For fat shit, the Hubble Space Telescope. Just after launch in 1990, astronomers realized that someone had made a terrible mistake. With a cost of 2,000 million dollars and five very complete ground tests, they made it the most tested scientific instrument in history. Already in Earth orbit it was seen that the telescope that was going to provide the sharpest images of the universe was not so good. The images suffered from terrible spherical aberration ; the stars appeared as blurs. Something was wrong with the 2.5 meter main mirror. All eyes turned to the company in charge, Perkin Elmer. The vaunted technological precision in its construction with which NASA filled the press releases – a minimum error of one thousandth of a millimeter – had just gone down the toilet. The chain of failures was horrendous: the mirror was built poorly because the device intended to control its exact shape had been poorly installed; the error was detected in the tests but the engineers thought it was a problem with the control devices and not with the mirror itself; NASA assembled it without performing any quality control and the entire telescope was not checked before launch.
The truth is that NASA has not won for disasters . On the one hand we have the space probes. The Genesis , which was launched in 2001 to collect samples of the solar wind and return back to Earth, crashed in 2004 when its parachute failed to open. An error in the deceleration sensor caused the parachute to never open and the capsule to crash to the ground in Utah at over 300 km/h. Luckily, the damage caused to the sample capsule was not as great as expected and after an enormous amount of extra work to purify the material, it was possible to recover part of it, saving the mission from a total fiasco. Quite the opposite of what happened with Beagle-2, the European probe that was supposed to land on the Martian surface at Christmas 2003. And boy, did it land. The most amazing thing was not the resounding failure at 20,000 km/h, but what happened with the subsequent investigation commissioned by the UK government – Beagle 2 was a British responsibility – and the European Space Agency (ESA). We would never have known its contents without the intervention of New Scientist magazine and because in Great Britain there is the Freedom of Information Act . All previous attempts made by the project’s own scientists and engineers had been rejected on the grounds that it contained privileged information on technical and commercial aspects.
It is not surprising that the ESA wanted to silence him, since what the pages of the report show is pure and simple incompetence. The descent parachute was changed at the last minute without proper testing; by failing to raise the necessary money, gross errors were made in the design, such as considering the Beagle 2 a scientific instrument and not a spacecraft in its own right –so the controls are less and the expense too-; the Martin Baker Aircraft company, designer of the entry, descent and landing system, abandoned the project before its end; there was a lack of robustness in the design of the airbags and an insufficient test program… To add fuel to the fire, Australian scientists have recently pointed out that the probe could have been lost due to miscalculations on entry into the Martian atmosphere that caused it to rotate on itself in an uncontrolled way.
However, we could think that Mars is a jinxed planet. The Russians have lost more than half of their missions there and the Americans are close behind. Among the most notorious is the Mars Observer , the first probe sent to the red planet after the Vikings of the 1970s. It was due to arrive in August 1993, and three days before its arrival it disappeared. Subsequent investigation pointed to an explosion due to the failure of a fuel valve that was an adaptation of the one used on Earth-orbiting satellites. It could have been one of those unavoidable failures in complex missions if it weren’t for the fact that the valve was designed to pressurize fuel tanks shortly after launch, not to lie dormant for months.
There are things that only happen to the Marx Brothers, to Jerry Lewis, to Woody Allen… and to NASA. As an example we have the disaster of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999, a mission to study the climate of the red planet. Instead of stabilizing at a safe 150 km above the surface, it ended up at 57 km: it was destroyed by friction with the upper atmosphere because the thrusters that controlled the spacecraft’s flight worked 4.45 less than expected. The nonsense was committed by the Lockheed Martin company by using the Anglo-Saxon measurement system instead of the Metric Decimal System. The software sent the data in pounds of force and the ship expected newtons, and a pound is equal to 4.45 newtons. Following the tradition inaugurated by Hubble, the software was not tested before liftoff or during flight.
