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."

Comments

Simple Error?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Simple Things...

[Dozix007]

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.

What a load of garbage.

[tsotha]

Every time something bad happens the Monday-morning quarterbacks come out of the woodwork. If you read the article you see they don't have any idea what went wrong, but they have all sorts of expensive ideas on how to fix the problem.

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 disagree

[Rei]

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.