Lessons Learned and Future Missions

Hey guys, Ed here. I wanted to remind you all of something very important and that is that Father's Day. it's coming up And also, my book, Snaapu, The deffinitive Guide to History's greatest sccrew ups is an amazing Father's Day gift It is full of all the same kinds of head scratching screw ups from throughout history that you have come to know and love from this very podcast. But I should point out, they're all entirely new stories and all of course, completely true and insane. I take you through each decade, starting in the nineteen fifties, everything from swinging spies to pllanting nukes on the moon. plus yours truly, I read the audiob book So You can buy the audio book and hear my dulcet tones serenating you with terrible screw ups U This week, I'm excited to share with you one of my favorite chapters from the audiobook. It's about the Mars Orbiter, which was a space probe that ended up losing roughly one hundred twenty five million dollars because of a Math error. Of. So close Those noodly little math mistakes They come back and bite you. All right, so keep listening and then Be sure to pick up a copy of Snnafu at any book retailer. Enjoy Mars Orbiter Probe to nowhere. In nineteen ninety nine, a Mars probe mysteriously carees off course and a bewildered team of rocket scientists realized their rookie math mistake was to blame In the early morning hours of september twenty third, nineteen ninety nine On another gorgeous so cal day, flight operations manager, Dr. Sam Thurman and his team sat slumped in their chairs at NASA's Jet proropulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The glumness on their faces clocked somewhere between Our Caribbean cruise has been canceled and All of our kittens just died The spacecraft on their screens, the one hundred twenty five million dollars Mars climate orbiter overdue in sending the signal to confirm it had successfully been caught by Mars's orbit tense preceding days, two things had become clear the orbiter was way off its target trajectory at the worst possible time nobody had a clue why. their despair at a basement level Even if the signal never came and the craft was lost to the void, which does happen from time to time in the business of insanely complex space missions The team would have no time to work through their stages of grief over aina Colada. The Mars Climate Orbiter, with its primary mission of studying Mars's atmosphere and climatic history for signs of water was also designed to play second fiddle to its sister craft The Mars pololar Lander due to complete its own two hundred million mile journey to Mars mere weeks later. The lander was built and launched in tandem with the orbiter. problem built into one could also have ended up in the other. As the day wore on, Dr. Sam Thurman and his bewildered gang of rocket scientists waited and waited and waited. No signal came faster, better, cheaper. For most of the nineties, NASA felt like a party that would never end after the devastating nineteen eighty six Challenger disaster. The agency's space shuttle program worked its way back into public acceptance reviving a sense of optimism and giving space exploration a newfound whiff of affordability and the American public, whose tax dollars kept the agency's coffee machines bubbling We're being rewarded with tangible nuggets of wonder. Three of the four great observatories were sent to space in the nineties, including the Hubble Space Telescope which provided some of the most beautiful images of space we've ever secured Despite all this progress, Daniel S. Golden, NASA administrator from nineteen ninety two to two thousand one also espoused a faster, better cheaper mentality He prioritized leaner and more frequent missions approach reduced the time it took to develop a spacecraft by forty percent and slashed costs by two thirds With an emphasis on efficiency, manned missions were becoming harder to justify. After all, humans were the neediest of all space cargo So after the successful nineteen ninety eight launch of the Lunar Prospector NASA had the moon pretty well covered It was Mars time, baby And this mission to the Red Planet, as Golden said, it had to be fast and cheap Too bad they forgot about the better part Looking for life Dr. Thurman, flight operations manager for both the Climate Orbiter and the Polar Lander He did the call. Tall, lanky, and prone to turtlenecks, with dark neatly combed hair showing some first gray around his temples dor. Thurman looked like a young Reed Richards before he discovered his elastic superpowers and became mrter Fantastic The son of an Air Force interterceptor pilot He had spent his nineteen sixties childhood steeped in military aviation. As he gazed in awe at the mythological Apollo missions career was born Dr. Thurman was already something of a veteran of the Jet proropulsion Laboratory by nineteen ninety nine Having worked in various roles since nineteen eighty seven. and earning praise as an expert in project management Now, under the thumb of NASA's increasingly stringent calls for efficiency, Climate Orbiter ground support team was positively lean at eighty people. Down from the two hundred people for the Mars Observer mission just seven years earlier We're trying to do a whole lot more with less, Thurman told The New York Times The Rublic and Congress have told us, space is neat, but it's got to be done at less than a billion dollars a pop. The Mars cllimate Orbiter was a real steal at one hundred twenty five million dollars Still, white collar grumbling abounded about the project's costs having ballooned forty four percent throughout its construction by Lockheed Martin. two contractor for all things weapons and space The craft itself was a six point nine foot tall one thousand three hundred and eighty seven pound cube wrapped in wrinkled orange foil It was strikingly asymmetrical, with a large rectangular array of solar panels jutting out of one side dish antenna perched precariously on its top surface Low gravity would be a relief. The orbiter looked like it wanted to fall over Over the course of a Martian year, or six hundred and sixty eight Martian souls For any earthling readers out there, that's six hundred and eighty seven days The probe would take daily photos and atmospheric readings, monitor real time changes on the Martian surface due to wind and detect clouds of water vapor to help scientists piece together the nature of water on Mars Good water could mean life Would David Bowie finally get an answer to the question he'd been caterwalling about since nineteen seventy one Was there life on Mars But before it could start collecting those juicy datas setets The orbiter would set up shop in a nice, round, sun synchronous polar orbit and wait for the Mars polar lander to arrive It would serve as a communications satellite, relaying messages from the lander back to Earth. And as an eye in the sky, taking weather and geographical readings, to aid the lander in a smooth touchdown on the Martian South Pole Time to countdown Five. Four Three T One trick mishap The climate orbiter launched on december eleventh, nineteen ninety eight from Cape Canaveral Initially, the mission was exceeding expectations, according to Dr. Thurman The proropulsion lab tracked the probe's location by detecting changes or dooppppler shifts in radio signals that were continuously sent back to Earth directing discrepancies between the observed flight path and the target flight path through several controlled burns of directional rockets It was normal and even expected to see discrepancies All spacecraft needed a bit of a nudge from time to time Even if we're talking about a two hundred million mile nudge After the first few corrections, A sense of unease began to grow at NASA The craft itself was just kind of finicky According to the Engineering magazine Spectrum which later did its own independent review The orbiter's gigantic asymmetrical side mounted solar array subjected it to constant energy bursts from the sun slightly spinning it like the blade of a wind turbine in a light breeze To counteract this rotation, heavy flywheels inside the craft could be spun up at varying speeds. This technique is the same way a segue holds itself upright The next time you're ripping down the sidewalk behind a segueay tour guide Just remember that spacecraft work the same way Due to the orbiter's peculiar design though, its thrusters were placed out of balance with its center of mass. Meaning that every time they fire them up to correct a rotation cross coupling of forces occurred leading to a drift from original position that engineers referred to as a translation Translation, the probe was slipping and sliding all over the place Dr. Thurman and his team were navigation experts Their job was to take the craft they were given and steer it to Mars team that had actually designed and built the spacecraft. The engineers had Lockheed Martin wasn't involved in its navigation until mere hours before the craft was due to arrive at Mars This left the navigation team guessing about extremely important details like Uh, how close to Mars can the orbiter get without exploding Without any input from Lockheed, the navigation team deemed that, while their target fly by altitude was approximately two hundred and twenty four kilometers been a safe distance The craft would survive a pass as close as eighty five kilometers This, by the way, wasn't based on actual analysis by Lockheed's engineers. It was also Red And they would learn that the hard way To make matters worse, later investigations would reveal that doctor Thurman and his navigators were stubbornly clinging to a belief that the margin of error in their numbers was approximately ten kilometers in either direction Whereas in reality, the spread was closer to one hundred kilometers According to an expert who spoke to Spectrum This should have had people screaming down the halls as it showed that the navigators had no idea where exactly their craft was The idiosyncrasies of the orbiter's design and the poor communication between the engineers and the navigators troubleshooting the orbiter's navigation was extremely difficult Going through the code alone would take months that there was no project manager with total oversight Teams would be on nearly introductory terms with each other's work Was the orbiter's tendency to drift off course the result of poor location readings Was there a physical problem with the thrusters Had Dr. Thurman forgotten to upgrade his PC to Windows ninety eight? There was no time to dig for answers The craft had arrived at Mars In an article published on NASA's website on september twentieth Dr. Thurman sounded remarkably cheery given the circumstances. Qote, The curtain goes up on this year's Mars missions with the orbit insertion of Mars cllimate Orbiter If all goes well, the happily ever after part of the play will be the successful mission of the Mars Polar Lander begins in December, followed by the mapping mission of the orbiter that is set to begin next March. End quote You can almost see the beads of sweat on his forehead Spoiler alert The orbit insertion didn't go well It went very, very badly. And when something crashes and burns, People with clipboards come staggering out of the night and form an investigatory panel In the following weeks, an investigation would tear apart every blueprint, every shred of data Every snippet of code they would discover as the root cause of the orbiter's failure was so forehead slappingly basic that a humiliated NASA would be forced to implement sweeping changes at every level of the agency Each time the orbiter had fired up its rockets to correct course, its onboard computer had sent back to Earth a record of exactly what each awkwardly placed thruster did so that engineers could calculate the unwanted drift and adjust accordingly The thruster performance data was then processed by loockheed and emailed to the jet proropulsion laboratory in pound four seconds which are English units. The kind of units we use for measuring nearly all things here in these great United States Wait. Why do we use English units in the first place? Hold that thought. doror Thurman and his JPL team had been taking those numbers and entering them into their navigation software as Newton secondconds. And guess what Those are metric units the kind of units that are used in space navigation. That's right, the fate of a highly anticipated years in the making, one hundred twenty five million dollars mission through two hundred million miles of space boiled down to a dumb as Moon Rocks mismatch. of measurement units Sent email To be very blunt, it was overlooked. Neil Hinters, vice president for Flight Systems at Lockheed Martin, said to The Washington Post Everyone at the Jet proropulsion lab just assumed the numbers they were receiving in Lockheed's emails We're in metric units Because that was the widely accepted standard in jet propulsion work They were unlabeled by the way And since the resulting calculations were within the same order of magnitude The mismatch went undetected for the entirety of the ten month trip On this morning of Orbit Inertion Day Some last minute estimates came in that placed the craft's approach altitude at around one hundred and ten kilometers more than one hundred kilometers closer than planned Keed Martin engineers were finally consulted According to Spectrum They were frightened An altitude like that would subject the orbiter to debilitating heat and turbulence far outside the bounds of its limited warranty As the Pasadena sun rose, a sense of gloom descended over the jet propulsion lab The number was updated several minutes later ninety five kilometers At that altitude, air friction would generate heat equivalent to a bank of propane torches The minutes ticked by A final altitude estimate came in ty seven kilometers The heat generated at fifty seven kilometers would have been ten times higher than at ninety five kilometers The orbiter likely plowed straight into Mars's atmosphere exploding immediately Cautionary tale The absurdity of the mission's failure was not lost on the scientific community John Logdon, Director of George Washington University's sppace Policy Institute B to the Los Angeles Times That is so dumb Speaking of dumb, why does America use English units at all In seventeen ninety three, the adoption of the metric system in the United States was of such importance to Thomas Jefferson that he requested artifacts from France that the Americans could use to calibrate their tools ist named Joseph Domby was sent across the Atlantic with a standard kilogram in his cargo But his ship was blown off course And he was kidnapped by pirates He died in captivity If it weren't for those meddling pirates Would the Mars cllimate orbiter be whistling a merry tune around the red planet to this very day? Beaming back images of Martian vapor clouds. while the Denver Broncos play a home game at one point six zero nine three four kilometer high stadium It would feel so nice and tidy to place the blame for the failure of the climate orbiter on that one fateful error Sure, Lockheed Martin should have supplied the Jet propulsion lab with glitch free software Yes, JPL should have double checked their homework Of course, those mean pirates shouldn't have stolen that sweet French man But to reduce the entirety of the orbiter's failure to a mismatch of measurements, be to ignore Congress's underfunding NASA's swaggering over conffidence bad management that trickled down into a culture of poor communication and fear of questioning authority To top it all off, weeks later, the Mars Polar lander was also lost because of an entirely different mistake A software error shut off the burners early causing it to crash into the Martian surface After the loss of both spacecraft and months of reviews by several panels, NASA made a slew of changes They rebuilt project management structures implemented stricter review processes and emphasized the importance of training In a sense, you could say these changes worked Considering nine of the eleven missions to Mars since nineteen ninety nine We're successful including the Twin Mars Rovers, Spirit, and Opportunity and the atmospheric orbiter Maven whose mission was similar to that of the climate Obiter Whether NASA's changes were enough to ensure its continued success in the future still an evolving question budget remains a fraction of what it was in the Apollo years Just about zero point three six percent of the U.S federal budget. tiny budget leads to small team sizes. Thorough can you really be if you're overworked and spread thin As for the less measurable changes to NASA's culture Is it even possible to convince a sprawling tech agency to slow down and embrace a more thoughtful approach twenty first century An official NASA document from nineteen seventy called made Apollo a success included this surprisingly folksy passage from NASA engineer Bob Tindall Of course, the way we got this job done was with meetings. Hundreds of meetings The thing we always tried to do in these meetings was to encourage everyone, no matter how shy, to speak out Hopefully, but not always without being subjected to ridicule We wanted to make sure we had not overlooked any legitimate input. end quote By my extremely careful measurements, that's about two hundred million miles from Damn Golden's faster, better, cheaper which, according to one eyeewitness, allegedly led Golden to hurl a projector at the wall When somebody suggested a backup plan in case a Russian module didn't arrive on schedule In the end, it was indeed late Sometimes the work needs to be slow Sometimes it isn't about the money. And despite your best efforts, sometimes you will fail because going to space is extremely difficult. It is most definitely worth it Just ask Major Tom from David Bowie's Space Oddityy F floating in his capsule high above the world. Marveling at a sight few of us will ever see contemplating the progress of humanity add the strange piece great beyond He sings that quote. I'm feeling very still And I think my spaceship knows which way to go. Sure does, Major Tom asssuming they all used the same units.