MSNBC: Red Planet & Nasa

[bignickel]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3077663/

From article
"There was no one to check and double check, and when you have complicated and complex missions you are going to make mistakes that need catching."

Climate Orbiter, R.I.P.
This is exactly what doomed another probe, the Mars Climate Orbiter, which also disappeared just as it arrived at Mars, also in 1999. NASA later released the story that the probe was lost because some low-level workers mixed up English and metric units for rocket thrust. This became a big public joke, and deflected attention from the true cause.

Blaming the foul-up in units was a misrepresentation: To save money, NASA had deleted staffing levels to double-check work, assuming instead that all the workers would make no mistakes. And when the error led to noticeable navigational errors during the flight, the team didn’t have the resources to investigate the clues. Rather than discover what was behind the worrisome indicators, they chose to assume everything was all right — and the probe crashed into Mars.

Whoa. I and just about everyone else has heard about the infamous 'metric conversion' cause, but this is the first that I've heard about lack of double-checking staff; NASA "assumed" that there would be no mistakes?

Maybe NASA Upper Management should play a few unpatched computer games to get a feel for the need for QA?

 

[Frostbite]

I used to follow the whole Mars exploration saga a couple years ago but I let go cause it was getting very disappointing. I think NASA have had their budget cut so much that they're doomed to failure. Let's hope the chinese, japanese and europeans pick it up.