NASA's Official Alternate History of Mars Exploration
Why No One Under 20 Has Experienced a Day Without NASA at Mars, NASA
“Without Mars Pathfinder, there could not have been Spirit and Opportunity, and without Spirit and Opportunity, there could not have been Curiosity,” Pathfinder Project Scientist Matt Golombek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, said of the subsequent generations of Mars rovers. JPL is now developing another Mars rover for launch in 2020.”
Keith’s note: Here we go again. NASA wants you to think that everything it does always works and that its path (thus far) on the whole #JourneyToMars thing was logical and paved only with success. As such, this happy piece neglects to mention a billion dollars worth of Mars missions; Mars Observer (blew up in 1993), Mars Climate Orbiter (crashed in 1999), and Mars Polar Lander (crashed in 1999).
Oddly, it is these three unmentioned intermediate missions that had a substantial impact upon the way NASA now explores Mars. This press release is supposed to be all about how one mission contributed to the next mission. Yet without these three mission failures NASA would arguably not have had the subsequent string of successes that it has had.
When Mars Observer was lost NASA went back to the drawing board to reboot its Mars exploration strategy. When MCO and MPL were lost within months of each other NASA did a larger policy reboot. To maximize success with the Mars Science Rover mission plan, two rovers were launched – most explicitly with the intent that if only one of them worked – and only for 90 days – both missions would have been seen as successful. Two landers based on MPL hardware benefited directly from understanding the problems on MPL. Looking back, as a result of these three failures, we now see a more careful and instrumented approach used in traveling to, entering orbit, and landing on – Mars. NASA learned its Mars exploration lessons well – the hard way.
But now NASA Public Affairs is trying to pull a fast one and rewrite the history books. In so doing they obscure the timeline wherein these lessons were learned. They also help to sow the seeds for future mistakes. The people listed as contacts and who wrote and reviewed this release at NASA HQ and JPL know better. Alas, they now have a new, younger generation who was not around when the hard lessons were learned (the other main point of this release) so why not just leave the bad bits out, eh?
Indeed, this selective memory PAO exhibits is akin to trying to describe the history of American human spaceflight while neglecting the tough lessons learned (and unlearned) from Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. No one is well-served by an edited, sanitized version of NASA’s long path outward into space.
Keith’s update: NASA loves to use the phrase “Mars is hard” when it comes to missions to Mars – especially when the nail biting begins. How would NASA ever know that it is “hard” unless they experienced hardships along the way – you know, hardships such as mission failures? How are the younger people who are the intended audience for this release going to know about these hardships if NASA will not tell them that they happened along the way?
I haven’t done a tally lately, but at one time more than half of all Mars missions were failures. Mars is not easy. We are learning a lot, but the lessons have been expensive. Maybe NASA will be ready for ‘the journey to Mars’ in another 50 years. I’m afraid NASA might not make it.
NASA does learn from its mistakes and has had some utterly spectacular mission successes as a result. They just need to fess up about the path that got them to this point and not fudge on the details.
Don’t worry, Keith. The younger generations wouldn’t bother to read something so long anyway.
Yea I know … ;-(
Sounds like another case of ‘alternative facts’.
Cheers
Point taken, Keith, but this seems like an over-reaction. This is a short article about Pathfinder and the successes at Mars. It doesn’t claim to be a complete history of NASA missions to the red planet.
Indeed, a quick query for NASA Mars missions provides frank information of the programs failures.
e.g. https://mars.nasa.gov/progr…
This press release omits half of what happened in NASA’s Mars exploration portfolio at the time and thus its premise is flawed.
Why so picky on the wording Keith. Lighten up. It is good to applaud the successes. Nobody forgets the failures that works in those programs.
“Picky on the wording”? They deliberately ignore 2 failed Mars missions within their time frame that cost over $1 billion – and then try to say that Pathfinder is responsible for all of their success? That’s just not true.
Two failed Mars mission in the time frame they covered. Their story started in 1997. Mars Observer was a few years before that. Now you can say something about how and why they picked 1997 as the starting point, and I might agree.
I was covering this back then. MO, MCO, MPL failures weighed very very heavily on the minds of NASA.
Of course it did, and I didn’t write anything to the contrary. But you specified “Mars missions within their time frame.” No matter how much it influenced people’s thinking in 1997 and later, MO technical wasn’t in the story’s time frame (1997-2017, as they chose to write it.)
“Nobody forgets the failures that works in those programs.” I’m afraid that isn’t true. At least not in detail. I work in the field, and I frequently have to remind people of past failures. Most people in the field remember the big failures, and may remember the headline summary of the cause. But when it comes to contributing causes, very few people remember. Mars Climate Orbiter was more than a unit conversion error, and Ariane 501/Cluster was more than just a software bug.
And some things just get forgotten. If I said the Discovery program has a ~10% failure rate (1.5 out of 11), very few planetary scientists could tell you what the one and a half failures were.
It’s even worse for non-catastrophic failures. If the mission finds a work-around, or is saved by redundancy, very little is said about it. People forget, and sometimes the same problem happens again with worse results. (E.g. the above mentioned partial failure of a Discovery mission.)
Maybe you should play some Jimmy Buffett for them. One of the verses from his song “Fruit Cakes” 🙂
http://www.metrolyrics.com/…
“We lost our martian rocket ship
The high paid spokesman said
Looks like that silly rocket ship
Has lost it’s cone shaped head
We spent 90 jillion dollars trying to get a look at Mars
I hear universal laughter ringing out among the stars”
I agree. It is in adversity that we measure our true worth. But there is not a lot of corporate memory of problems. I tried to get a little funding to gather insights on why our program costs were so high from the Shuttle workers before they were laid off, but no one was interested. We haven’t even gone fully metric. Of course in the commercial world no one is interested in talking about problems either. And in my field they say, “A doctor buries his mistakes.”
“Those who do not remember the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.”
-George Santayana, “Reason in Common Sense”, 1905
http://www.gutenberg.org/fi…
I think the particularly egregious line is “The momentum propelled by Pathfinder’s success is still growing.” Having participated on MPL I think it’s fairly safe to say that in the aftermath no one involved in robotic Mars missions felt that there was still momentum from MPF. MER was a successful reboot, and I’d look to that, and maybe MRO for the current feel-good about robotic Mars exploration. Just my $0.02
That’s a little lander-centric. I think MGS did quite a bit when it comes to momentum for orbital missions. Enough to keep things rolling despite the loss of MCO.
Yep, didn’t mean to slight the orbiters. I had MGS in there originally, and then I took it out due to a slight brain hiccup.
Maybe the Project Scientist is talking about it from the perspective of planetary science. Lost missions contribute very little to that.
Did you read the article? They talked about mission hardware design based on experience gained from prior missions to Mars. I was in the press briefings in 1999-2003 at NASA. The MPL and MCO failures had a great impact on future Mars mission design as well as how NASA takes risks in missions that they send to Mars.
I think I missed Keith’s point when I posted comments about whether or not the people involved remembered the failures and mistakes, and the extent to which we have learned from them.
Maybe I should have thought about how these press releases affect how the general public thinks about NASA missions. The general public is, after all, the intended audience for press releases.
Nearly everyone likes to make themselves look good by talking about their successes. There in a natural tendency to downplay or neglect to mention your own failures. NASA press release typically follow that tendency.
But is this a good or healthy thing to do in the long run? It creates and prompts a public image of infallibility. That isn’t true. Even when NASA does everything it can to assure success, complete failures happen around 10% of the time for robotic, planetary missions and 1% of the time for manned missions. I think trying to look infallible may actually damage NASA’s public image. It means every failure is front-page news and a major source of criticism.
With more PR attention to the failures, the news media and the public might be more understanding. Saying, “One out of ten missions fail, and I’m sorry to tell you this mission was one of the unlucky ones” might give a better and more accurate impression than saying, “We always do it right, except, well, this time it looks like we didn’t. Oops.”
Nothing like reinventing the social, psychological, motivational, inspirational or technical wheels. No wonder nothing is efficient or sustainable.