The NASA Historian Has Not Read NASA History
Watching Apollo 11 with NASA Historian Bill Barry
“What lessons can we draw from the Apollo program to apply to challenges we face now, such as climate change?
One of the big triumphs of the Apollo program was that we managed to make it all come together and work. Going to the moon in less than 10 years seemed pretty impossible to a lot of people at the time, but we managed to make it happen. To a great extent, I think the lesson that comes out of Apollo is how to manage a big project and that big projects can be done.”
Keith’s note: “How to manage a big project”? The NASA historian has clearly not read the history of large programs Like the ISS, Webb Space Telescope – or SLS. I am not sure that any lessons were learned from Apollo. Quite the opposite. Just sayin’.
How about Hubble, Voyager, Viking, Mars Pathfinder, COBE, WMAP, Kepler…?
NASA has had so many successes that are “big projects”, but you only choose to write about its failures.
Yes all I ever do is write about failures.
Well, not always (I think you were being sarcastic…) But, in a sense, writing about failures is your job. That’s what the news business is about. People don’t buy newspapers with headlines like, “Everything in the world is wonderful.” So they print stories about how horrible the damage from a hurricane was, not how luck it was that the hurricane didn’t make landfall. So I expect to read about a launch failure on NASA Watch, but I don’t expect to read a long list of all the successful launches.
Complaining (or in NASA parlance whining) is the first step in change.
If you want to read about NASA successes, go to any mass media outlet who just regurgitates the sugarcoated press releases coming out of NASA’s public affairs office.
I think I’d object for a different reason. He was not talking about how well managed later projects were. He said “the lesson that comes out of Apollo is how to manage a big project.” That could be correct but, if so, the lessons were not applied to later, more poorly managed projects.
But I’d still take exception to the idea that Apollo taught NASA how to manage big projects. Apollo was a well-funded crash program. How to manage a cost-constrained program which can set its own deadlines is a very different beast. One could even say that Apollo taught NASA the wrong lessons. Perhaps the later programs would have been better managed without the mindset set by the unique situation Apollo faced.
It also wasn’t the first big technology project. That honor would go to the Manhattan Project followed closely by the B-29. Then you had the Nuclear Submarine, SAGE, Polaris and ICBM Missile Projects. So by the time the nation started Project Apollo it already had a critical mass of experts with years of experience in big tech projects to guide it.
But both NASA and the DOD managed somehow to forget the lessons learned about how to manage big projects after the 1960’s. With the DOD the slide downward started with the B1, with NASA the Space Shuttle.
I’m half tempted to add the Panama Canal to your list. But that would get into whether it was a big (civil) engineering project or a big technology project. On the other hand, I could argue that returning astronauts to the Moon is an engineering rather than a technology project. It requires the use and application of existing technology, but not necessarily inventing new things.
Even something like in situ resources from the Moon involve digging up rocks, heating rocks, and capturing the gas released by heating the rocks. Those are things we’ve done before and we’re reasonable clear on how to do them. We’ve never put the parts together in the necessary way, but that’s not the same as asking a project to invent a space-rated, compact, nuclear fusion reactor.
I based it on the likelihood those running the project truly understood the science driving the technology behind it. The Panama Canal project was run by engineers who could do most of the jobs of those working for them easily. Same with the Transcontinental Railroad and the Erie Canal Projects. Massive for their day, but the technology wasn’t beyond the understanding of the individuals in overall charge of the project.
By contrast General Groves didn’t really understand the physics of nuclear reactions and depended on the judgement of the scientists working under him to run the project. Same with Project Apollo, Administrator Webb didn’t understand Orbital Mechanics or the science of rockets except in general terms and depended on the scientists and engineers working for him. The B-29 would be borderline simply because of the complex electronics it used, based on earlier aircraft.
Interesting. You seem to be using the understanding of the managers to define technological rather than engineering projects. I was thinking in terms of how well the workers understood it. In the case of the Manhattan Project, not only was General Groves clueless about how to build an atomic bomb, but so were the physicists. They knew a fission bomb was theoretical possible, but the details were totally unknown at the start. In the case of a 2024 lunar landing, the managers probably don’t have a solid grip on the details, but the workers do. That makes it a matter of putting known pieces of the problem together in a new way. I see that as different from a project where no one even knows how the pieces work.
B-52 gets no love?
The B-29 was basically the pioneer for later aircraft programs like the B-52 that were so successful. One could add in the B-47 as the bridge between them.
I often wonder what NASA would be like if Kennedy had been less willing to do the Moonshot in response to Russian space triumphs, or if LBJ wasn’t such a huge space-booster for it. Maybe they’d be better at doing cost-effective crewed space programs – or they might just not have them at all, like how the military abandoned its crewed space programs.
Even if they learned the right lessons, would Congress let them follow them? I’m not so sure.
I’m a scientist who tends to like analysis and solving one problem at a time. What lesson did NASA learn is one question. Was it a good lesson is another. And what Congress would have allowed, if NASA had learned a good lesson, is a third. I was only commenting on the first two questions.
I blame MBAs and PowerPoint. Seriously.
The original purpose of an MBA was to provide management skills to someone without a management degree, for example in engineering or computer science. But unfortunately it has strayed far from its intent. Also the instructors these days depend too much on prepackaged courses from the textbook companies instead of actually teaching with real world books using real world examples. The MBA also ignores that different industries require different skills sets in an attempt to impose a one size fits all education on students.
I can’t comment on the details of the curriculum, or how the classes are taught. But I think you are describing an idea which is not and probably can not be realized. In engineering and technical fields, an MBA is generally considered a box you need to check off, in order to be promoted to senior management. Since the customers simply want to check off a box, that is, I think, what the various colleges provide. Actually teaching students how to manage a project isn’t what the customers want. And the customers don’t want to hear that they can’t work in different industries without learning different skills. That means many schools tend to impose that one size fits all attitude. In fact, changing that would be a tricky marketing problem. How do you attract customers, when your sales pitch is that what they want isn’t really what they need?
I blame the bureaucrats.
I’ll mention (yet again) the study commissioned by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, on how PowerPoint destroyed a Space Shuttle. It almost forces people into a presentation style which is vague, subjective, and absolutely useless for communicating technical details.
I hated PPT when it first arrived on the scene but after leaving NASA I got to see it used properly at a scientific conference in a field far, far away from aerospace, technical content and all.
PPT is nothing more than a computer-assisted animation-enhanced view-graph generator, and a very powerful one at that. It is helpful and very effective as a communications (& teaching) tool when it is used properly. It is an impediment and yes, even can be dangerous, when it is used improperly. But it is not the tool that forces people to be vague, subjective, or non-technical. View-graph transparencies were enabling (but not forcing) such behavior long before the PC age, hence the now almost quaint (but still relevant) term ‘view-graph engineering’.
Most of the NASA culture (and, I fear, the entire aerospace field) does not seem to know how to use it properly. Jack is closer to the mark when blaming the bureaucrats, but I don’t think it’s only the bureaucrats. Engineers can misuse PPT, too, sometimes without even appreciating that they ARE misusing it.
That the technical content and import of the data got diluted prior to Columbia wasn’t the fault of the tool, it was the fault of the people misusing the tool and/or over-relying on the tool in place of actually communicating with the aid of the tool.
And not just the presenters; those receiving the presentations likely imposed their own restrictions (intentionally or not, directly or indirectly) on what they wanted to see and how they wanted to see it. This is a management problem, not a software problem.
Effective communication is a skills set that is greatly lacking today (just note all the typos and terrible phrasing…everywhere), and not just in the world of aerospace. When something isn’t considered a person’s job, it gets neglected or ignored. Engineers aren’t supposed to waste time on such things, they’re supposed to stay focused on engineering. So they do.
Guess what? When Mission Operations was trimming its employee phase 1 training curriculum decades ago, guess which presentation got axed first? “Giving Effective Presentations.” I think this fact sums it up nicely.
I didn’t mean to say PowerPoint was evil incarnate (although it is fun to say that about Microsoft products…) And the commissioned study I mentioned didn’t say that either. It’s simply not a good format for clearly and unambiguously communicating technical details. The study basically said text rather than bullets would have been much better.
But PowerPoint does enforce a particular style, or at least encourage it. Things like equations are difficult to include, tables will be formatted in a particular way by default, changes in spelling and grammar will be suggested (or automatically made), etc. Those are all geared to what the programmers considered the “normal” style of the average user. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with that. It’s just the someone taking about spacecraft, and how not to blow them up, is not the normal or average user. Essentially, the users and their audience are to blame, as you describe. It’s a format for giving the big picture to managers who don’t want to hear about the gory details. Unfortunately, the big picture happens to be “the devil is in the details.”
PPT does not ‘force’ or encourage anything upon a person making a presentation. The person presenting the information (whatever it is) to an audience (whoever they are) is fully in control and can exploit PPT’s particular capabilities as needed to best convey said information to said audience. If PPT’s limitations or ‘default settings’ do not serve, get in the way, or potentially corrupt the process, it’s completely in the hands of the presenter(s) to use other means of getting data across to the audience.
Anyone who slaves himself or herself (either willingly or just through laziness) to a particular tool (or to the built-in preferences of a particular tool) to the detriment of the conveyance of the informational content they are supposed to be presenting is not doing their job right.
If the world has changed so much that the tools themselves are mindlessly shaping the behavior & responsibility of the tool users, then the world is in much worse shape than I feared.
I agree, and perhaps that is why the Apollo generation, using slide rules, drafting tables, human calculators and blackboards, were able to go from Project Mercury to the Moon in 8 years, while the new generation with Super Computers. CAD, Simulation Software and Power Power needs nearly 20 years to build a simple capsule (Orion) and probably requires a decade to build the lunar lander.
Because the modern generation has these wonderful tools they have lost the ability to visualize the problems and designs in their minds. They no longer take the time to think about how to organize a problem or presentation, outline the steps and visualize the end results. They just rush forward dumping things into their software tool and accept whatever comes out as the truth. They have turned their thinking over to their tools.
Returning it to this thread, because they are able to look everything up on Wikipedia, they don’t bother learning history, not realizing that by not learning it they won’t know what to look up or the questions to ask. Teachers, especially K-12, seem to no longer teach students to memorize facts on the grounds they will be able to “look it up” and focus instead on giving a “sense” of the subject instead.
Talking to one of the educator instructors I found that teaching how to read clocks is no longer being taught in school. I asked why and they said it’s an outdated skill since they are able to see the time on their smart phones. I know I am shocked at how so few of my students know how to read maps anymore, depending on their smart phones for directions. I have asked them how they will find their way if their smart phones stopped working and they just give me a blank stare as if it’s an event to horrible to imagine.
Sometimes I tell people I would much rather give a talk using nothing but a blackboard and a piece of chalk. And, unfortunately, they think I’m joking. There was a manager at (I think) Los Alamos who once insisted on that. That was back in the 1950s and when they were trying to develop a nuclear-powered cruise missile. He felt anyone who couldn’t present something off the cuff actually didn’t know enough about the subject to be making the presentation.
And I also like the little, mathematical tricks which let you make rough estimates in your head (without even needing to pull out the slide rule.) The NRL Plasma Formulary (a nice, and free, publication if you work in the field) has the first page devoted to numerical quirks which are true to better than 1%. Did you know that the square root of ten is equal to pi? Well, almost (off by 0.6%) I once showed that to a computer science major who was working for me, and her eyes nearly popped out. These days, I sometimes get people refusing to believe something I said, if they just don’t believe anyone can do an order of magnitude estimate in their head. (Ok. That doesn’t happen very often, but it’s still a contrast to stories I’ve heard about the Manhattan Project’s theoretical physics group. Bethe was reportedly shocked that Feynman didn’t know the trick to squaring numbers near fifty.)
I really have trouble understanding your logic. Anyone putting together a presentation has a finite amount of time. If the clearest, most accurate way of writing something has a few too many characters, PowerPoint will automatically change the font size for the entire slide, and probably make some of the sub bullets unreadably small. I can spend time fighting with PowerPoint over font size, line spacing and margins, or I can rephrase what I wrote to be a few characters shorter and, in the process, less accurate and unambiguous. Which do you think most people do? Remember, every minute you spend fighting with the software is a minute you are not spending on the actual content of the presentation. The same thing applies to including equations, to the point where many people avoid including them at all, and use vague text instead. The same is true of Greek letters. And I’m glad I don’t do the sort of work involving different flavors of infinity, because I wouldn’t want to put א in. Hebrew is probably even more awkward in PowerPoint than Greek.
The end result is that most people will go with the flow, and make presentations in the style which matches the built-in assumptions and defaults. That’s not a good thing, but that’s what happens.
And, in many cases, not using PowerPoint isn’t an option. Some conferences specifically request you upload your presentation to their computer in that format. Many managers want to borrow slides, for their summary presentations to more senior managers. And they would get really irate if someone sent them the slides in TeX.
And it’s the software making these decisions & choices? You seem (granted, my perception may be flawed) to be arguing that this is the case.
Remember the anecdote about GK Chesterton’s response to the question “What’s wrong with the world today?”
See
https://www.chesterton.org/…
If we cede responsibility for our errors to our tools (or to the passive-voice never-quite-able-to-assign-it-to-anyone bureaucracy) we may as well pack it in as a society.
In line with Dr M’s points, I have reflected somewhat on these and related concerns elsewhere:
http://www.thespacereview.c…
(I even reference the potential PPT contribution to Columbia therein.)
Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?
Well, yes. When software makes automatic changes, it is making a decision for me. And if that isn’t the decision I want, I have to waste time changing it back. That’s generally what I do, not I’d actually rather use software that didn’t try to “help” so much. Other people aren’t nearly as stubborn as I am, and just go with the flow. That might be lazy. I’ll leave that up to you. But I don’t think expecting better is realistic. That would be like expecting Mr. Bruno of ULA to _not_ want his company to make money. Or Senator Shelby to _not_ want federal funds spent in Alabama. It might be nice, but it’s not going to happen.
Does he have a history degree?
If you read the Apollo history you find that NASA sought out experienced high technology managers who had had roles in missiles, advanced fire control, aviation and electronics.
NASA today does the opposite and places a lot of people with zero relevant education or experience in areas they are responsible for. Just look at three current NW headlines: ISS utililization and CASIS; the CASIS people have little if any relevant background and have been so for many years; and the NASA people who oversee CASIS have the same non background. Gateway-the people leading the effort have no background in developing anything for space or high tech.
NASA engineer/managers think any engineer/manager can manage anything. Take a look at the program. It didn’t work. Maybe they ought to try something different?
You shouldn’t be blaming NASA. That problem is inherent to the whole management culture. It is assumed that a good manager who can run a car factory can just take a new job, and be a good manager of a chain of restaurants. That actually doesn’t make much sense to me, but I’m not one of the people who think that way and those who do are the ones who both set and benefit from that culture.
And yet if you question anything, you get lectured about the extent of the “organisational experience” at the agency, the centre, and especially the contractor. When it suits them, “experience” is all.
(Although they also act as if the history of a place somehow infuses into the people working there, regardless of the actual experience of the people working there now.)
One nice thing about CubeSats is that we now have 25-year old engineers who can respond to that. “Well, on the last two spacecraft I built, we didn’t do it that way.”
It really helps when you are getting 5% of the federal budget, as NASA did during the peak of the Apollo program. But I agree with Nick, the biggest problem today is people in leadership roles with NO experience in the subject that they are leading. NASA moves SESers around like pieces on a game board with the assumption that a good leader (which most of them aren’t) can lead anything. When I started at NASA 35+ years ago, the Engineering Director knew as much about my system as I did, even more. Nowadays, they don’t know jack about the technical aspects of the work underneath them. You can make it work, but it takes twice as long and 3 times more money.
There are at least two types of NASA employees, nowadays. 1.Technical Engineer who digs in the systems and learns them inside and out. There is a few great people like these.
2.Promotion Driven who will spend their living hours trying to find the next promotion. They will accept any job, whether it’s fun or not. Someone who is a systems engineer for a just a few years, gets promoted without having learned enough in the trenches. From a technical lead, then find a sponsor in upper management and wa-lah, they are now supervisors. That is 90% of the managers at NASA. What makes it worse is the fact that NASA has been reducing the responsibilities of civil servant engineers, and turning it over contractors. So unless the CS engineer is motivated, they do not learn a whole lot. Those folks are running NASA today.
Honestly, that isn’t a NASA problem. It seems to by systemic to the way people look at jobs in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere.) If you are doing the same job, without promotion, for years or decades, many people consider you to be a failure. To be considered successful, you need to be promoted, be in charge of larger projects and more people, and, in general, become a more and more senior manager. Salaries and benefits are tied to that, as well as the ability to get people to listen to your opinions. Unfortunately, that means people generally don’t stick with a job they are good at and enjoy, and decisions aren’t made by the people who actually understand how things work.
Sometimes I wonder if Apollo was lucky with the dominos all lined up just right, it had the right people in the right places with the right tools at the right time. Soviets had issues of weak infrastructure and so-so political will to support N1, rushed Soyuz first flight. There was also a third space program the USAF MOL with their own astronauts, spacecraft, control centers but not much to show for all that work.
Obviously having lots of money is good but need smart people to manage it and those willing to put service before self. Then infrastructure for the worker bees to get the things they need whether it be tools, parts, and other matters like affordable housing close by.
I’m not sure. To some extent, you are correct. Even the line from the movie, “The Right Stuff”, is correct. Our Germans were better then their Germans. (The smartest and most senior ones ran like hell to the west, and the Soviets ended up getting the less skilled technicians.) But I’m not sure if you can attribute the success of Apollo to that sort of random luck and how the dominos fell.
I’m a fan of backgammon rather than chess, and that game is all about of setting yourself up to use random chance. If I put my pieces here, almost any roll of the dice will let me accomplish something. If I put them somewhere else, the odds are that I’ll be stuck and my opponent will be able to gain an advantage. So I’m not going to criticize the Apollo managers for getting lucky. They did. But they also set it up so the odds would be in their favor.
Another thing that allowed Apollo to meet its goal was national priority on procurements. People I worked with that had worked Apollo said they got whatever they wanted right away. If a specialty item was needed and there were multiple customers needing it, Apollo got it first. Nuclear submarines scheduled to leave port were the only higher priority for procurements. That was a HUGE advantage.
Since I just got back from the Interplanetary Small Spacecraft conference, I have to disagree with the idea that high budgets help. Several speakers at the conference noted that the success of small spacecraft (e.g. CubeSats) is a direct result of being highly constrained. Having to fit inside small cost/mass/volume limits really makes people focus and do what is necessary to achieve the goals, and not waste resources on anything else. If you give people a larger budget, they will sped it. If you don’t put a limit on the budget, they will spend without limits and you get into the “too big to fail” mindset.
> fit inside small cost/mass/volume limits
reminds me of LADEE of small size, limited mass, limited electrical power, limited sensor packages, fixed budget. PM’s main job was to say no to everybody else.
Actually, Tony Colaprete from NASA Ames gave one of the keynote talks at last week’s conference, and he used LADEE as an example. He made some good points about the differences between risk avoidance, risk acceptance and risk management. And that’s really more central to the success of CubeSats than being an integral number of 10 cm cubes. (And, yes, a good PM’s job is to say no. Actually, a good scientist should do his or her own sanity checks, before asking for something unrealistic and forcing the PM to say no.
On Class D projects, the PM’s job is to say no to all the folks who are used to working with Class A and B projects. “Wouldn’t you feel better if you did X?” X, which costs time and money, has some not entirely documented improvement in reliability or probability of success. – “well sure, but I don’t have 3 years and a billion dollars, so we’re not going to do X”.
In many cases, the justification for doing X is that “it’s what we’ve always done” without much analysis or experience to assess the benefit quantitatively. While not as bad as the tiger repelling rock on my desk (I have not seen a tiger recently, so it must be working) – there *is* a tendency to inherit every possible precaution – since NASA missions tend to be, by their nature, one-off.
There have been quite a few failures on the “science spacecraft” side of the house. So much so that I’ve heard JPL called Just Plain Lucky by more than a few ex-aerospace industry engineers. I’ve heard through the same ex-aerospace industry engineers that one of the reasons that APL is running Parker Solar Probe is because of previous JPL failures.
But this is all hearsay, so feel free to disregard this post if it doesn’t fit your narrative that the “science spacecraft” side of NASA doesn’t have as many failures as the crewed spacecraft side.
I wouldn’t call it JPL failures. APL is doing well, managing Parker and working with JPL on Europa Clipper, but it isn’t because JPL has really failed to achieve mission goals. I think it’s more like a history of management failure. When JPL does it, it’s spectacular (usually), but it’s often late and over budget. And they do have a tendency to use the spectacular results to sweep the schedule and budget issues under the rug. APL has a better track record of just doing the job, on time and on budget.
I think it can be demonstrated historically that Apollo was part of the momentum left over from World War II and the prosperity of the 1950’s. What followed Apollo was the Vietnam funk. We are in a new era now with the old engineers of the Apollo era (and to some extent the shuttle era) steeped on success and optimism gone and the new engineers still trying to find their way. Certainly, SpaceX is demonstrative that their way can be successful but in iterative fashion, not within a large government program that has no ultimate aim other than a goal once reached that can be soon abandoned.
What we didn’t know / learn from Apollo is how technology would make the project more difficult to accomplish in the future. But the advent of email, cell phones, 24-hour a day availability, increased staff organizations (both in Executive, Legislative branches), Non-Governmental organizations with vision/turf to protect, constrained dollars, online meetings, Powerpoint, cheap long distance, proliferation of air travel… All these make it harder to establish and keep momentum on a large project. When everyone can ask to ‘attend’ your meeting through WebEx and GoToMeeting; when everyone can ask to be on distribution, when management can be requested to appear on short notice on the opposite coast to answer questions, … we could not go to the Moon today with our information systems/technology hamstringing managers and engineers. My opinion.
Well, that can go both ways. If I can call in to a conference with my colleagues, rather than flying from Colorado to Maryland, that’s a massive savings in time and money. If anyone can call in, and some elementary school student calls in and asks, “Why can’t you send the spacecraft to Neptune using a warp drive?”, well that doesn’t really make the meeting more efficient. I don’t think the real issue is the technology or easy of communications. I think it’s about having a small, focused team. If you have that, the technology just makes the interactions more efficient. But even a local team, meeting in person, will have the problems you describe if it’s too big. A 500 person meeting is not going to be productive, even if they are all in the same room.
P.S.: There are issues about running a teleconference. Some people who are on the phone tend to go on at length, which people physically at the meeting are more likely to be succinct. But that’s about how to run meetings, not the technology involved.
Working in that field, I’m a bit more critical. There is no doubt that NASA’s scientific work has been very successful. But I frequently wonder if it is as successful as it could be. With a different approach or a different way of managing risks, could the same budget have been used to accomplish twice as much? I think it could. Four times as much? Possibly. And that’s a fairly damning condemnation, despite the vast list of successes.
With all due respect, some of the massive science projects that vastly overrun (JWST) are developing radical new technology, whereas SLS and Orion are doing fairly straightforward development work that NASA’s been doing for decades. But it is true that the bigger the budget the harder it seems to be to control the cost overruns and schedule delays.
I think that’s symptomatic of big missions. If it costs a billion dollars, no one wants it to fail. So ever time someone says, “what if X goes wrong?” people feel compelled to do extra work to make sure X won’t happen. That’s even institutionalized into NASA procedures and rules for how to manage missions (e.g. literary classics like NPR 8705.4…) It’s only on lower profile and budget projects where you see serious risk management. That is, balancing the odds and consequences of X happening, against the schedule and budget impact of doing something to prevent X from happening.
I can certainly appreciate how stressful it can be to make those decisions. I once had say “yes, do it” for a command which had a small chance of destroying a $4 billion dollar spacecraft. That was after so much analysis that a whole bunch of us had agreed that it probably wouldn’t be a problem, odds of problem would be so much less than 1% that they couldn’t be reliably estimated, and even if there was a problem, it probably wouldn’t be a serious one. Even with all that, it was probably the most stressful day in my whole career.
But let’s put this in context. The F-35C Lightning II costs $100 million per aircraft. And Navy pilots will be landing them on ships on a regular basis. (Actually, they may be doing so already, although I think the first operational deployments aren’t scheduled until next year.) That’s a whole lot of money riding on a pretty risky operation, conducted on a daily basis. The folks at JPL who complain (or brag) about dealing with their seven minutes of terror during a Mars landing aren’t even in the bush league by comparison.
It was definitely a “lesson” but perhaps not a “lesson learned” or a “lesson incorporated into practice”?
A friend involved with MPL told me that hardest part of accident investigation was figuring out which fatal flaw was responsible. They identified half a dozen things which would almost certainly cause a loss of the spacecraft. It was a matter of if it hadn’t been X it would have been Y. And MCO was not a bad error. It was, as these things usually are, a string of several bad errors. One after another, and any one of which could have saved the spacecraft if it had been avoided.
And, I hate to say it, but when you look under the hood, Juno (no caps, it’s a name not an acronym) isn’t doing as well as you might think. Getting nervous about the main engine put them in a 53 day orbit, and that means the scientific goals will take five rather than one year to complete. And that adds up to a whole lot of money. And at least one of the instruments is only about half functional, no matter how much the project tries to tap dance around that and say it really doesn’t matter.
That doesn’t mean JPL hasn’t been vastly successful in planetary exploration. It’s just that the whole business isn’t as flawlessly successful as their PR machine makes it seem.
I said they have been successful. Actually, I wrote “vastly” successful. But I actually would also like to see some of the mistakes better publicized.
First, the way places like JPL try to sweep them under the carpet hurts future missions. The Genesis sample return mission crashed for almost exactly the same reason the Galileo atmospheric probe almost failed. Galileo had a backup timer that Genesis lacked, and that’s why the problem only got one vague sentence in the published literature. Improving the state of the art requires learning from mistakes, and that requires telling people about the mistakes.
Second, creating a myth of perfection makes every failure a public relations disaster. Losing a spacecraft because someone mixed up feet and meters sounds idiotic. But if you know everyone always double and triple checks units, and we always catch a huge number of mistakes, the fact that one slipped through sounds slightly less idiotic. (Not that MCO wasn’t an idiotic failure, it was just idiotic for a whole bunch of more subtle reasons.)