Houston, We Have A Problem

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

March 28, 2000 / 8:17 PM EST / CBS

NASA's Mars Polar Lander most likely crashed on Mars last December because of a false signal in the landing gear system that fooled the spacecraft's poorly programmed flight computer into thinking it had touched down, an independent report claims.

But the root cause of the failure was NASA's implementation of Administrator Dan Goldin's "faster, better, cheaper" approach to planetary exploration. NASA tried to do too much, too quickly, with too little money and with shockingly poor management, over-sight controls and accountability.

The review team said the Mars team was under-funded, ill-trained and run by otherwise competent managers who had little experience operating such complex programs. Prime contractor Lockheed Martin also was blamed for promising more than it could deliver, failing to properly check out and test the flight hardware and failing to properly communicate with counterparts at NASA.

The "new NASA", with its credo of "faster, better, cheaper," put too much emphasis on faster and cheaper, not enough on better. The credo was born of what NASA saw as necessity -- necessity forced on it by congressional funding that was too skimpy. But it's clear from this report that NASA was far too eager to please its congressional budget masters.

The independent investigating committee's report found that, specifically, sensors on the landing legs of the spacecraft probably sent erroneous signals to the onboard computer. That caused it to command the engines to stop too soon, they theorize.

In other words: Houston, we had a software problem.

Two other exploratory probes, which were to have landed independently once carried by the mother ship to Mars, also failed. Why those two pieces of equipment failed, the investigators frankly did not even venture a guess.

The Mars Polar Lander went up Jan. 3, l999. Contact was lost with it on Dec. 3 as the machine came close to the planet.

That made two Mars failures in a row for NASA, both in the same year. The earlier Mars Climate Orbiter never got into Mars orbit. A previous investigation blamed that on NASA and its contractors getting mixed up on their measuring units, failing to convert inches and pounds into centimeters and kilograms (which many high school students and most college engineering students can do while half asleep).

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a California outfit of generally good reputation, was NASA's arm for carrying out the Mars program. Bluntly put, they and NASA fouled up the numbers, big time, repeatedly.

NASA science chief Ed Weiler said the agency effectively asked the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to "do the impossible" and that NASA now knows where the limits of better, faster, cheaper lie -- somewhere between the successful $300 million Mars Pathfinder, and the 1998 Mars Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander programs. The two 1998 programs combined cost about the same as the 1996 Pathfinder mission.

As a result, Weiler said Tuesday he's rorganizing NASA's Mars exploration program, setting up a new headquarters management team, adding more money to handle unexpected problems and re-thinking the goals and rationale of upcoming flights.

NASA will press ahead with a Mars orbiter scheduled for launch next year, but a lander similar to the ill-fated Polar Lander will be delayed indefinitely. Plans to retrieve soil and rock samples from the surface of Mars, which NASA had hoped to launch in 2005, are now on hold.

Tuesday's report said that the whole program is a mess. And until and unless NASA can get its stuff together, it's better for the country just to shut 'er down -- the entire Mars exploration drive.

The report says NASA, JPL and the U.S. aerospace industry have accumulated "significant flaws." Given the facts and the record, that's putting it lightly.