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Beagle 2 Failure Analyzed
InsomniaCity writes "An inquiry into the loss of the Beagle 2 Mars probe in December will criticize the management of the project and the testing of the lander, says the BBC. Following the loss, the European Space Agency (Esa) and the British National Space Centre established a Commission of Inquiry, that are now recommending 19 things we need to remember for the future, from project management and fund raising, to high altitude testing of the parachute system. The commission, however, did not pinpoint any particular technical failure."
With how fast it was sent through production into use, it could have been something as simple as faulty programming.
Maybe someone told it to use it's parachute at 5m instead of 5km? The world may never know.
I'm sure you could find a few US baseball players whose combined salaries exceeded the cost of their mars landers .. but despite the fact that the US public is far more interested in sport that space exploration, they still managed to land two probes on mars :-)
Maybe the real issue is the size of the US vs UK economy, which is what really determines the amount of money available to spend on mars missions.
I realize this is not an American probe, but the American example of Metric\American system is a prime example of things that generally go wrong on these type of missons. Generally simple, easy to avoid things are the prime kickers. While hind site is 20/20, I think some increased quality control would be quite usefull.
umm well the Mars Rover did arive a weak after beagle... sabotage I tell you
I am a bit amazed that they tested everything individually but didn't do an end to end testing.
I realize that they were on a tight schedule. I wonder if they performed environmental testing under extreme conditions? The article didn't mention it but it is really important. Especially since I doubt the mars atmospere resembles the weather in Great Britain.
I think it would be cool if they gave it another go.
Karma, We don't need no stinkin' karma!
It's ESA not Esa, do U write Usa???, michael: -1 point.
Space missions are risky and expensive. You can spend lots of extra money and have the mission fail anyway. And there's a danger of it getting cancelled altogether if you spend too long testing.
I'm not so sure that funding is the sole source of ESA's woes. Of course, when you're only budgeting 1/30th the amount as your competitors, things aren't always going to work out.
But consider the fact that ESA was founded in 1975 (May 30, 1975, to be exact. We're almost at the anniversary...) By this time, the USA had already tested numerous rockets, put men into space, and had landed men on the moon six years prior. The orbiter was already in development and the first "space shuttle" would be deployed less than a year later.
ESA has a lot of catching up to do, even now. I don't doubt that NASA and ESA share a lot of data, but for the time being, NASA has a great deal of experience over any competing space agency. Funding is not the only problem that ESA will have to overcome before it can be seen as NASA's contemporary.
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Rate Naked People (Not work-safe)
But back to the Beagle, I agree. At the same time, Football is a game frequently associated with dodgy accounting and poor management, however they make a fortune. Heavy science always costs a fortune, even 'lite' projects like Beagle. I thought the whole idea to be good, it is just a pity that they didn't have just a little bit more cash and time for testing.
As for education, well science is interesting (kids do like to find out things) and a good teacher can make a spectacular difference. However it takes a lot more understanding to appreciate science than it does the average ball game and nothing is going to change that.
I hope no-one blames Professor Pillinger for this. He did a great job under the circumstances and he deserves a chance to try again - this time with funding and commitement from ESA.
The Mosquito was actually a very successful plane. The engineers had the sense to use a highly sophisticated composite material using hollow fibres for stiffness (otherwise known as wood).
They chose wood, not to impress the ignorant, but because it was the best material for the job in the circumstances - that is largly what engineering is about.
I remember reading a few years ago about the "new" approach to space exploration. Instead of sending less probes, they (the space agencies) would be sending more, cheaper probes. The idea being that yes, there would be a higher proportion of failures, but when offset against the increased number of missions overall, we'd end up with a higher (number of successful missions) / (total expenditure across all missions).
A similar idea crops up in the manned versus unmanned debate - "unmanned exploration is cheaper because amongst other things, you don't have to be as sure the spacecraft won't fail because there's no human life at stake."
We've now got our numerous, cheaper (Beagle cost 50 million pounds), unmanned missions. But when half of them fail (der!), people get into a kink!
I wouldn't call Beagle 2 a failure. It didn't accomplish it's scientific goals but it proved that a small group of people with all the odds against them can produce a high quality spacecraft (and it was a high quality piece of kit, excluding perhaps the parachute) and get it to another world.
And it did get to Mars! Sure, it landed much like a bowl of petunias falling from several miles would -- but the fact that it flew at all was the amazing thing. Keep an eye out for the BBC documentary on the whole mission to get an idea of what I mean.
My message to the Beagle 2 team: It's difficult getting to Mars, and for your first attempt you did really well. Better luck next time!
Wouldn't surprise me at all if bad management led to the failure. I'd never grasped the value of good management until my current job, which lacks it. Not that I'm any kind of great programmer, but I always felt before that the burden of success was mine, 100%, when in fact it's a lot less than that. The people making the higher level decisions (resource/time allocation, features, scope, requirements) are the ones who can really fuck things up. Heh, that seems pretty trite now that I've typed it...
At least they realize that tracking it during decent is something they should do from now on.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I disagree, and it bothers me seing space agencies around the world trashed all the time. For example, NASA is a common punching bag for the Shuttle. Its predicted 18 million dollar launch cost, while looking great on paper, quickly swelled to 500 million per launch. Well, guess what? The Shuttle is pretty much par for the course. Almost all rocket programs have started out with grandiose dreams, and failed. Rocket launch costs, while fluctuating a lot, have remained relatively stable since the 1960s.
I was debating with someone recently who kept insulting the shuttle, and referring to Ariane. I then showed the person how much of a disaster the Ariane program has been as well - Ariane 5 having three failures in 18 paid launches, the cost overruns driving their price up (not as high as the shuttle, but still not that great), the bailout of Arianespace, the cancellation of the ESC-B upper stage, etc. The person's response? They picked another rocket system to use as their champion, ignoring the fact that *it* had its own problems too.
To make it worse, many of the people who trash space agencies treat ameteurs as if they're the ray of hope for the future. The ameteur rocket industry has been one failure after another, and has eaten enough dollars to fund some serious development at real space agencies. They're about to start getting their first major successes - and while they too have some very good people working for them, well, "Whoopee". When they've gotten several thousand designs into space hundreds or even thousands of times each, give me a call.
We've had some truly brilliant people working at places like NASA, the ESA, etc., who have achieved incredible tasks. And while one may blame the management, guess what? Decisions have to be made. I heard someone the other day criticizing NASA for embarking on the Shuttle project and treating it as junk, while glorifying the never-made Sea Dragon. Well, how on earth was NASA supposed to predict that the Shuttle's costs would increase so dramatically due to technological problems not yet discovered? What makes one think that a rocket, "built like a ship", would have *less* technical problems? In fact, when SEALAR was built based on the Sea Dragon design, its performance figures were horribly downgraded and even still it ended up with serious structural failures that led to its cancellation. And the shuttle's costs aren't actually as bad, comparitively, as many people think - ~20,000$/kg, while the cheapest launches out there, using the latest tech, are ~10,000$/kg and are not man-capable.
So give them a break, people. They're got some of the really intelligent people working very hard on an *incredibly* difficult task.
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
Being that it was their first probe, perhaps they should have cut down on the number of gizmos so that they had money and weight to have better landing systems.
Rather than include a dozen experiments, maybe just have 2 or 3. For example, just focus on detecting life instead of x-ray spectrometers etc.
Table-ized A.I.