Star Points for October, 1999; by Curtis Roelle
Right Stuff Wrong Turn at Mars.

The big news at last month's end was the loss of another NASA
spacecraft the moment it arrived at Mars.  The Mars Climate Orbiter
(MCO) failed to phone home on time as it rounded the far side of
the planet where it was supposed to have fired its on-board engine
inserting itself into orbit.  NASA was quick to point to human
error in navigating the spacecraft valued at $125 million plus
development and launch costs.

MCO is the first U.S. Mars mission to fail to achieve its objective
since the $1 billion Mars Observer (MO) in 1993.  Ironically, MO's
demise also came while attempting to place itself into Martian
orbit.  The difference was its major malfunction was blamed on
hardware failure rather than operator error.  Looks like it's hard
to find good help for under a billion dollars.

In the meantime two successful missions have been achieved.  These
were the Mars Pathfinder lander and rover of 1997, and the Mars
Global Surveyor which is still returning data daily after a lengthy
delay in starting its mapping mission once it arrived at the red
planet.

Although a bitter blow to planetary science JPL may find comfort in
recalling that this was not its first or even its worst failure in
space.  For example in the 1960's JPL suffered six botched flights
in a row of its Lunar Ranger spacecraft. In all fairness the launch
vehicle failed during the first two, so JPL really only fumbled the
ball four times in a row.  "After Ranger JPL was a different
organization" according to T.A. Heppenheimer in "Countdown: A
History of Space Flight" (1997).

Following several spectacular embarrassments in the early 1990's
including the apparent disintegration of MO, launching of the
Hubble Space Telescope with a serious flaw in its primary mirror
(requiring a costly repair mission), and an non-repairable antenna
failure on the Galileo Jupiter mission, NASA decided on a new
strategy.  The new plan proposed launching smaller leaner missions
as opposed to porky probes whose losses translated into years of
budget dollars and delays.  The new "cheaper, better, and quicker"
approach became the mantra of NASA's Discovery program.  

Although skeptics advocating the status quo said it could not be
done the first Discovery spacecraft was built right here in
Maryland at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
in Howard County.  the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR)
spacecraft is still on its way for an encounter with the asteroid
Eros early next year.

For upcoming Mars missions the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) is scheduled
to land near the southern pole of Mars on December 3.  
MPL is the companion craft of MCO which was to have played a role
in relaying data from the polar landing station to Earth.
The latest crisis of MCO comes at a time when Congress is proposing
steep cuts in NASA's program of unmanned space exploration.  What
impact the loss of MCO will have on future budgets will not be
known until the red dust has settled.