NASA Failures When we look at NASA what do we see? Most people see an organization which has accomplished incredible things not only in space but also on earth, after all they were the ones who put the first men onto the moon and were the impetus for the International Space Station. There is no denying they have had some incredible successes. What most people don’t realize is they have also had some terrible failures. Some will say this is to be expected, but is that true, could at least some of these failures have been prevented? I am going to look at some recent failures to start with. They have to do with the SLS which is the new Space Launch System which NASA is having built and is testing. The contractors and NASA were criticized by the Government Accountability Office which found the prime contractors for the project were receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in awards. The problem with this is it is going on while the project still has many issues and is years behind schedule. Boeing by last year had received 271 million in rewards. Recently during a rocket fire test, the rockets were shut off prematurely. Before that a software problem plagued the Orion capsule in which Lockheed was the prime contractor. Before that there was a software problem with a test flight. Why would you give out awards for great work when all these things keep going wrong? I think a person with average intelligence can figure that one out. The problem with the Orion capsule meant the parts of the capsule had to be disassembled. Who would build a backup system which didn’t have access? We tend to think of NASA as a heroic agency and they certainly have saved some lives, but they also have cost them. Think of all the money NASA could save if they would have used a company with a much better on time record such as SpaceX. Poor SpaceX, their lobbyists need to get more powerful, because isn’t this what it boils down to? While NASA is messing around with Boeing and Lockheed who is the main contractor for the Orion capsule, SpaceX has been building their own giant rocket without government funds. Before the space shuttle Challenger took off, engineers from Morton Thiokol called NASA and asked them not to launch stating it was too cold and the launch could be a disaster. Several times the call was made and several times ignored. At one point the person in charge was said to be annoyed but ordered the launch. After an investigation it was said he didn’t have all the information to know enough to stop the launch. I guess he didn’t trust the people who manufactured the O rings telling him they could fail due to the low temperature. NASA has a string of failed missions. Just the other day from when I am writing this article, NASA has announced it is giving up on the InSight burrowing “mole.” The “mole” was a digger attached to the lander. NASA has announced due to problems with the soil the digger is now dead. The lander is in fine shape. The digger used a scoop but was never able to penetrate the ground. Maybe the soil is harder to penetrate in some spots than others on the Red Planet? I guess we will have to wait for a more sophisticated digger to arrive. NASA actually had a good idea. They had decided it was so expensive to keep replacing satellites when there were problems, they would build a robot repair satellite. It was named DART. DART stood for Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology. The idea was to launch a satellite which could seek out damaged satellites, power up to them and fix the problem. After the DART was launched, they tried sending it to another broken satellite. To their horror it crashed into it. The DART was launched in 2005. As the DART tried again, it crashed again or maybe you could call it a very hard bump. After many tries there was no fuel left. The computer program which it carried had a problem estimating distance. Sometimes NASA has projects which have nothing to do with space. Helios was one of those programs. It was an all-electric flying wing which was tasked with flying into the upper atmosphere. It was entirely solar powered. Unlike some of the other NASA solar powered planes this one was a total failure. It flew for about 30 minutes before high winds knocked it out of the sky. I remember the unbelievable result when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and astronomers tried to use it only to find out the mirror which is the heart of a reflecting telescope was not ground properly. What had happened was the engineers who ground the mirror didn’t compensate for zero gravity which had a slight effect on the mirror but it was enough where astronauts had to be taken to the telescope to repair it. This was a failure which was fixed, that doesn’t happen very often. The next project had a name which reminded me of a Star Trek movie, it was called Genesis. Remember in Star Trek how Genesis could reform a dead planet into a living one? This had nothing to do with NASA’s Genesis project however. The idea was for a satellite to catch particles from the solar wind which blows from the sun. It had a specially formed sheet built into it for this purpose. There was a problem, the satellite was not very sturdy so a plan was conceived where a helicopter would snag the parachute before the satellite hit the ground. The parachute never opened and the satellite slammed into the earth. In the late 1990s NASA was making a push to explore Mars. They built the Mars Polar Lander. It was composed of a lander, a soil probe and a satellite. Today we have been very successful landing on Mars but when the Mars Polar Lander was launched it made it to Mars and disappeared. We never knew what happened to it, which was very strange. Another Mars project was the Mars Climate Orbiter or MCO. The idea was to study the atmosphere on the Red Planet. Two surface probes were to radio back information. This time it was obvious what the problem was, Lockheed Martin created software that used imperial units not the metric units used by NASA. Because of this the probe hit the atmosphere of Mars at the wrong angle and then burned up. There were plenty more failures, but I will save them for another time.
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