NASA Releases Report on Mars Exploration Program

latcarf writes, "The lead article on NASA today is about the report on the Mars exploration program - a program that hasn't gotten much exploring done recently. It concludes that the loss of the Mars Polar Lander is most likely due to premature engine shutdown and that the cure to such problems is less "faster and cheaper" and more time spent testing systems at greater cost. The article about this report on CNN includes an interview with Tom Young, formerly with NASA, who relates problems with tests on the Polar Lander."

Comments

UN helps people; NASA is pure speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

I think NASA, and the US gov't need to devote more money to NASA.

Why? So they can lose more billion dollar satallites(sp)? Ever see the conditions of our nation's public schools? Money would be better spent on education at lower levels. That would help to create more and *better* scientists (and probably fewer lost satallites! :)

I'd rather see money spent on NASA than the United Nations.

I disagree. I personally feel that we should put more money into *beneficial* UN programs such as UNICEF. Surely feeding starving children and bring food, education, and medicine is more important than having the national ego boost of flying to Mars (or whatever NASA has planned). While the space program certainly has it's benefits, we are no longer in the "space race" as you pointed out. Who are we competing against, spending so much money?

A problem, I think, is that many scientists tend to lose site of the "big picture" when it comes to scientific studies. Sure it's nice to know that there are black holes, but how does that knowledge affect us on Earth? It may have advanced knowledge of astrophysics, but what benefit is that to the majority of the population of the planet? Science should always keep in mind that the greatest it can achieve is to improve the lives of human beans everywhere. The UN can do this well. NASA, it seems, can't.

Re:UN helps people; NASA is pure speculation

[HeghmoH]

Wow. I sure love ad hominem arguments. I said nothing about Star Trek, nothing about space exploration ending human misery. You say I am assuming a Mars lander improves the human race. I say that YOU are assuming that a Mars lander does nothing to improve the race. Those efforts which happen at the farthest edge of human knowledge are always the efforts that produce the most benefit and the most advancement. Doing research on poverty might raise the standard of living for the poor by, who knows, 50%? he standard of living for everybody, including the poor, has increased an order of magnitude since the turn of the century, and generally not because of people trying to help them, but because of people helping everybody. Because of people doing research on the very edge of human knowledge.

Re:UN helps people; NASA is pure speculation

[HeghmoH]

You are mixing up the improvement of the lives of some people with improvement of the human race. Despite appearences, the two are only superficially related.

Pumping money into food for starving people will not alleviate the problems that made them starve in the first place. As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish he'll eat for a day. But if you teach him to fish, he'll eat for life. Which leads to education. This is certainly a good goal, but again the solution is not what one would expect. Throwing money at a problem has never created a solution, not in the entire history of our race. Throwing money at education will not create better schools or better teachers. Perhaps they need more money, but this is not all they need. They also need wild and crazy reforms. Being a recent graduate from an American high school, I can say that the US school system is breaking at the seams, and it's not because it doesn't have enough cash lying around.

Other countries may be different in this regard. Perhaps their systems are fairly decent, but just don't have sufficient money to run them. For the cost of one Mars Polar Lander each year, you could pay for roughly sixteen thousand teachers at ten thousand dollars a year. Not a lot in this country, but in the countries that need it most that salary is incredibly luxuriant.

I think that scientists understand that the best thing they can do is to further the human race. However, they also understand that the greatest scientific discoveries in history were made by people not expecting to make the greatest scientific discoveries in history.

Re:Ooops, just submitted this...

[whoop]

The current priorities in the speeches politicians want to give nowadays involve "how I will give you money." And the average Joe Schmoe laps it up like the trained monkeys they are. So, we have a group of politicians that have put American into a Gimme-state, so the budgets have to be adjusted appropriately. I don't see NASA getting a worthwhile increase in budget for a good 8-10 years. We'll have to go through a couple more presidents before the whole political arena will change enough to allow ideas other than gimme programs. Watch raw Algore speeches on CSPAN (c-span.org has has real video I believe for those of you outside this country, check listings for "Road to the Whitehouse"). It is all, "I will give you X {m,b}illion dollars for {education,social security,welfare,cigarette smokers,etc}. Gearge Bush will kill you."

I can recall all the way back to about 1991, then President George Bush gave a little speech calling for humans on Mars by 2010 (might have be 2020). Here we are already in 2000, and we haven't mastered landing craft there. We (the American people as a whole) just don't give a damn about space today. Kennedy gave a similar speech, with the side-effect of being killed two days later, but we did make it to the moon in under 10 years. For the last thirty years, since we stopped associating with the moon, all we've been is a shuttle service for satellites and growing tomatoes in space. I think we've pretty well mastered that, let's move on to something more challenging people! :)

Fast. Cheap. Good. Choose two.

[Robin Hood]

Hasn't NASA heard of that elementary law of engineering / programming? "Fast. Cheap. Good. Choose two." You just can't get all three, and they ought to know that by know.

Actually, I suspect that they do know it, they're just not telling Congress because they know that Congress, not being made up of engineers, want all three and will cut funding if someone points out the facts of life to them. I suspect that NASA's motto really is:

<LOUD> "FASTER, CHEAPER, BETTER." </LOUD> <mutter> "choose two..." </mutter>
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:

Re:Privatize Nasa?

[Bad Mojo]

NASA DOES have competition. Boeing, Donald McDouglas, and Rockwell. These all will put a satellite up or do other space related things for a profit. NASA gets to do the stuff that isn't simply money driven. No one will pay money to just put a lander on Mars. NASA as a private company would simply become another satellite pusher.

Bad Mojo

Re:Nasa still likes to crash things ...

[Bad Mojo]

If there are life forms on Mars that can do anything about us crashing stuff on the planet, they don't seem to be retaliating. They don't seem to be doing ANYTHING.

PR with Mars? I know Mars, and if you don't crash a few landers onto the surface, you're insulting Mars.

Bad Mojo

Re:$320 mil in IPO terms

[kevlar]

I wouldn't say that valueing RedHat at $7.4B is exactly realistic or wise. In fact, if the market crashes, I'll be the first to point the finger at over valued companies like those listed. Just because some people believe ignorantly that those companies can turn a profit that will value to that amount, doesn't mean in any way that they will or ever could.

Re:one sentence summary.

[Cattywampus]

I'd love to see you engineer a project with countless interworking systems and attempt to find and nail each and every bug to the wall while on a shoestring budget without the time necessary to do the job right.

Stuff it, already. It's not possible to foresee each and every possible failure; hindsight is 20/20. They've managed to successfully launch and maintain hundreds of other projects, all while their budget continues to dwindle. One mistake, and everyone jumps on their back. Kinda disgusting.

Re:Blame e-commerce!

[mindstrm]

Where does the job posting from sun say it requires 7+ years of java experience?
It asks for 2+ years of relevant experience, and mentions that java is a plus.

Re:Privatize Nasa?

[mindstrm]

Okay. How would they make money? Holy capitalist pig.

Re:I GOT AN IDEA!!!

[mindstrm]

Yes. For spacelift service, to put up satellites, that's a good idea, at could be profitable.

But those Europeans don't put people on the moon, or try to land robots on mars, or put up space telescopes, or.. the list goes on.
Nasa is about RESEARCH, not profits.

Re:Literally burning tax dollars.

[mindstrm]

Okay. I enjoy dissing the US on occasion..but I must say.
The US PEOPLE, through their tax dollars, as a nation, put a man on the moon, probes on mars and other planets, voyager, etc...
A choice? There IS a choice. Space exploration costs MONEY! And NASA has had an ever shrinking budget because there is no taxpayer support. So. If the US People WANT nasa to succeed, they have to put the money into it. If they DONT want to do that, they should scrap it.

Imagine you are a contractor. Someone hires you to build a server for him. You explain to him that to do what he needs will cost $10,000. He says 'I only have $1000, but I want you to do it anyway'. You do the best you can, but his server cracks under the load the first day it is up. Should he blame YOU for it's failure, or himself for not listening in the first place?

Re:Considering Open Source for Space

[stab]

Not really, in my opinion ... the Ground Data Systems for the MVACS module of the Polar Lander were intricately tied in with the telemetry of the lander itself, and needed to be attached to a testbed to be of any real use.

So, unless NASA makes a testbed available, or a pretty damn good simulation of one, there's not a great deal of use in open sourcing anything.

Also, I remember hearing once that there's no actual security on the probes, apart from the difficulty in transmitting all the way to Mars ... so, do we really want all the protocols opened ? :)

Instead of all the manpower it would take to monitor the comments from people, it would be much more advantageous to hire one or two kick ass programmers to marshall and audit the code instead.

Humbug!

[hey!]

The quest for systems which are "faster and cheaper" is what our modern equivilent of "computer science" amounts to. Newer, high-prodcutivity languages such as Java and Visual Basic allow programmers to do just that: develop applications faster and with less bugs, thus reducing both the need for testing, as well as costs.

Humbug! First of all, on a project like this coding productivity is scarcely signficant -- it's requirements specification, system integration, and testing where all the time goes. If the coders get to churn out a hundred lines of code a week, averaged over the entire project, they're lucky. If they're pressed for time, they aren't going to cut corners in coding, but testing and integration.

VB is only a higher productivity language for certain classes of problems (simple forms based interfaces with database access and a couple of visual ActiveXs bolted on for eye candy). It works really well in this space, because of the IDE, not the language itself which is execrable and error prone. Essentially you can integrate all of your application components (database, ActiveXs, forms) within the IDE and test them iteratively.

I admire the Java language greatly, but really it is not that different from C++; mostly it is noticeable (as a language) by what it leaves out -- among other things pesky and error prone pointer arithmetic. However, I doubt NASA's problems are related to stray pointers -- they probably use ADA. Java also has an innovative runtime system with nice security features.

I think it is interesting that a lot of the value of these "languages" comes from the infrastructure that exists around them -- the design time IDE in one case and the runtime system in the other. What it suggests is that NASA needs to, over the long run, develop a robust and reusable space exploration rapid prototyping system. It would include standard hardware components, testing apparatus, highly tested reusable software objects and a standard operating system. Real time Linux? It would make a lot of sense for vendors to deliver source code to NASA under a license that would allow subsequent vendors to reuse it.

I don't think coding productivity would make any changes, but it would probably make integrating the entire system faster and easier.

Re:$320 mil in IPO terms

[Foogle]

Yeah, because... uh... it's so easy to Open Source hardware. Seriously, how the heck do you apply open source to a space-shuttle? I don't understand what everyone's obsession is with tacking the words "Open Source" onto everything... It's the same thing here as it was with the Iridium satellites: You can't "Open Source" something that isn't "source" to begin with.

-----------

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

Re:$320 mil in IPO terms

[costas]

Privatize NASA? y'all on drugs? ;-)... In a sense NASA is *already* privatized: when it spends a few hundred million dollars on an X plane that validates a technology some company (Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop --the only ones left really) will build an aircraft around, the money does eventually flow to the private sector. The single greatest example is perhaps the X-33, where NASA is essentially subsidising the development of a commercial launch vehicle.

But what most of the readers here fail to realize is that NASA *must* stay as a government agency for both scientific and economical reasons: Scientific, becuase as others mentioned, NASA has probably the best 'research ethic' in the world. The people there are more free to pursue their own research interests than they would in a corporate R&D facility or in a (corporate-subsidized) research university.

Most importantly though, NASA cannot *afford* to be private; the financial threshold for entry into the aeronautical or space business would have any Valley VC running scared... most big commercial aerospace projects (a good example is the 777) don't pay themselves off until a *decade* or so into production. Boeing is large enough (and the governments behind Airbus can tax enough) to keep those huge cash reserves around, but the stock market doesn't have that kind of patience, especially this market of 6-months-from-incorporation IPOs...

What is truly sad is that most of this wealth is being created by companies largely immitating one another, while true innovators are punished because they are 'sinking' their profits into R&D (who's 'hotter': VA or IBM? Lucent or ?)

engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

Re:$320 mil in IPO terms

[spiral]

> *idly wonders the possibility of an Open Source space program*

Great idea! Let everyone participate in the development of these projects. Surely any random guy who who can hack the Linux kernel is qualified to work on a space probe. After all, it's not like it's rocket science.

Oh, wait. Never mind...

Re:How about asking other countries to pitch in?

[adamb0mb]

The rest of the world is pumping money into space exploration. I'm sure you've heard of the international space station in the works. All contries involved have put a great deal of money forward on this project.

For Everything else there's MatserCard...

[NoWhere Man]

One of my fav comics from User Friendly:
http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/99 dec/uf001332.gif

Re:Blame e-commerce!

[DGregory]

Huh? That link says "java a plus" not "7 years or more of Java experience required"

Re:ISS and federal allocations

[CaptainCarrot]

There is no way to implement "better, faster, cheaper" properly. Not anymore. It's too late.

I work in the defense industry, on a satellite project that had a serious launch failure last year. The reason we have been having so many problems in the space program is because of a complete breakdown in the transmission of the expertise necessary for success. This expertise was originally gained in the early days of the space race, and would be impossible to recall without cash outlays comparable to what was spent in those days. Adjusted for inflation, of course.

The engineers who did the basic research in those days are long retired, but in past decades they had a long time to transmit what they knew to the younger generation of engineers. Sorry if this offends any of the younger crowd, but freshly minted college graduates are not really fully trained. They have all the basics, but real-world experience is absolutely essential. When there were a large number of experienced older engineers in the workforce there was a kind of informal apprenticeship system in place whereby the new generation received this training. But because this was never codified or formalized, the pointy-haired bosses of the industry never took serious note of it. Under the pressures of "better, faster, cheaper" the began to look for any way they could to cut costs - their own salaries and perks being sacrosanct, of course. Their jaundiced eyes soon lit on the senior engineering staff. They were all older, and with accumulated seniority much more expensive. Why, a PHB could hire three new grads for the cost of just one of these old guys! So out the door they went, either laid off or forced into early retirement, and they took their knowledge with them.

In most cases the knowledge lost wasn't the kind of information that any PHB could apply simple-minded metrics to and put down on a balance sheet. They were all the little things - habits, ways of working, all the reflexive sanity checks that ensured that the numbers that came out at the end of their procedures conveyed the information they were intended to convey. They would check and doublecheck things like unit conversions and software loads just because that's how they worked. And by and large NASA projects worked too.

But now they're gone. Boosters are inserting payloads into useless orbits. Probes are crashing into the planets they were supposed to land softly on. Satellites are failing before their designed lifespans are elapsed. And there just may not be a single thing that can be done about it. Not without an effort that this country no longer has the will to support.

That's not as interesting....

[Oscarfish]

...as this UPI story is. It basically states that NASA knew the polar lander was doomed well before it reached Mars.

I hate to say it, but...

2000-03-22 02:01:47 NASA knew Mars Polar Lander was Doomed (articles,space) (declined)

I think...

[fluxrad]

we just need to decide what we want to see done here. The public/government should really decide what's important to them. If we want to see a man on Mars by the end of the first half of this century - then we're going to need to throw money at this project like it's going out of style. Otherwise...we should re-evaluate how badly we want to go to Mars or anywhere else for that matter.

I'm not saying that we need to either go full force into this...or kill it. But the amount of money we spend on these missions should be proportional to our need or desire to get them done successfully.


-FluX
-------------------------
Your Ad Here!
-------------------------

ALIENS!!!

[rwade]

PreMature Engine Shutoff my tushie! It was the Damn polar aliens, they've been doing this for years! What do you think happened to the Mars Rover?

Nasa still likes to crash things ...

[SuperDuG]

Lets look at the most recent things that has cause nasa to get into the news ... ahh yes ... it's ability to crash things into alien planets ...

Remember way back when we were all five and we would crash things and make the big `splosion noises then go eat macaronni? Well I think nasa is just one noodle short of a 5 year old here.

Another thing. If you were an alien considering making contact with the so called superior organism would you take kindly to them crashing things into your planet or bringing remote control cars in your lawn? ... no of course not.

If nasa wants to keep good PR with mars they need to negotiate a landing zone and coordinate a way for the lander to enter into the martian atomosphere. This crashing business will just cause the martians to have ill feelings towards humans and we just can't have that.

Abstract knowledge is still knowledge

[tardaeron]

Granted, it doesnt seem like knowing all this happy stuff about black holes and mars has any effect on me as a person. However, it is a form of abstract knowledge, and the time frequently comes when abstract knowledge leads to vital information. For instance, having the space shuttle drag a sled through our atmosphere at a certain level does not seem to have any positive effect, but the knowledge garnered from such a task could lead to stations in geostationary orbit, in a gravitational field LOWER than that of earth, where medicine could be applied to certain people with peculiar and not-so-peculiar problems that low gravity _may_ help more than no gravity. Just because it doesnt apply directly to real life now does not mean that it will never apply to real life.

Blame e-commerce!

[Brand X]

No, really. NASA is currently unable to compete for highly qualified programmers, given the price tags everything.com have created... and, having worked with JPL employees, and having seen the things going on in these contracts, I'm rather afraid. Warm-body staffing all over the place. It isn't always that bad, but it happens. And there is no way, with the current budget, that NASA can afford to recruit the best of the best to write their software... at least, not enough of them to keep from being strapped to the wire and undermanned.

Re:Blame e-commerce!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I understand your reasoning, however, because we have all been hyped into believing that this dot com revolution is causing a brain drain in other industries. Quite frankly, I don't buy it.

One of the problems with NASA is it doesn't have a particular mandate. We don't have a race with the USSR anymore and NASA has lost focus. Mars, because of the cost involved, doesn't have the sexiness that putting a man on the moon did. I think NASA, and the US gov't need to devote more money to NASA. Hell, I think NASA needs to become more of a world organization. We need to get the whole world involved in this endeavour. I'd rather see money spent on NASA than the United Nations.

How about asking other countries to pitch in?

[wsabstract]

I think in order for space exploration to truly take off, more countries need to get involved. Currently, NASA is essentially the only organization left that takes on this challenge, and graciously shares a lot of its findings and discoveries derived from costly space missions and experiments to the world. It would be nice if the world community could pump something back in, in financial terms or otherwise, to help continue the trek.

---------------

Re:Yikes

[Detritus]

The contractors that ground the Hubble mirror knew the thing was flawed when they delivered it.

Bullshit. Don't accuse someone of knowingly delivering a defective component if you can't back it up with evidence.

Obviously the problem is that NASA and its contractors make mistakes. Well, we will just have to fire them all and replace them with magic robots who never make errors and will work unlimited hours for free.

I work for a NASA contractor and have seen the effects of faster and cheaper up close. It's like Stalin's purges, every month more people disappear, never to be seen again. I haven't seen a new hire in years. My boss is retiring this week and his position will disappear with him. Time to print out another org chart.

What NASA is really saying

[Grant Elliott]

It seems that when NASA ran missions that cost hundreds of times as much, the media griped about the high cost and our tax dollars and so on. When NASA cut costs drastically, a few missions fail. Now, the press is griping about the money down the drain and your tax dollars and so on. No win situation... So many people love to point out the problems that no one saw the counterpoint until it was tried out.

I think NASA is basically saying that they are going back to the way things used to be. It was more expensive, but it was also more cost effective. I think NASA is less concerned with public opinion now, and more with science. It's for the better. I hope it lasts.

NASA wants to be taken seriously?

[Forager]

Maybe they should stop wearing those ridiculous bow ties. (sorry, but it's true)

--Forager

Re:Just a suggestion...

[Detritus]

Most of those are not NASA missions. Except for the Space Shuttle, satellite launch services are purchased from private companies such as Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. NASA does not design or build the launch vehicle. Almost all of the Titan launches are done for the USAF, NRO and NSA., not NASA. NASA has enough to deal with without being blamed for other people's launch failures.

More links

[crumley]

NASA has the complete reports on the Mars Polar lander incident and on recommendations for the Mars exploration program in general. They also have a press release (though the server seems to be down).

The basic summary is that "better, faster, cheaper" can work, but some management and structural changes have to be made in order to ensure the success of the Mars program.

\whine{Don't you hate it when you submit a story hours earlier, with better links, but it is rejected. }

Ooops, just submitted this...

[imac.usr]

Oh well. To make up for it, here's my favorite line from the CNN story:

There was a full-scale test of the suspect software before flight, but some sensors were incorrectly wired, Young said. After the wiring was corrected, the test was not repeated.

Insert "D'oh!" here. (Or perhaps the sound of one hundred thousand people saying "whop.")

Seriously, has NASA's budget and time window really shrunk so far that they can't afford to utilize basic tenets of software testing and design? If so, Congress really needs to rethink the constand slicing and dicing of NASA's fundage. I've seen projects that were released without adequate testing (which I later had to support...grrrr....), but the consequences there were an increase in work time and client frustration, not the loss of over $100 million of spacecraft.

Remember: always mount a scratch monkey.

Time to fix and re-launch

[yuriwho]

Rather than scrapping the entire design (if NASA truly believes the leg deployment triggered a sensor that shut of the thrusters) why don't they revise the sensor design, retest the lander thoroughly and relaunch a new mission with the esisting design? How much would that cost. Does anyone know the percentage of total cost that goes into design/testing versus launch/deployment?

We have to get to Mars before my arteries clog.

ISS and federal allocations

[Captn Pepe]

Part of the problem here is that NASA, like most government agencies, gets its funding allocated very finely. While this is generally a good thing (we DO want congress to have control over government projects, after all), politics has caused a real mess in space science. Ever since the Republicans pushed through spending caps, nobody wants to be the one to blame for exceeding them, despite the massive government surplus.

Now throw in the fact that the ISS has developed a huge political momentum, which means that its money is sacrosanct - ISS allocations actually increased last year - which meant that the chunk of money that was supposed to be skimmed from NASA's budget almost all came from the planetary and earth science budgets. Remember when there was going to be a rover on the Polar Lander? That's where it went. These projects were cut to the bone, leaving too few engineers working too much unpaid overtime to finish the lander.

So to the people out there complaining that NASA just wants to return to the "good old days" of multi-billion dollar missions, think again. The press release put out by NASA even says that they're going to continue with the "better, faster, cheaper" philosophy, but "properly applied" this time. Essentially, all they really want is the breathing room to hire a few extra engineers, to retain the most experienced workers (think "institutional experience"), and do tests over when need be.

Nasa Report

[HollowGraham]

Yes, there have been failures in the space program, yes, there are failures in all areas of life. After recently viewing the latest batch of Hubble photos ( which by the way were first I have seen since all that hubble failure talk a few years ago) I was completely amazed and astounded. Pointing the camera at one of the tiniest patches of completely black sky in our heavens, at maximum zoom ( they call it the fringes of the universe) We see literally hundreds of galaxies. All different shapes colors and sizes. Our lives are short and for the most part pointless, with the magnificent splender of an entire ,seemingly endless universe ( If any of us can possibly imagine that) and the wonder of where we fit in amongst the heavens in our tiny aquarium like planet, we strive to find meaning and order amongst chaos. It is our last hope as humans to gleen some small fraction of the puzzle ( if one exists) in our lifetimes. The rest we leave to those that follow. Is there life out there? A joke more than a question. Of course there is, no doubt, look at the photos.

$320 mil in IPO terms

[Brento]

I love it how CNN says that the two spacecraft cost a combined $320 million. Let's put that into perspective with numbers from the sister site, CNNFN:

Red Hat - market capitalization of $7,465 million
VA Linux - market cap of $2,905 million
Cobalt - market cap of $1,292 million

I could go on and on. Why isn't Nasa seen as a tech company instead of just another gubbermint agency? Maybe if we privatized it and put it on the Nasdaq, it would get more respect from the press - and some better mission success rates.

Privatize Nasa?

[E_Let]

I don't think it would be a good idea to privatize NASA. There are some advantages as (you noted and as noted before); better funding, better salaries to entice better workers...

The disadvantages to a private NASA are few but are very important. I would think that this private agency would be one motivated by profit and less by pursuit of knowledge. This would probably affect certain decisions made by project managers. While NASA does work under tight budget constraints, its goal in conducting exploration missions is the collection of data for public distribution. I can forsee a private company claiming ownership of, lets say...rock samples collected by a lander.

If NASA was privatized but still retained some government control, I think it would be better off. I think the government still should regulate who has rights to building massive rockets carrying tons of highly explosive materials. The government should also claim public ownership of any scientific discoveries made by these exploration missions. Heck, I'd hate to finally make it to the red planet someday just to see flags with the microsoft logo on them planted in the dust.

To say all government is evil and detrimental is silly

Just a suggestion...

[TheSimon]

It's probably been implied many times already, but one of the reasons NASA projects continue to fail is that they are going with the budget mission idea where they can send lots of small/cheap/disposable missions instead of the expensive but more calculated(read: successfull missions)

Here's some stats on some of the recent NASA missions:

August 12, 1998: A Titan IVA rocket loses control because testing failed to catch frayed wires in the power supply.

August 27, 1998: Delta III Rocket loses control due to flaw in control system.

October 24, 1998: Successfull launch of Deep Space 1.

December 5, 1998: Submillimeter Wave Astronomy satellite successfully launched on a Pegasus-XL.

March 4, 1999: Wide-Field Infrared explorer loses coolant first day in orbit.

April 9, 1999: Titan IVB fails because of improperly placed electrical tape...

April 27, 1999: Payload shroud on Athena II fails to release. Ikonos satellite lost.

April 30, 1999: Titan IVB fails to reach proper orbit because of incorrect manual data entry.

The list goes on, this is from Popular Science (April 2000). I left some out because of lack of time but I woudl suggest reading the article.

Too bad they can't get partial credit.

[sparky vunderblunt]

I mean, they did hit the planet.