It's frankly bonkers how many insane success-at-long-odds stories NASA has and how few "we made a stupid mistake and everything exploded" stories NASA has.
For every Climate Orbiter "we made an oopsie converting metric to imperial" story, there are three "we figured out how to get the crew of Apollo 13 to fit a square peg into a round hole and they can breath now" miracles.
I mean, sure, there's Apollo 1's "we put people and a bunch of wires in a pressurized can of pure oxygen", but there's also the Perseverance Rover's "we made a crane that holds itself aloft with rockets and lowers a one ton rover gently to the ground on a tether."
> It's frankly bonkers how many insane success-at-long-odds stories NASA has and how few "we made a stupid mistake and everything exploded" stories NASA has.
That’s what happens when engineers are allowed to engineer things, rather than being forced to “move fast and break things”.
Things that slightly move, make all things better. As in propelling the physics of the situation (rattle the solar panel) and then reevaluate, recover.
I completely agree with you. NASA consistently does amazing things.
Unfortunately I just can’t leave this whole “Imperial vs Metric” thing alone so here comes a tangent.
> "we made an oopsie converting metric to imperial"
US Customary*. The United States has never used the Imperial system. It didn’t even exist at the time of the revolution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_a...
Also since I’m already being pedantic Mars Climate Orbiter was not lost to a conversion error. US Customary units were provided by Lockheed software to a NASA system that expected SI units. It would not have been lost if either system was used consistently.
Two space shuttles exploded, killing everyone on board.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
They did, yes. And there are fascinating failure stories for each one. But my point is that there were more miraculous successes than miraculous failures. Heck, in my opinion, given that the Space Shuttle flew in atmosphere like a brick, and given that there was no possible way to get a second shot at the landing strip, the fact that they landed successfully every time (except for Columbia, of course) is amazing.
The Apollo flights in particular were interesting. For example, in the case of Apollo 14, when Houston was literally reading new machine code to the astronauts over radio who were punching in POKE instructions by hand to change the code.
Good point, let's just shut it down, nobody should do anything
That's not my point. The learned painful lessons and their success rate is high.
Wasn’t that more the point of the person you replied with counterexamples to?
Let’s assume good faith all round. One poster rightly highlights the overwhelmingly positive track record. Another points out the negatives went a little beyond an “oopsie”.
Yeah just being respectful to those 14 astronauts who died. They are worth mentioning. Nasa had major setbacks - not an "oopsie". Didn't mean to hijack the thread. Well done Voyager team.
I think this is an unfair characterization of the comment. Nobody is dismissing the shuttle crews. The “oopsie” was in reference to the Mars Climate Orbiter mishap that did not involve loss of human life.
And a bunch of other missions worked great. Learn from failures, progress.
Yeah it's not "bonkers" or "insane". They learned the hard way. Painful lessons.
The cost of doing things (I remember watching the Challenger live on TV at the time).
Every now and then we watch/read in the news that # of workers died while building that bridge/road/building/etc. We don't stop making bridges/roads/buildings. We just make it safer. Will people continue dying unnecessary/unnatural deaths? Unfortunately, yes. Let's minimise this.