WEBVTT - Mars Orbiter and the Probe to Nowhere 0:00:00.640 --> 0:00:04.520 Hey guys ed here, I wanted to remind you all 0:00:04.920 --> 0:00:08.000 of something very important, and that is that Father's Day 0:00:08.200 --> 0:00:12.760 it's coming up. And also my book SNAPO, The Definitive 0:00:12.760 --> 0:00:16.959 Guide to History's Greatest screw Ups is an amazing Father's 0:00:17.040 --> 0:00:20.959 Day gift. It is full of all the same kinds 0:00:20.960 --> 0:00:24.000 of head scratching screw ups from throughout history that you 0:00:24.040 --> 0:00:28.000 have come to know and love from this very podcast. 0:00:28.240 --> 0:00:31.120 But I should point out they're all entirely new stories 0:00:31.160 --> 0:00:34.839 and all of course completely true and insane. I take 0:00:34.920 --> 0:00:38.839 you through each decade, starting in the nineteen fifties, everything 0:00:38.840 --> 0:00:42.800 from swinging spies to planting nukes on the moon, plus 0:00:43.120 --> 0:00:48.120 yours truly, I read the audiobook, so you can buy 0:00:48.159 --> 0:00:52.040 the audiobook and hear my dulcet tones serenading you with 0:00:52.159 --> 0:00:55.680 terrible screw ups. This week, I'm excited to share with 0:00:55.760 --> 0:00:58.520 you one of my favorite chapters from the audiobook. It's 0:00:58.560 --> 0:01:02.440 about the Mars orbit, which was a space probe that 0:01:03.120 --> 0:01:05.399 ended up losing roughly one hundred and twenty five million 0:01:05.480 --> 0:01:11.440 dollars because of a math error. Oh ah, so close. 0:01:12.040 --> 0:01:16.280 Just those newtly little math mistakes they come back and 0:01:16.280 --> 0:01:19.480 bite you all right. So keep listening, and then be 0:01:19.560 --> 0:01:21.880 sure to pick up a copy of Snafu at any 0:01:22.000 --> 0:01:28.800 book retailer. Enjoy Mars Orbiter the probe to nowhere. In 0:01:28.920 --> 0:01:32.679 nineteen ninety nine, a Mars probe mysteriously Koreem's off course, 0:01:33.080 --> 0:01:37.080 and a bewildered team of rocket scientists realized their rookie 0:01:37.080 --> 0:01:41.839 math mistake was to blame. In the early morning hours 0:01:41.880 --> 0:01:45.720 of September twenty third, nineteen ninety nine, on another gorgeous 0:01:45.760 --> 0:01:50.120 SoCal day, flight operations manager doctor Sam Thurman and his 0:01:50.240 --> 0:01:53.640 team sat slumped in their chairs at NASA's Jet Propulsion 0:01:53.720 --> 0:01:58.680 Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The glumness on their faces clocked 0:01:58.720 --> 0:02:03.320 somewhere between our Caribbean crewis has been canceled and all 0:02:03.360 --> 0:02:07.120 of our kittens just died. The spacecraft on their screens, 0:02:07.400 --> 0:02:10.480 the one hundred and twenty five million dollar Mars Climate 0:02:10.680 --> 0:02:14.680 Orbiter was overdue in sending the signal to confirm it 0:02:14.720 --> 0:02:18.959 had successfully been caught by Mars's orbit. In the tense 0:02:19.040 --> 0:02:23.200 preceding days, two things had become clear that the orbiter 0:02:23.360 --> 0:02:26.840 was way off its target trajectory at the worst possible time, 0:02:27.520 --> 0:02:31.480 and that nobody had a clue why, But their despair 0:02:31.840 --> 0:02:35.400 had a basement level. Even if the signal never came 0:02:35.480 --> 0:02:38.160 and the craft was lost to the void, which does 0:02:38.240 --> 0:02:40.600 happen from time to time in the business of insanely 0:02:40.680 --> 0:02:44.000 complex space missions, the team would have no time to 0:02:44.040 --> 0:02:46.959 work through their stages of grief over a Pina colada. 0:02:47.840 --> 0:02:51.119 The Mars Climate Orbiter, with its primary mission of studying 0:02:51.120 --> 0:02:55.560 Mars's atmosphere and climatic history for signs of water, was 0:02:55.600 --> 0:02:58.920 also designed to play second fiddle to its sister craft, 0:02:59.280 --> 0:03:02.919 the Mars or Lander, due to complete its own two 0:03:02.960 --> 0:03:06.840 hundred million mile journey to Mars mere weeks later. The 0:03:06.919 --> 0:03:09.840 Lander was built and launched in tandem with the orbiter, 0:03:10.200 --> 0:03:13.320 A problem built into one could also have ended up 0:03:13.360 --> 0:03:16.440 in the other. As the day war on, doctor Sam 0:03:16.480 --> 0:03:20.799 Thurman and his bewildered gang of rocket scientists waited and 0:03:20.960 --> 0:03:29.080 waited and waited, but no signal came. Faster, better, cheaper. 0:03:30.680 --> 0:03:33.200 For most of the nineties, NASA felt like a party 0:03:33.240 --> 0:03:36.720 that would never end. After the devastating nineteen eighty six 0:03:36.840 --> 0:03:40.760 Challenger disaster, the agency's Space Shuttle program worked its way 0:03:40.760 --> 0:03:44.360 back into public acceptance, reviving a sense of optimism and 0:03:44.520 --> 0:03:49.280 giving space exploration a new found whiff of affordability, and 0:03:49.400 --> 0:03:52.880 the American public, whose tax dollars kept the agency's coffee 0:03:52.880 --> 0:03:56.920 machines bubbling, were being rewarded with tangible nuggets of wonder. 0:03:57.320 --> 0:04:00.440 Three of the four Great Observatories were sent to space 0:04:00.440 --> 0:04:05.160 in the nineties, including the Hubble Space Telescope, which provided 0:04:05.280 --> 0:04:09.280 some of the most beautiful images of space we've ever secured. 0:04:10.200 --> 0:04:14.160 Despite all this progress, Daniel S. Golden, NASA administrator from 0:04:14.240 --> 0:04:17.760 nineteen ninety two to two thousand and one, also espoused 0:04:17.760 --> 0:04:22.440 a faster, better, cheaper mentality. He prioritized leaner in more 0:04:22.480 --> 0:04:26.080 frequent missions. This approach reduced the time it took to 0:04:26.120 --> 0:04:30.360 develop a spacecraft by forty percent and slashed costs by 0:04:30.400 --> 0:04:34.560 two thirds. With an emphasis on efficiency, manned missions were 0:04:34.640 --> 0:04:39.160 becoming harder to justify, After all, humans were the neediest 0:04:39.200 --> 0:04:43.440 of all space cargo. So after the successful nineteen ninety 0:04:43.440 --> 0:04:46.840 eight launch of the Lunar Prospector, NASA had the Moon 0:04:47.000 --> 0:04:50.760 pretty well covered. It was Mars time, baby, and this 0:04:50.839 --> 0:04:53.760 mission to the Red planet. As Golden said, it had 0:04:53.800 --> 0:04:57.359 to be fast and cheap. Too bad they forgot about 0:04:57.360 --> 0:05:05.240 the better part. Looking for life, Doctor Thurman Flight operations 0:05:05.279 --> 0:05:08.480 manager for both the Climate Orbiter and the Polar Lander, 0:05:08.839 --> 0:05:13.080 heeded the call. Tall, lanky, and prone to turtlenecks, with dark, 0:05:13.120 --> 0:05:16.440 neatly combed hair showing some first gray around his temples, 0:05:17.040 --> 0:05:20.120 Doctor Thurman looked like a young Reed Richard's before he 0:05:20.200 --> 0:05:24.640 discovered his elastic superpowers and became mister Fantastic. The son 0:05:24.680 --> 0:05:27.440 of an Air Force interceptor pilot, he had spent his 0:05:27.560 --> 0:05:32.640 nineteen sixties childhood steeped in military aviation. As he gazed 0:05:32.680 --> 0:05:37.000 in awe at the mythological Apollo missions, a career was born. 0:05:37.839 --> 0:05:40.280 Doctor Thurman was already something of a veteran of the 0:05:40.360 --> 0:05:44.080 Jet Propulsion Laboratory by nineteen ninety nine, having worked in 0:05:44.160 --> 0:05:47.880 various roles since nineteen eighty seven and earning praise as 0:05:47.880 --> 0:05:51.440 an expert in project management. Now under the thumb of 0:05:51.520 --> 0:05:56.360 NASA's increasingly stringent calls for efficiency, his Climate Orbiter ground 0:05:56.360 --> 0:06:00.560 support team was positively lean at eighty people, down from 0:06:00.600 --> 0:06:03.400 the two hundred people for the Mars Observer mission just 0:06:03.560 --> 0:06:06.760 seven years earlier. We are trying to do a whole 0:06:06.800 --> 0:06:09.679 lot more with less, Thurmann told The New York Times. 0:06:09.920 --> 0:06:12.720 The public and Congress have told us space is neat, 0:06:12.880 --> 0:06:14.400 but it's got to be done at less than a 0:06:14.440 --> 0:06:18.120 billion dollars a pop. The Mars Climate Orbiter was a 0:06:18.160 --> 0:06:21.680 real steel at one hundred and twenty five million dollars. Still, 0:06:21.839 --> 0:06:25.680 white collar grumbling abounded about the project's costs, having ballooned 0:06:25.720 --> 0:06:29.920 forty four percent throughout its construction by Lockheed Martin, go 0:06:29.960 --> 0:06:33.520 to contractor for all things weapons in space. The craft 0:06:33.560 --> 0:06:36.960 itself was a six point nine foot tall, one thousand, 0:06:37.000 --> 0:06:41.200 three hundred eighty seven pound cube wrapped in wrinkled orange foil. 0:06:41.839 --> 0:06:45.520 It was strikingly asymmetrical, with a large rectangular array of 0:06:45.560 --> 0:06:48.479 solar panels jutting out of one side and a dish 0:06:48.520 --> 0:06:53.400 antenna perched precariously on its top surface. Low gravity would 0:06:53.440 --> 0:06:56.000 be a relief, the orbiter looked like it wanted to 0:06:56.000 --> 0:06:59.400 fall over. Over the course of a Martian year or 0:06:59.480 --> 0:07:03.839 six hundred sixty eight Martian souls for any Earthling readers 0:07:03.880 --> 0:07:07.159 out there, that's six hundred eighty seven days, the probe 0:07:07.160 --> 0:07:11.360 would take daily photos and atmospheric readings, monitor real time 0:07:11.480 --> 0:07:14.720 changes on the Martian surface due to wind, and detect 0:07:14.840 --> 0:07:17.920 clouds of water vapor to help scientists piece together the 0:07:18.040 --> 0:07:22.320 nature of water on Mars. Liquid water could mean life. 0:07:22.880 --> 0:07:25.280 Would David Bowie finally get an answer to the question 0:07:25.360 --> 0:07:29.360 he'd been caterwauling about since nineteen seventy one? Was their 0:07:29.480 --> 0:07:33.760 life on Mars? But before it could start collecting those 0:07:33.880 --> 0:07:36.840 juicy data sets, the orbiter would set up shop in 0:07:36.920 --> 0:07:40.600 a nice round sun synchronous polar orbit and wait for 0:07:40.640 --> 0:07:43.920 the Mars Polar Lander to arrive. It would serve as 0:07:43.960 --> 0:07:48.080 a communications satellite, relaying messages from the lander back to Earth, 0:07:48.720 --> 0:07:51.200 and as an eye in the sky taking weather and 0:07:51.320 --> 0:07:55.240 geographical readings to aid the lander in a smooth touchdown 0:07:55.280 --> 0:08:00.560 on the Martian South Pole. Time to countdown five four 0:08:01.160 --> 0:08:10.280 three two one metric mishap. The Climate Orbiter launched on 0:08:10.320 --> 0:08:14.240 December eleventh, nineteen ninety eight, from Cape Canaveral. Initially, the 0:08:14.280 --> 0:08:18.120 mission was exceeding expectations, according to doctor Thurman. The jet 0:08:18.160 --> 0:08:21.760 propulsion lab tracked the probe's location by detecting changes or 0:08:21.840 --> 0:08:25.680 Doppler shifts in radio signals that were continuously sent back 0:08:25.720 --> 0:08:29.880 to Earth, correcting discrepancies between the observed flight path and 0:08:30.000 --> 0:08:34.680 the target flight path through several controlled burns of directional rockets. 0:08:35.160 --> 0:08:38.440 It was normal and even expected to see discrepancies. All 0:08:38.480 --> 0:08:41.480 spacecraft needed a bit of a nudge from time to time, 0:08:42.200 --> 0:08:45.679 even if we're talking about a two hundred million mile nudge. 0:08:46.480 --> 0:08:50.440 But after the first few corrections, a sense of unease 0:08:50.520 --> 0:08:54.120 began to grow. At NASA, the craft itself was just 0:08:54.480 --> 0:08:58.840 kind of finicky. According to the engineering magazine Spectrum, which 0:08:58.920 --> 0:09:02.720 later did its own in dependent review, the orbiter's gigantic, 0:09:02.840 --> 0:09:07.960 asymmetrical side mounted solar array subjected it to constant energy 0:09:08.000 --> 0:09:11.800 bursts from the Sun, slightly spinning it like the blade 0:09:11.800 --> 0:09:15.319 of a wind turbine in a light breeze. To counteract 0:09:15.360 --> 0:09:18.720 this rotation, heavy flywheels inside the craft could be spun 0:09:18.840 --> 0:09:22.319 up at varying speeds. This technique is the same way 0:09:22.360 --> 0:09:25.760 a segue holds itself upright. The next time you're ripping 0:09:25.800 --> 0:09:28.920 down the sidewalk behind a segue tour guide, just remember 0:09:28.920 --> 0:09:32.640 that spacecraft work the same way. Due to the orbiter's 0:09:32.679 --> 0:09:36.280 peculiar design, though, its thrusters were placed out of balance 0:09:36.320 --> 0:09:39.080 with its center of mass, meaning that every time they 0:09:39.160 --> 0:09:42.480 fired them up to correct a rotation, a cross coupling 0:09:42.559 --> 0:09:46.520 of forces occurred, leading to a drift from original position 0:09:46.640 --> 0:09:51.800 that engineers referred to as a translation translation, the probe 0:09:51.960 --> 0:09:56.200 was slipping and sliding all over the place. Doctor Thurman 0:09:56.320 --> 0:09:59.880 and his team were navigation experts. Their job was to 0:10:00.040 --> 0:10:02.560 take the craft they were given and steer it to Mars. 0:10:03.200 --> 0:10:06.120 The team that had actually designed and built the spacecraft, 0:10:06.360 --> 0:10:10.600 the engineers at Lockheed Martin, wasn't involved in its navigation 0:10:10.800 --> 0:10:13.839 until mere hours before the craft was due to arrive 0:10:13.880 --> 0:10:18.240 at Mars. This left the navigation team guessing about extremely 0:10:18.280 --> 0:10:22.280 important details like how close to Mars can the orbiter 0:10:22.360 --> 0:10:27.240 get without exploding? Without any input from Lockheed, the navigation 0:10:27.320 --> 0:10:30.599 team deemed that while their target fly by altitude was 0:10:30.640 --> 0:10:34.120 approximately two hundred and twenty four kilometers, which would have 0:10:34.160 --> 0:10:37.680 been a safe distance, the craft would survive a pass 0:10:37.720 --> 0:10:41.080 as close as eighty five kilometers. This, by the way, 0:10:41.280 --> 0:10:45.240 wasn't based on actual analysis by Lockheed's engineers. It was 0:10:45.280 --> 0:10:49.720 also wrong, and they would learn that the hard way 0:10:50.720 --> 0:10:54.280 to make matters worse. Later investigations would reveal that doctor 0:10:54.320 --> 0:10:58.080 Thurman and his navigators were stubbornly clinging to a belief 0:10:58.280 --> 0:11:01.120 that the margin of error in their numbers was approximately 0:11:01.200 --> 0:11:05.840 ten kilometers in either direction, whereas in reality the spread 0:11:05.960 --> 0:11:09.440 was closer to one hundred kilometers. According to an expert 0:11:09.480 --> 0:11:12.960 who spoke to Spectrum, this should have had people screaming 0:11:13.000 --> 0:11:15.960 down the halls, as it showed that the navigators had 0:11:16.040 --> 0:11:21.080 no idea where exactly their craft was. The idiosyncrasies of 0:11:21.080 --> 0:11:24.760 the orbiter's design and the poor communication between the engineers 0:11:24.760 --> 0:11:30.400 and the navigators made troubleshooting the orbiter's navigation woes extremely difficult. 0:11:31.040 --> 0:11:34.040 Going through the code alone would take months, and the 0:11:34.080 --> 0:11:37.320 fact that there was no project manager with total oversight 0:11:37.800 --> 0:11:41.200 meant that the teams would be on nearly introductory terms 0:11:41.200 --> 0:11:44.839 with each other's work. Was the orbiter's tendency to drift 0:11:44.880 --> 0:11:48.560 off course the result of poor location readings. Was there 0:11:48.600 --> 0:11:52.320 a physical problem with the thrusters? Had Doctor Thurman forgotten 0:11:52.320 --> 0:11:56.360 to upgrade his PC to Windows ninety eight, there was 0:11:56.400 --> 0:11:59.920 no time to dig for answers the craft had arrived 0:12:00.040 --> 0:12:03.760 at Mars. In an article published on NASA's website on 0:12:03.800 --> 0:12:09.800 September twentieth, doctor Thurman sounded remarkably cheery given the circumstances. Quote, 0:12:09.880 --> 0:12:12.440 the curtain goes up on this year's Mars missions with 0:12:12.520 --> 0:12:16.600 the orbit insertion of Mars Climate Orbiter. If all goes well, 0:12:16.679 --> 0:12:18.920 the happily. Ever after part of the play will be 0:12:19.040 --> 0:12:22.559 the successful mission of the Mars polar Lander that begins 0:12:22.559 --> 0:12:26.000 in December, followed by the mapping mission of the orbiter 0:12:26.040 --> 0:12:30.040 that is set to begin next March. End quote. You 0:12:30.120 --> 0:12:33.120 can almost see the beads of sweat on his forehead. 0:12:33.800 --> 0:12:39.240 Spoiler alert. The orbit insertion didn't go well. It went very, 0:12:39.360 --> 0:12:43.600 very badly. And when something crashes and burns, people with 0:12:43.720 --> 0:12:47.319 clipboards come staggering out of the night and form an 0:12:47.360 --> 0:12:52.440 investigatory panel. In the following weeks, an investigation would tear 0:12:52.480 --> 0:12:57.120 apart every blueprint, every shred of data, every snippet of code, 0:12:57.880 --> 0:13:00.200 and what they would discover as the root cause cause 0:13:00.240 --> 0:13:05.560 of the orbiter's failure was so forehead slappingly basic that 0:13:05.679 --> 0:13:10.240 a humiliated NASA would be forced to implement sweeping changes 0:13:10.280 --> 0:13:14.200 at every level of the agency. Each time the orbiter 0:13:14.240 --> 0:13:17.360 had fired up its rockets to correct course, its onboard 0:13:17.360 --> 0:13:20.280 computer had sent back to Earth a record of exactly 0:13:20.320 --> 0:13:24.560 what each awkwardly placed thruster did, so that engineers could 0:13:24.600 --> 0:13:29.640 calculate the unwonted drift and adjust accordingly. The thruster performance 0:13:29.720 --> 0:13:32.920 data was then processed by Lockheed and emailed to the 0:13:33.000 --> 0:13:37.959 Jet Propulsion Laboratory in pound four seconds, which are English units, 0:13:38.160 --> 0:13:40.880 the kind of units we use for measuring nearly all 0:13:40.960 --> 0:13:44.880 things here in these great United States. Wait, why do 0:13:44.960 --> 0:13:48.640 we use English units in the first place? Hold that thought. 0:13:49.760 --> 0:13:52.920 Doctor Thurman and his JPL team had been taking those 0:13:53.000 --> 0:13:57.400 numbers and entering them into their navigation software as Newton seconds. 0:13:58.280 --> 0:14:02.880 And guess what, though, are metric units, the kind of 0:14:02.960 --> 0:14:07.360 units that are used in space navigation. That's right. The 0:14:07.400 --> 0:14:10.920 fate of a highly anticipated, years in the making one 0:14:11.040 --> 0:14:14.120 hundred and twenty five million dollar mission through two hundred 0:14:14.240 --> 0:14:18.160 million miles of space, boiled down to a dumb as 0:14:18.240 --> 0:14:24.560 moon Rock's mismatch of measurement units sent by email. To 0:14:24.600 --> 0:14:28.240 be very blunt, it was overlooked, Neil Hinners, vice president 0:14:28.280 --> 0:14:31.520 for flight Systems at Lockheed Martin, said to The Washington Post. 0:14:32.240 --> 0:14:35.640 Everyone at the Jet Propulsion Lab just assumed the numbers 0:14:35.640 --> 0:14:39.280 they were receiving in Lockheed's emails or in metric units, 0:14:39.840 --> 0:14:43.880 because that was the widely accepted standard in jet propulsion work. 0:14:44.640 --> 0:14:48.320 They were unlabeled, by the way, and since the resulting 0:14:48.360 --> 0:14:52.720 calculations were within the same order of magnitude, the mismatch 0:14:52.760 --> 0:14:56.320 went undetected for the entirety of the ten month trip. 0:14:57.320 --> 0:15:01.040 On this morning of orbit insertion day, some last minute 0:15:01.160 --> 0:15:04.440 estimates came in that placed the craft's approach altitude at 0:15:04.480 --> 0:15:08.000 around one hundred ten kilometers, more than one hundred kilometers 0:15:08.080 --> 0:15:13.760 closer than planned. Lockheed Martin engineers were finally consulted. According 0:15:13.760 --> 0:15:18.080 to Spectrum, they were frightened an altitude like that would 0:15:18.080 --> 0:15:22.280 subject the orbiter to debilitating heat and turbulence, far outside 0:15:22.280 --> 0:15:26.560 the bounds of its limited warranty. As the Pasadena sun rose, 0:15:26.960 --> 0:15:30.240 a sense of gloom descended over the jet propulsion lab. 0:15:30.920 --> 0:15:35.280 The number was updated several minutes later ninety five kilometers. 0:15:35.680 --> 0:15:39.000 At that altitude, air friction would generate heat equivalent to 0:15:39.080 --> 0:15:43.560 a bank of propane torches. The minutes ticked by a 0:15:43.600 --> 0:15:48.440 final altitude estimate came in fifty seven kilometers. The heat 0:15:48.480 --> 0:15:51.640 generated at fifty seven kilometers would have been ten times 0:15:51.720 --> 0:15:56.000 higher than at ninety five kilometers. The orbiter likely plowed 0:15:56.080 --> 0:16:05.880 straight into Mars atmosphere, exploding immediately. Cautionary tale. The absurdity 0:16:05.880 --> 0:16:08.960 of the mission's failure was not lost on the scientific community. 0:16:09.400 --> 0:16:14.320 John Logsden, director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute 0:16:14.600 --> 0:16:17.840 set it best to the Los Angeles Times, that is 0:16:18.000 --> 0:16:22.400 so dumb. Speaking of dumb, why does America use English 0:16:22.520 --> 0:16:26.480 units at all? In seventeen ninety three, the adoption of 0:16:26.520 --> 0:16:28.920 the metric system in the United States was of such 0:16:29.040 --> 0:16:33.280 importance to Thomas Jefferson that he requested artifacts from France 0:16:33.320 --> 0:16:36.720 that the Americans could use to calibrate their tools. A 0:16:36.760 --> 0:16:41.040 French botanist named Joseph Dombi was sent across the Atlantic 0:16:41.120 --> 0:16:44.360 with a standard kilogram in his cargo, but his ship 0:16:44.520 --> 0:16:48.160 was blown off course and he was kidnapped by pirates. 0:16:48.640 --> 0:16:53.040 He died in captivity. If it weren't for those meddling pirates, 0:16:53.680 --> 0:16:56.720 would the Mars Climate Orbiter be whistling a merry tune 0:16:56.760 --> 0:17:00.160 around the Red planet to this very day, beaming back 0:17:00.160 --> 0:17:04.320 images of Martian vapor clouds while the Denver Broncos play 0:17:04.359 --> 0:17:07.239 a home game at one point six zero nine three 0:17:07.359 --> 0:17:11.679 four kilometer high stadium. It would feel so nice and 0:17:11.760 --> 0:17:14.119 tidy to place the blame for the failure of the 0:17:14.160 --> 0:17:18.800 climate orbiter on that one fateful error. Sure, Lockheed Martin 0:17:18.920 --> 0:17:22.119 should have supplied the Jet Propulsion Lab with glitch free 0:17:22.119 --> 0:17:27.320 software yes, JPL should have double checked their homework. Of course, 0:17:27.359 --> 0:17:30.760 those mean pirates shouldn't have stolen that sweet french Man. 0:17:31.640 --> 0:17:34.359 But to reduce the entirety of the orbiter's failure to 0:17:34.400 --> 0:17:38.960 a mismatch of measurements would be to ignore congresses under funding, 0:17:39.560 --> 0:17:44.119 NASA's swaggering over confidence and bad management that trickled down 0:17:44.160 --> 0:17:48.600 into a culture of poor communication and fear of questioning authority. 0:17:49.440 --> 0:17:52.479 To top it all off, weeks later, the Mars Polar 0:17:52.600 --> 0:17:56.560 Lander was also lost because of an entirely different mistake. 0:17:57.240 --> 0:18:00.600 A software error shut off the burners early, causing it 0:18:00.640 --> 0:18:04.399 to crash into the Martian surface. After the loss of 0:18:04.480 --> 0:18:09.080 both spacecraft and months of reviews by several panels, NASA 0:18:09.200 --> 0:18:13.720 made a slew of changes. They rebuilt project management structures, 0:18:14.080 --> 0:18:18.840 implemented stricter review processes, and emphasized the importance of training. 0:18:19.480 --> 0:18:22.480 In a sense, you could say these changes worked, considering 0:18:22.600 --> 0:18:25.440 nine of the eleven missions to Mars since nineteen ninety 0:18:25.520 --> 0:18:31.480 nine were successful, including the twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, 0:18:31.880 --> 0:18:35.800 and the atmospheric orbiter Maven, whose mission was similar to 0:18:35.840 --> 0:18:39.760 that of the Climate orbiter. Whether NASA's changes were enough 0:18:39.760 --> 0:18:43.119 to ensure its continued success in the future is still 0:18:43.119 --> 0:18:46.679 an evolving question. Its budget remains a fraction of what 0:18:46.760 --> 0:18:49.560 it was in the Apollo years, just about zero point 0:18:49.640 --> 0:18:53.240 thirty six percent of the US federal budget. A tiny 0:18:53.280 --> 0:18:57.199 budget leads to small team sizes. How thorough can you 0:18:57.280 --> 0:19:01.600 really be if you're overworked and spread? Then? As for 0:19:01.640 --> 0:19:05.280 the less measurable changes to NASA's culture, is it even 0:19:05.400 --> 0:19:08.600 possible to convince a sprawling tech agency to slow down 0:19:08.640 --> 0:19:12.440 and embrace a more thoughtful approach in the twenty first century. 0:19:13.080 --> 0:19:17.040 An official NASA document from nineteen seventy called What made 0:19:17.080 --> 0:19:22.119 Apollo a Success included this surprisingly folksy passage from NASA 0:19:22.160 --> 0:19:26.120 engineer Bob Tendall quote. Of course, the way we got 0:19:26.119 --> 0:19:30.280 this job done was with meetings, hundreds of meetings. The 0:19:30.320 --> 0:19:32.520 thing we always tried to do in these meetings was 0:19:32.560 --> 0:19:36.879 to encourage everyone, no matter how shy, to speak out hopefully, 0:19:36.960 --> 0:19:41.080 but not always without being subjected to ridicule. We wanted 0:19:41.080 --> 0:19:44.560 to make sure we had not overlooked any legitimate input. 0:19:45.000 --> 0:19:49.440 End quote. By my extremely careful measurements, that's about two 0:19:49.480 --> 0:19:54.200 hundred million miles from dam Golden's Faster, Better, Cheaper, which 0:19:54.240 --> 0:19:57.560 according to one eye witness allegedly led Golden to hurl 0:19:57.600 --> 0:20:00.320 a projector at the wall when somebody sugges just ad 0:20:00.359 --> 0:20:03.760 a backup plan in case a Russian module didn't arrive 0:20:03.840 --> 0:20:08.400 on schedule. In the end, it was indeed late. Sometimes 0:20:08.400 --> 0:20:11.679 the work needs to be slow. Sometimes it isn't about 0:20:11.720 --> 0:20:15.720 the money, and despite your best efforts, sometimes you will fail. 0:20:16.359 --> 0:20:20.520 Because going to space is extremely difficult, but it is 0:20:20.720 --> 0:20:24.760 most definitely worth it. Just ask Major Tom from David 0:20:24.800 --> 0:20:28.639 Bowie's Space Oddity. Floating in his capsule high above the world, 0:20:29.040 --> 0:20:31.560 marveling at a site few of us will ever see, 0:20:32.000 --> 0:20:36.879 contemplating the progress of humanity and the strange piece of 0:20:36.920 --> 0:20:42.399 the great beyond, he sings that quote, I'm feeling very still, 0:20:42.920 --> 0:20:45.320 and I think my spaceship knows which way to go 0:20:46.080 --> 0:20:50.760 end quote. Sure does Major Tom, well, assuming they all 0:20:50.880 --> 0:20:52.200 used the same units,