NASA quality. Somebody ought to look at that technical library's records, and ponder the state of NASA Quality those reader's history may imply.

[delfmast]

NASA apparently never lets Safety or Quality considerations interfere with a good days work, an arrogant contracting officer, or a faster cheaper schedule. Until the two foot long shelf of books about institutionalizing quality, that are left forgotten, in the excellent NASA technical library get checked out, for the first time in years, and are carefully read, and sensibly implemented, quality at NASA may be problematic. If even a few of those old reliable pearls of Quality wisdom could be read, and used, with conviction, by NASA's top management, and a committed Quality approach inculcated into every stakeholder in NASA, the continuing waste of taxpayers dollars, and astronauts lives that mar NASA's record of brilliant conquests can be ended. Just the single decades old yellow paperback copy of Phil Cosby's "Quality is Free" book, located in the center of that shelf, would be sufficient, if anybody could be convinced to read it, and to commit NASA to do the simple things it suggests. The record of NASA personnel who have read a quality book in the past decade, if it is only that recorded on the date stamped library record, pasted in the fly leafs, of each of those books may tell the whole story of NASA quality. Somebody ought to look at that technical library's records, and ponder the state of NASA Quality those reader's history may imply.

[thgdriver]

Scientists, probably the same bunch of losers that support Al Gore and his global warming BS.

[barbaraf4]

This is crazy. NASA needs to fold up their slide rules and go out of business. This is one of many probes or landers or whatevers that have been lost. Mars doesn't want us there, and we certainly don't have the brains to get there. The losses are numbered in the billions and billions. We could do so much for humanity here on earth with that money.

[inventagod2]

Try $400 billion - but then, we needed the oil.

[allgood34]

$154 million. Can you imagine what we (the tax payers) could have used that for instead of probing some planet that we will never live on? Can't we choose what to use the money for like the homeless or the unemployed or aids research or something that will make a difference in the US?

At lest they got lots of info before it bite the dust. Mars dust that is.

[spammenot995]

I guess Marvin was annoyed. :-)

[inventagod2]

Martians been zapping landers again? Sure have lost a lot of them...