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Mars Phoenix Lander's Ovens Were Destined To Fail
RobertB-DC writes "The Phoenix mission to Mars' frigid polar regions was going to be tricky from the start, with only a few weeks to perform as much science as possible. Success depended on everything working right. But one of the mission's most frustrating glitches — the stuck doors on the TEGA ovens — could have been prevented with basic quality control on Earth. Nature is reporting that bad brackets were replaced by the manufacturer ... with identically bad brackets. The Planetary Society blog sums it up succinctly: 'Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch.'"
This is what happens when too many people have their hands up the engineers and by extension the technicians' asses.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Seriously, they should do this. Hold them to the same standards as a washing machine company. If a contractor screws up, they're going to pay for sending an engineer out there to fix the product. (And if they want him back, they can pay or that too.) If they don't want to do that, well, they can pay for a whole new mission. Then they're less likely to do things like skip diagnostics and fuck up multi-million dollar missions.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This reminds me of the the Apple iBook I have rotting in a draw somewhere, Apple acknowledged that the product had a known design fault, but all they did was replace the logicboard with an identical one, which of course would also fail, in my case I went through _six_ logicboards, two of them in the one go (the tech replaced it and it failed during testing so had to be replaced again before it was returned to me)
What really amazes me about this is that it is legal. This is due (in my country at least) to corrupt politicians taking too many brown paper bags full of cash in return for winding back consumer protection laws... if a manufacturer acknowledges that there is a known _design_ fault and then continues to provide the faulty product they aught at the very least be told to replace the faulty product with a _redesigned_ one without someone having to go to the trouble of filing suit. Personally, in addition to this I think the executives should also be sent to pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
I think there would be no shortage of volunteers. And by that, I mean, millions of volunteers, including all astronauts, and everybody that wants to be one.
I'm kind of surprised to read a poster on slashdot write they wouldn't volunteer for a one-way mission.