Speaker 1: Hey guys ed here, I wanted to remind you all
Speaker 1: of something very important, and that is that Father's Day
Speaker 1: it's coming up. And also my book SNAPO, The Definitive
Speaker 1: Guide to History's Greatest screw Ups is an amazing Father's
Speaker 1: Day gift. It is full of all the same kinds
Speaker 1: of head scratching screw ups from throughout history that you
Speaker 1: have come to know and love from this very podcast.
Speaker 1: But I should point out they're all entirely new stories
Speaker 1: and all of course completely true and insane. I take
Speaker 1: you through each decade, starting in the nineteen fifties, everything
Speaker 1: from swinging spies to planting nukes on the moon, plus
Speaker 1: yours truly, I read the audiobook, so you can buy
Speaker 1: the audiobook and hear my dulcet tones serenading you with
Speaker 1: terrible screw ups. This week, I'm excited to share with
Speaker 1: you one of my favorite chapters from the audiobook. It's
Speaker 1: about the Mars orbit, which was a space probe that
Speaker 1: ended up losing roughly one hundred and twenty five million
Speaker 1: dollars because of a math error. Oh ah, so close.
Speaker 1: Just those newtly little math mistakes they come back and
Speaker 1: bite you all right. So keep listening, and then be
Speaker 1: sure to pick up a copy of Snafu at any
Speaker 1: book retailer. Enjoy Mars Orbiter the probe to nowhere. In
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine, a Mars probe mysteriously Koreem's off course,
Speaker 1: and a bewildered team of rocket scientists realized their rookie
Speaker 1: math mistake was to blame. In the early morning hours
Speaker 1: of September twenty third, nineteen ninety nine, on another gorgeous
Speaker 1: SoCal day, flight operations manager doctor Sam Thurman and his
Speaker 1: team sat slumped in their chairs at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Speaker 1: Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The glumness on their faces clocked
Speaker 1: somewhere between our Caribbean crewis has been canceled and all
Speaker 1: of our kittens just died. The spacecraft on their screens,
Speaker 1: the one hundred and twenty five million dollar Mars Climate
Speaker 1: Orbiter was overdue in sending the signal to confirm it
Speaker 1: had successfully been caught by Mars's orbit. In the tense
Speaker 1: preceding days, two things had become clear that the orbiter
Speaker 1: was way off its target trajectory at the worst possible time,
Speaker 1: and that nobody had a clue why, But their despair
Speaker 1: had a basement level. Even if the signal never came
Speaker 1: and the craft was lost to the void, which does
Speaker 1: happen from time to time in the business of insanely
Speaker 1: complex space missions, the team would have no time to
Speaker 1: work through their stages of grief over a Pina colada.
Speaker 1: The Mars Climate Orbiter, with its primary mission of studying
Speaker 1: Mars's atmosphere and climatic history for signs of water, was
Speaker 1: also designed to play second fiddle to its sister craft,
Speaker 1: the Mars or Lander, due to complete its own two
Speaker 1: hundred million mile journey to Mars mere weeks later. The
Speaker 1: Lander was built and launched in tandem with the orbiter,
Speaker 1: A problem built into one could also have ended up
Speaker 1: in the other. As the day war on, doctor Sam
Speaker 1: Thurman and his bewildered gang of rocket scientists waited and
Speaker 1: waited and waited, but no signal came. Faster, better, cheaper.
Speaker 1: For most of the nineties, NASA felt like a party
Speaker 1: that would never end. After the devastating nineteen eighty six
Speaker 1: Challenger disaster, the agency's Space Shuttle program worked its way
Speaker 1: back into public acceptance, reviving a sense of optimism and
Speaker 1: giving space exploration a new found whiff of affordability, and
Speaker 1: the American public, whose tax dollars kept the agency's coffee
Speaker 1: machines bubbling, were being rewarded with tangible nuggets of wonder.
Speaker 1: Three of the four Great Observatories were sent to space
Speaker 1: in the nineties, including the Hubble Space Telescope, which provided
Speaker 1: some of the most beautiful images of space we've ever secured.
Speaker 1: Despite all this progress, Daniel S. Golden, NASA administrator from
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two to two thousand and one, also espoused
Speaker 1: a faster, better, cheaper mentality. He prioritized leaner in more
Speaker 1: frequent missions. This approach reduced the time it took to
Speaker 1: develop a spacecraft by forty percent and slashed costs by
Speaker 1: two thirds. With an emphasis on efficiency, manned missions were
Speaker 1: becoming harder to justify, After all, humans were the neediest
Speaker 1: of all space cargo. So after the successful nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: eight launch of the Lunar Prospector, NASA had the Moon
Speaker 1: pretty well covered. It was Mars time, baby, and this
Speaker 1: mission to the Red planet. As Golden said, it had
Speaker 1: to be fast and cheap. Too bad they forgot about
Speaker 1: the better part. Looking for life, Doctor Thurman Flight operations
Speaker 1: manager for both the Climate Orbiter and the Polar Lander,
Speaker 1: heeded the call. Tall, lanky, and prone to turtlenecks, with dark,
Speaker 1: neatly combed hair showing some first gray around his temples,
Speaker 1: Doctor Thurman looked like a young Reed Richard's before he
Speaker 1: discovered his elastic superpowers and became mister Fantastic. The son
Speaker 1: of an Air Force interceptor pilot, he had spent his
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties childhood steeped in military aviation. As he gazed
Speaker 1: in awe at the mythological Apollo missions, a career was born.
Speaker 1: Doctor Thurman was already something of a veteran of the
Speaker 1: Jet Propulsion Laboratory by nineteen ninety nine, having worked in
Speaker 1: various roles since nineteen eighty seven and earning praise as
Speaker 1: an expert in project management. Now under the thumb of
Speaker 1: NASA's increasingly stringent calls for efficiency, his Climate Orbiter ground
Speaker 1: support team was positively lean at eighty people, down from
Speaker 1: the two hundred people for the Mars Observer mission just
Speaker 1: seven years earlier. We are trying to do a whole
Speaker 1: lot more with less, Thurmann told The New York Times.
Speaker 1: The public and Congress have told us space is neat,
Speaker 1: but it's got to be done at less than a
Speaker 1: billion dollars a pop. The Mars Climate Orbiter was a
Speaker 1: real steel at one hundred and twenty five million dollars. Still,
Speaker 1: white collar grumbling abounded about the project's costs, having ballooned
Speaker 1: forty four percent throughout its construction by Lockheed Martin, go
Speaker 1: to contractor for all things weapons in space. The craft
Speaker 1: itself was a six point nine foot tall, one thousand,
Speaker 1: three hundred eighty seven pound cube wrapped in wrinkled orange foil.
Speaker 1: It was strikingly asymmetrical, with a large rectangular array of
Speaker 1: solar panels jutting out of one side and a dish
Speaker 1: antenna perched precariously on its top surface. Low gravity would
Speaker 1: be a relief, the orbiter looked like it wanted to
Speaker 1: fall over. Over the course of a Martian year or
Speaker 1: six hundred sixty eight Martian souls for any Earthling readers
Speaker 1: out there, that's six hundred eighty seven days, the probe
Speaker 1: would take daily photos and atmospheric readings, monitor real time
Speaker 1: changes on the Martian surface due to wind, and detect
Speaker 1: clouds of water vapor to help scientists piece together the
Speaker 1: nature of water on Mars. Liquid water could mean life.
Speaker 1: Would David Bowie finally get an answer to the question
Speaker 1: he'd been caterwauling about since nineteen seventy one? Was their
Speaker 1: life on Mars? But before it could start collecting those
Speaker 1: juicy data sets, the orbiter would set up shop in
Speaker 1: a nice round sun synchronous polar orbit and wait for
Speaker 1: the Mars Polar Lander to arrive. It would serve as
Speaker 1: a communications satellite, relaying messages from the lander back to Earth,
Speaker 1: and as an eye in the sky taking weather and
Speaker 1: geographical readings to aid the lander in a smooth touchdown
Speaker 1: on the Martian South Pole. Time to countdown five four
Speaker 1: three two one metric mishap. The Climate Orbiter launched on
Speaker 1: December eleventh, nineteen ninety eight, from Cape Canaveral. Initially, the
Speaker 1: mission was exceeding expectations, according to doctor Thurman. The jet
Speaker 1: propulsion lab tracked the probe's location by detecting changes or
Speaker 1: Doppler shifts in radio signals that were continuously sent back
Speaker 1: to Earth, correcting discrepancies between the observed flight path and
Speaker 1: the target flight path through several controlled burns of directional rockets.
Speaker 1: It was normal and even expected to see discrepancies. All
Speaker 1: spacecraft needed a bit of a nudge from time to time,
Speaker 1: even if we're talking about a two hundred million mile nudge.
Speaker 1: But after the first few corrections, a sense of unease
Speaker 1: began to grow. At NASA, the craft itself was just
Speaker 1: kind of finicky. According to the engineering magazine Spectrum, which
Speaker 1: later did its own in dependent review, the orbiter's gigantic,
Speaker 1: asymmetrical side mounted solar array subjected it to constant energy
Speaker 1: bursts from the Sun, slightly spinning it like the blade
Speaker 1: of a wind turbine in a light breeze. To counteract
Speaker 1: this rotation, heavy flywheels inside the craft could be spun
Speaker 1: up at varying speeds. This technique is the same way
Speaker 1: a segue holds itself upright. The next time you're ripping
Speaker 1: down the sidewalk behind a segue tour guide, just remember
Speaker 1: that spacecraft work the same way. Due to the orbiter's
Speaker 1: peculiar design, though, its thrusters were placed out of balance
Speaker 1: with its center of mass, meaning that every time they
Speaker 1: fired them up to correct a rotation, a cross coupling
Speaker 1: of forces occurred, leading to a drift from original position
Speaker 1: that engineers referred to as a translation translation, the probe
Speaker 1: was slipping and sliding all over the place. Doctor Thurman
Speaker 1: and his team were navigation experts. Their job was to
Speaker 1: take the craft they were given and steer it to Mars.
Speaker 1: The team that had actually designed and built the spacecraft,
Speaker 1: the engineers at Lockheed Martin, wasn't involved in its navigation
Speaker 1: until mere hours before the craft was due to arrive
Speaker 1: at Mars. This left the navigation team guessing about extremely
Speaker 1: important details like how close to Mars can the orbiter
Speaker 1: get without exploding? Without any input from Lockheed, the navigation
Speaker 1: team deemed that while their target fly by altitude was
Speaker 1: approximately two hundred and twenty four kilometers, which would have
Speaker 1: been a safe distance, the craft would survive a pass
Speaker 1: as close as eighty five kilometers. This, by the way,
Speaker 1: wasn't based on actual analysis by Lockheed's engineers. It was
Speaker 1: also wrong, and they would learn that the hard way
Speaker 1: to make matters worse. Later investigations would reveal that doctor
Speaker 1: Thurman and his navigators were stubbornly clinging to a belief
Speaker 1: that the margin of error in their numbers was approximately
Speaker 1: ten kilometers in either direction, whereas in reality the spread
Speaker 1: was closer to one hundred kilometers. According to an expert
Speaker 1: who spoke to Spectrum, this should have had people screaming
Speaker 1: down the halls, as it showed that the navigators had
Speaker 1: no idea where exactly their craft was. The idiosyncrasies of
Speaker 1: the orbiter's design and the poor communication between the engineers
Speaker 1: and the navigators made troubleshooting the orbiter's navigation woes extremely difficult.
Speaker 1: Going through the code alone would take months, and the
Speaker 1: fact that there was no project manager with total oversight
Speaker 1: meant that the teams would be on nearly introductory terms
Speaker 1: with each other's work. Was the orbiter's tendency to drift
Speaker 1: off course the result of poor location readings. Was there
Speaker 1: a physical problem with the thrusters? Had Doctor Thurman forgotten
Speaker 1: to upgrade his PC to Windows ninety eight, there was
Speaker 1: no time to dig for answers the craft had arrived
Speaker 1: at Mars. In an article published on NASA's website on
Speaker 1: September twentieth, doctor Thurman sounded remarkably cheery given the circumstances. Quote,
Speaker 1: the curtain goes up on this year's Mars missions with
Speaker 1: the orbit insertion of Mars Climate Orbiter. If all goes well,
Speaker 1: the happily. Ever after part of the play will be
Speaker 1: the successful mission of the Mars polar Lander that begins
Speaker 1: in December, followed by the mapping mission of the orbiter
Speaker 1: that is set to begin next March. End quote. You
Speaker 1: can almost see the beads of sweat on his forehead.
Speaker 1: Spoiler alert. The orbit insertion didn't go well. It went very,
Speaker 1: very badly. And when something crashes and burns, people with
Speaker 1: clipboards come staggering out of the night and form an
Speaker 1: investigatory panel. In the following weeks, an investigation would tear
Speaker 1: apart every blueprint, every shred of data, every snippet of code,
Speaker 1: and what they would discover as the root cause cause
Speaker 1: of the orbiter's failure was so forehead slappingly basic that
Speaker 1: a humiliated NASA would be forced to implement sweeping changes
Speaker 1: at every level of the agency. Each time the orbiter
Speaker 1: had fired up its rockets to correct course, its onboard
Speaker 1: computer had sent back to Earth a record of exactly
Speaker 1: what each awkwardly placed thruster did, so that engineers could
Speaker 1: calculate the unwonted drift and adjust accordingly. The thruster performance
Speaker 1: data was then processed by Lockheed and emailed to the
Speaker 1: Jet Propulsion Laboratory in pound four seconds, which are English units,
Speaker 1: the kind of units we use for measuring nearly all
Speaker 1: things here in these great United States. Wait, why do
Speaker 1: we use English units in the first place? Hold that thought.
Speaker 1: Doctor Thurman and his JPL team had been taking those
Speaker 1: numbers and entering them into their navigation software as Newton seconds.
Speaker 1: And guess what, though, are metric units, the kind of
Speaker 1: units that are used in space navigation. That's right. The
Speaker 1: fate of a highly anticipated, years in the making one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty five million dollar mission through two hundred
Speaker 1: million miles of space, boiled down to a dumb as
Speaker 1: moon Rock's mismatch of measurement units sent by email. To
Speaker 1: be very blunt, it was overlooked, Neil Hinners, vice president
Speaker 1: for flight Systems at Lockheed Martin, said to The Washington Post.
Speaker 1: Everyone at the Jet Propulsion Lab just assumed the numbers
Speaker 1: they were receiving in Lockheed's emails or in metric units,
Speaker 1: because that was the widely accepted standard in jet propulsion work.
Speaker 1: They were unlabeled, by the way, and since the resulting
Speaker 1: calculations were within the same order of magnitude, the mismatch
Speaker 1: went undetected for the entirety of the ten month trip.
Speaker 1: On this morning of orbit insertion day, some last minute
Speaker 1: estimates came in that placed the craft's approach altitude at
Speaker 1: around one hundred ten kilometers, more than one hundred kilometers
Speaker 1: closer than planned. Lockheed Martin engineers were finally consulted. According
Speaker 1: to Spectrum, they were frightened an altitude like that would
Speaker 1: subject the orbiter to debilitating heat and turbulence, far outside
Speaker 1: the bounds of its limited warranty. As the Pasadena sun rose,
Speaker 1: a sense of gloom descended over the jet propulsion lab.
Speaker 1: The number was updated several minutes later ninety five kilometers.
Speaker 1: At that altitude, air friction would generate heat equivalent to
Speaker 1: a bank of propane torches. The minutes ticked by a
Speaker 1: final altitude estimate came in fifty seven kilometers. The heat
Speaker 1: generated at fifty seven kilometers would have been ten times
Speaker 1: higher than at ninety five kilometers. The orbiter likely plowed
Speaker 1: straight into Mars atmosphere, exploding immediately. Cautionary tale. The absurdity
Speaker 1: of the mission's failure was not lost on the scientific community.
Speaker 1: John Logsden, director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute
Speaker 1: set it best to the Los Angeles Times, that is
Speaker 1: so dumb. Speaking of dumb, why does America use English
Speaker 1: units at all? In seventeen ninety three, the adoption of
Speaker 1: the metric system in the United States was of such
Speaker 1: importance to Thomas Jefferson that he requested artifacts from France
Speaker 1: that the Americans could use to calibrate their tools. A
Speaker 1: French botanist named Joseph Dombi was sent across the Atlantic
Speaker 1: with a standard kilogram in his cargo, but his ship
Speaker 1: was blown off course and he was kidnapped by pirates.
Speaker 1: He died in captivity. If it weren't for those meddling pirates,
Speaker 1: would the Mars Climate Orbiter be whistling a merry tune
Speaker 1: around the Red planet to this very day, beaming back
Speaker 1: images of Martian vapor clouds while the Denver Broncos play
Speaker 1: a home game at one point six zero nine three
Speaker 1: four kilometer high stadium. It would feel so nice and
Speaker 1: tidy to place the blame for the failure of the
Speaker 1: climate orbiter on that one fateful error. Sure, Lockheed Martin
Speaker 1: should have supplied the Jet Propulsion Lab with glitch free
Speaker 1: software yes, JPL should have double checked their homework. Of course,
Speaker 1: those mean pirates shouldn't have stolen that sweet french Man.
Speaker 1: But to reduce the entirety of the orbiter's failure to
Speaker 1: a mismatch of measurements would be to ignore congresses under funding,
Speaker 1: NASA's swaggering over confidence and bad management that trickled down
Speaker 1: into a culture of poor communication and fear of questioning authority.
Speaker 1: To top it all off, weeks later, the Mars Polar
Speaker 1: Lander was also lost because of an entirely different mistake.
Speaker 1: A software error shut off the burners early, causing it
Speaker 1: to crash into the Martian surface. After the loss of
Speaker 1: both spacecraft and months of reviews by several panels, NASA
Speaker 1: made a slew of changes. They rebuilt project management structures,
Speaker 1: implemented stricter review processes, and emphasized the importance of training.
Speaker 1: In a sense, you could say these changes worked, considering
Speaker 1: nine of the eleven missions to Mars since nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: nine were successful, including the twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity,
Speaker 1: and the atmospheric orbiter Maven, whose mission was similar to
Speaker 1: that of the Climate orbiter. Whether NASA's changes were enough
Speaker 1: to ensure its continued success in the future is still
Speaker 1: an evolving question. Its budget remains a fraction of what
Speaker 1: it was in the Apollo years, just about zero point
Speaker 1: thirty six percent of the US federal budget. A tiny
Speaker 1: budget leads to small team sizes. How thorough can you
Speaker 1: really be if you're overworked and spread? Then? As for
Speaker 1: the less measurable changes to NASA's culture, is it even
Speaker 1: possible to convince a sprawling tech agency to slow down
Speaker 1: and embrace a more thoughtful approach in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: An official NASA document from nineteen seventy called What made
Speaker 1: Apollo a Success included this surprisingly folksy passage from NASA
Speaker 1: engineer Bob Tendall quote. Of course, the way we got
Speaker 1: this job done was with meetings, hundreds of meetings. The
Speaker 1: thing we always tried to do in these meetings was
Speaker 1: to encourage everyone, no matter how shy, to speak out hopefully,
Speaker 1: but not always without being subjected to ridicule. We wanted
Speaker 1: to make sure we had not overlooked any legitimate input.
Speaker 1: End quote. By my extremely careful measurements, that's about two
Speaker 1: hundred million miles from dam Golden's Faster, Better, Cheaper, which
Speaker 1: according to one eye witness allegedly led Golden to hurl
Speaker 1: a projector at the wall when somebody sugges just ad
Speaker 1: a backup plan in case a Russian module didn't arrive
Speaker 1: on schedule. In the end, it was indeed late. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the work needs to be slow. Sometimes it isn't about
Speaker 1: the money, and despite your best efforts, sometimes you will fail.
Speaker 1: Because going to space is extremely difficult, but it is
Speaker 1: most definitely worth it. Just ask Major Tom from David
Speaker 1: Bowie's Space Oddity. Floating in his capsule high above the world,
Speaker 1: marveling at a site few of us will ever see,
Speaker 1: contemplating the progress of humanity and the strange piece of
Speaker 1: the great beyond, he sings that quote, I'm feeling very still,
Speaker 1: and I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Speaker 1: end quote. Sure does Major Tom, well, assuming they all
Speaker 1: used the same units,