You would think that with a multi billion dollar agency like NASA that dumb mistakes couldn't happen. I mean, after all, they employ thousands of engineers and scientists and their budget is monumental. Any failures that happen should be due to acts of God or at least a type of mistake that just couldn't be helped, for one reason or another. Unfortunately this is not the case, NASA has made plenty of dumb mistakes. I am not saying that they haven’t had some spectacular successes, because they certainly have as we all know, all I am saying is that some of the mistakes that have make are so basic that you wonder how no one caught them before tragedy struck.

I remember one probe that just crashed. No one could figure out why. Instructions were sent to it to facilitate it’s landing on Mars and all seemed well, but all of a sudden bam. It seems to have crashed. How did this happen? Was this some sort of problem with communications and sun spots or maybe the failure of some hardware on the probe? No not at all, it seems that when you relay instructions in the English linear system to a device that is programmed for the metric system you have nothing but trouble on your hands. Yeah, can you imagine that mistake, it doesn’t get much more basic that this?.

Now what about the failure of the Mar’s Observer in 1993. Everything seemed to be going fine but then it failed. Surely this was because something had failed on the probe? Hundreds of engineers had gone over it along with many scientists before the launch. It had been checked, double checked and checked again. There couldn't’ possibly be something that was missed! Oh something was missed alright. It seems that this probe contained the wrong guidance software. The software it was carrying had been designed only for Earth orbiting satellites. This type of software was completely wrong for a mission to Mars and that is why this probe failed. How in the world this could have been missed is a mystery to me.

Shuttle deploying satellite

When a pilot is checking his plane before takeoff, not only is the outside of the plane looked over, but he has a checklist of things that must be checked. The list doesn’t include everything because he can’t check the engines and such, that is why they have mechanics, but he can check that all settings are correct. Why can’t NASA adapt something like this? One of the things on the list would be that the correct software is running the navigation of the probe or satellite and that it is in the correct format such as either metric or English and that should be circled in red for all to see with copies distributed to all. Hey these things are costing us tax payers millions of dollars and there should be accuracy in checking them before a launch and it is too late.

NASA was founded in 1958. It has a long history of preventable errors. In 1958 they launched America’s first satellite and with it, NASA’s first design error. The satellite was designed so badly that it was completely unstable in space. This thing must have been tumbling all over the place. It had actually been constructed wrong and accepted that way for launch. It looks like no one noticed that it wasn’t built correctly. Come on guys I know that we were in hot competition with Russia in those days, but is that any excuse for launching a piece of floating junk that just didn’t work? It sort or reminds me of the Hubble launch. Remember how hard we worked on the first space telescope? People could hardly wait for it to get into orbit. It was originally supposed to be a lot bigger but it kept getting scaled down due to budget restrictions. Well we finally launched it and guess what, the views were very blurry. How could this be? No one had tested the mirror. In a reflecting telescope, a large mirror is used as a lens and this mirror has to be ground precisely to the right form. This mirror wasn’t. That is why we had to have astronauts go into space and replace it. Can you imagine spending hundreds of millions on this thing and not testing it before you launch it into space? When asked why, the answer was it would have cost too much to test. Oh give me a break, I bet it wouldn't have cost as much as the extra launch and space walks to repair it.

NASA doesn’t always do things right or even spot when things are done incorrectly. Everyone knows how highly flammable oxygen is, yet it was the atmosphere of choice for the Apollo capsules until a spark caused a fire that killed three astronauts. After that incident the atmosphere was switched to something that more resembled the air we breathe. Why did it take a fire and several deaths before the danger of an all oxygen atmosphere was realized? Lt. Col. Virgil I. Grissom, a veteran of Mercury and Gemini missions; Lt. Col. Edward H. White, the astronaut who had performed the first United States extravehicular activity during the Gemini program; and Roger B. Chaffee, an astronaut preparing for his first space flight, died in this tragic accident in 1967.

Hubble

In a book that was recently published, there is a story of a rocket that sat on it’s launch pad for over 1000 days at the cost of 3.5 million per day. The story tells of a frustrated general that threatened to mount a plaque on it. How could someone not think that NASA has too big a budget when they can throw money away like this? The total funds lost came to $3,500,000,000. Shame on them.

Besides those failures that are due to just plain bad management, such as the ones listed above, where else is NASA lacking? Oh yes there are other areas that are costing us millions of dollars for nothing. One of these are projects that NASA knows will eventually be killed but they just keep pouring our money into them. One expert wrote that the Orbital Space Plane was a project that many engineers know would never make it and it’s concept was just not well thought out. He stated that even though many engineers knew that it would have to be killed, no one wanted to say anything. I can understand that, if you offend the powers that be, by saying their project won’t work, you will find that you have no work. People have to feed their families and thus do not want to lose a good job. It is the people in charge that should have realized the futility of the project and even if it wasn’t right away, it should have been stopped some where along the line to save money.

NASA has been accused of a lot of things. Some say they never really sent men to the Moon. Others say the MAR's photographs are phony. There are still others that say we did go to the Moon and Mars and that NASA discovered alien life in these places or ruins of a previous civilization. NASA has been accused of a lot of things. I would not go that far, but I would like to know why no escape capsules or even ejection devices have been installed in the shuttle? The argument that ejection seats would not have saved any lives is bogus. If a ship blows up in the atmosphere and the crew cabin is still in one piece as it crashes to Earth or into the sea, as was the case in at least one accident, some of the astronauts may have survived if they had a way of ejecting. I really don't think that there is enough being spent on human safety. Just part of the money that is wasted through poor management would be enough.

All in all, we need NASA, but NASA has to get it priorities straight. It has to stop funding the shuttle fleet and the International Space Station, both of which drain a good portion of their budget. It's time for a new NASA, one that is going to put everything into space and planet exploration and who is willing to join with other nations to do it.