Mars Orbiter and the Probe to Nowhere

A NASA space probe that lost roughly $25 million because of a… math era? Classic SNAFU! On this week’s special bonus, we revisit a favorite space-related chapters from my book, SNAFU: The Definitive Guide to History’s Greatest Screw-ups. Just in time for Father’s day, this is your gentle reminder that SNAFU makes for a fantastic gift for the history buff, nonfiction reader, or SNAFU podcast super fan. Pick up your copy on any book retailer or at this link: https://www.snafu-book.com/ https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.snafu-book.com%2F&data=05%7C02%7Cdylanfagan%40iheartmedia.com%7C24990f9db35a4c22ad1c08decb1cc779%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639171521638671679%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=uaDMOpcDiVVvePIrN3GN3348%2FBn29F2IxYa1thYv36g%3D&reserved=0 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey guys, Ed here. I wanted to remind you all of something very important. And that is that Father's Day, it's coming up! And also, my book, Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest Screw-Ups, is an amazing Father's Day gift. It is full of all the same kinds of head-scratching screw-ups from throughout history that you have come to know and love from this very podcast. But I should point out, they're all entirely new stories, and all, of course, completely true and insane. I take you through each decade, starting in the 1950s. Everything from swinging spies to planting nukes on the moon.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Plus, yours truly, I read the audiobook. So, you can buy the audiobook and hear my dulcet tones serenading you with terrible screw-ups. This week, I'm excited to share with you one of my favorite chapters from the audiobook. It's about the Mars Orbiter, which was a space probe that ended up losing roughly $125 million because of a math error. Oof, ah, so close. Just those noodley little math mistakes. They come back and bite you. Alright, so keep listening, and then be sure to pick up a copy of Snafu at any book retailer. Enjoy!

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Mars Orbiter: The Probe to Nowhere. In 1999, a Mars probe mysteriously careens off course, and a bewildered team of rocket scientists realized their rookie math mistake was to blame. In the early morning hours of September 23rd, 1999, on another gorgeous SoCal day, Flight Operations Manager Dr. Sam Thurman and his team sat slumped in their chairs at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The glumness on their faces clocked somewhere between "Our Caribbean cruise has been canceled" and "All of our kittens just died."

• 2:05Speaker 00

  The spacecraft on their screens, the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter, was overdue in sending the signal to confirm it had successfully been caught by Mars's orbit. In the tense preceding days, two things had become clear: That the orbiter was way off its target trajectory at the worst possible time, and that nobody had a clue why. But their despair had a basement level. Even if the signal never came and the craft was lost to the void, which does happen from time to time in the business of insanely complex space missions, the team would have no time to work through their stages of grief over a pina colada.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  The Mars Climate Orbiter, with its primary mission of studying Mars's atmosphere and climatic history for signs of water, was also designed to play second fiddle to its sister craft, the Mars Polar Lander. Due to complete its own 200-million-mile journey to Mars mere weeks later, the lander was built and launched in tandem with the orbiter. A problem built into one could also have ended up in the other. As the day wore on, Dr. Sam Thurman and his bewildered gang of rocket scientists waited, and waited, and waited, but no signal came.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Faster, better, cheaper. For most of the 90s, NASA felt like a party that would never end. After the devastating 1986 Challenger disaster, the agency's space shuttle program worked its way back into public acceptance, reviving a sense of optimism and giving space exploration a newfound whiff of affordability. And the American public, whose tax dollars kept the agency's coffee machines bubbling, were being rewarded with tangible nuggets of wonder. Three of the four great observatories were sent to space in the 90s, including the Hubble Space Telescope, which provided some of the most beautiful images of space we've ever secured.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Despite all this progress, Daniel S. Golden, NASA administrator from 1992 to 2001, also espoused a "faster, better, cheaper" mentality. He prioritized leaner and more frequent missions. This approach reduced the time it took to develop a spacecraft by 40% and slashed costs by 2/3. With an emphasis on efficiency, manned missions were becoming harder to justify. After all, humans were the neediest of all space cargo. So after the successful 1998 launch of the Lunar Prospector, NASA had the moon pretty well-covered. It was Mars time, baby!

• 4:50Speaker 00

  And this mission to the red planet, as Golden said, it had to be fast and cheap. Too bad they forgot about the better part.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Looking for Life

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Dr. Thurman, flight operations manager for both the Climate Orbiter and the Polar Lander, heeded the call. Tall, lanky, and prone to turtlenecks with dark neatly combed hair showing some first gray around his temples, Dr. Thurman looked like a young Reed Richards before he discovered his elastic superpowers and became Mr. Fantastic. The son of an Air Force interceptor pilot, he had spent his 1960s childhood steeped in military aviation. As he gazed in awe at the mythological Apollo missions, a career was born. Dr. Thurman was already something of a veteran of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory by 1999,

• 5:43Speaker 00

  having worked in various roles since 1987 and earning praise as an expert in project management. Now, under the thumb of NASA's increasingly stringent calls for efficiency, his Climate Orbiter ground support team was positively lean at 80 people, down from the 200 people for the Mars Observer mission just seven years earlier. "We're trying to do a whole lot more with less," Thurman told The New York Times. "The public and Congress have told us, space is neat, but it's gotta be done at less than a billion dollars a pop." The Mars Climate Orbiter was a real steal at $125 million. Still, white-collar grumbling abounded about the project's costs having ballooned 44%

• 6:27Speaker 00

  throughout its construction by Lockheed Martin, go-to contractor for all things weapons in space. The craft itself was a 6.9-foot-tall, 1,387-pound cube wrapped in wrinkled orange foil. It was strikingly asymmetrical, with a large rectangular array of solar panels jutting out of one side, and a dish antenna perched precariously on its top surface. Low gravity would be a relief; the orbiter looked like it wanted to fall over. Over the course of a Martian year—or 668 Martian souls—for any Earthling readers out there—that's 687 days—the probe would take daily photos and atmospheric readings,

• 7:10Speaker 00

  monitor real-time changes on the Martian surface due to wind, and detect clouds of water vapor to help scientists piece together the nature of water on Mars. Liquid water could mean life. Would David Bowie finally get an answer to the question he'd been caterwauling about since 1971? Was there life on Mars? But before it could start collecting those juicy data sets, the orbiter would set up shop in a nice, round, sun-synchronous polar orbit and wait for the Mars Polar Lander to arrive. It would serve as a communications satellite, relaying messages from the lander back to Earth, and as an eye in the sky, taking weather and geographical readings to aid

• 7:53Speaker 00

  the lander in a smooth touchdown on the Martian south pole. Time to count down. Five, four, three, two, one.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Metric mishap.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  The Climate Orbiter launched on December 11th, 1998, from Cape Canaveral. Initially, the mission was exceeding expectations. According to Dr. Thurman, the Jet Propulsion Lab tracked the probe's location by detecting changes, or Doppler shifts, in radio signals that were continuously sent back to Earth, correcting discrepancies between the observed flight path and the target flight path through several controlled burns of directional rockets. It was normal, and even expected to see discrepancies. All spacecraft needed a bit of a nudge from time to time, even if we're talking about a 200-million-mile nudge. But, after the first few corrections, a sense of unease began to grow at NASA.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  The craft itself was just kind of finicky. According to the engineering magazine Spectrum, which later did its own independent review, the orbiter's gigantic asymmetrical side-mounted solar array subjected it to constant energy bursts from the Sun, slightly spinning it like the blade of a wind turbine in a light breeze. To counteract this rotation, heavy flywheels inside the craft could be spun up at varying speeds. This technique is the same way a Segway holds itself upright. The next time you're ripping down the sidewalk behind a Segway tour guide, just remember that spacecraft work the same way. Due to the orbiter's peculiar design, though, its thrusters were placed out of balance with its center of mass,

• 9:37Speaker 00

  meaning that every time they fired them up to correct a rotation, a cross-coupling of forces occurred, leading to a drift from original position that engineers referred to as a "translation." Translation: the probe was slipping and sliding all over the place. Dr. Thurman and his team were navigation experts. Their job was to take the craft they were given and steer it to Mars. The team that had actually designed and built the spacecraft, the engineers at Lockheed Martin, wasn't involved in its navigation until mere hours before the craft was due to arrive at Mars. This left the navigation team guessing about extremely important details like,

• 10:19Speaker 00

  "Uh, how close to Mars can the orbiter get without exploding?" Without any input from Lockheed, the navigation team deemed that while their target flyby altitude was approximately 224 kilometers, which would have been a safe distance, the craft would survive a pass as close as 85 kilometers. This, by the way, wasn't based on actual analysis by Lockheed's engineers. It was also wrong, and they would learn that the hard way. To make matters worse, later investigations would reveal that Dr. Thurman and his navigators were stubbornly clinging to a belief that the margin of error in their numbers was approximately

• 11:01Speaker 00

  10 kilometers in neither direction, whereas, in reality, the spread was closer to 100 kilometers. According to an expert who spoke to Spectrum, "This should have had people screaming down the halls, as it showed that the navigators had no idea where exactly their craft was." The idiosyncrasies of the orbiter's design and the poor communication between the engineers and the navigators made troubleshooting the orbiter's navigation woes extremely difficult. Going through the code alone would take months, and the fact that there was no project manager with total oversight meant that the teams would be on nearly introductory terms with each other's work.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Was the orbiter's tendency to drift off course the result of poor location readings? Was there a physical problem with the thrusters? Had Dr. Thurman forgotten to upgrade his PC to Windows 98? There was no time to dig for answers. The craft had arrived at Mars. In an article published on NASA's website on September 20th, Dr. Thurman sounded remarkably cheery given the circumstances. Quote, "The curtain goes up on this year's Mars missions with the orbit insertion of Mars Climate Orbiter. If all goes well, the happily-ever-after part of the play will be the successful mission of the Mars Polar Lander that begins in December, followed by the mapping mission of the orbiter that is set to begin next March."

• 12:28Speaker 00

  End quote. You can almost see the beads of sweat on his forehead. Spoiler alert: The orbit insertion didn't go well. It went very, very badly. And when something crashes and burns, people with clipboards come staggering out of the night and form an investigatory panel.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  In the following weeks, an investigation would tear apart every blueprint, every shred of data, every snippet of code. And what they would discover as the root cause of the orbiter's failure was so forehead-slappingly basic that a humiliated NASA would be forced to implement sweeping changes at every level of the agency. Each time the orbiter had fired up its rockets to correct course, its onboard computer had sent back to Earth a record of exactly what each awkwardly placed thruster did, so that engineers could calculate the unwanted drift and adjust accordingly. The thruster performance data was then processed by Lockheed and emailed to the Jet Propulsion

• 13:33Speaker 00

  Laboratory in pound-force seconds, which are English units, the kind of units we use for measuring nearly all things here in these great United States. Wait, why do we use English units in the first place? Hold that thought. Dr. Thurman and his JPL team had been taking those numbers and entering them into their navigation software as Newton-seconds. And guess what? Those are metric units, the kind of units that are used in space navigation. That's right, the fate of a highly anticipated, years-in-the-making, $125 million mission

• 14:13Speaker 00

  through 200 million miles of space boiled down to a dumb-as-moon-rocks mismatch of measurement units, sent by email. "To be very blunt, it was overlooked," Neil Hinnors, vice president for Flight Systems at Lockheed Martin, said to The Washington Post. "Everyone at the Jet Propulsion Lab just assumed the numbers they were receiving in Lockheed's emails were in metric units, because that was the widely-accepted standard in jet propulsion work." They were unlabeled, by the way, and since the resulting calculations were within the same order of magnitude, the mismatch went undetected for the entirety of the 10-month trip.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  On this morning of Orbit Insertion Day, some last-minute estimates came in that placed the craft's approach altitude at around 110 kilometers, more than 100 kilometers closer than planned. Lockheed Martin engineers were finally consulted. According to Spectrum, they were frightened. An altitude like that would subject the orbiter to debilitating heat and turbulence far outside the bounds of its limited warranty. As the Pasadena Sun rose, a sense of gloom descended over the Jet Propulsion Lab. The number was updated several minutes later. 95 kilometers. At that altitude, air friction would generate heat equivalent to a bank of propane torches.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  The minutes ticked by. A final altitude estimate came in. 57 kilometers. The heat generated at 57 kilometers would have been 10 times higher than at 95 kilometers. The orbiter likely plowed straight into Mars' atmosphere, exploding immediately.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Cautionary Tale.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  The absurdity of the mission's failure was not lost on the scientific community. John Logsdon, director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, said it best to the Los Angeles Times. "That is so dumb." Speaking of dumb, why does America use English units at all? In 1793, the adoption of the metric system in the United States was of such importance to Thomas Jefferson that he requested artifacts from France that the Americans could use to calibrate their tools. A French botanist, named Joseph Dombey, was sent across the Atlantic with a standard kilogram in his cargo, but his ship was blown off course, and he was kidnapped by pirates. He died in captivity.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  If it weren't for those meddling pirates, would the Mars Climate Orbiter be whistling a merry tune around the red planet to this very day? Beaming back images of Martian vapor clouds, while the Denver Broncos play a home game at 1.60934 Kilometer High Stadium? It would feel so nice and tidy to place the blame for the failure of the Climate Orbiter on that one fateful error. Sure, Lockheed Martin should have supplied the jet propulsion lab with glitch-free software. Yes, JPL should have double-checked their homework. Of course, those mean pirates shouldn't have stolen that sweet French man. But to reduce the entirety of the orbiter's failure to a mismatch of measurements

• 17:36Speaker 00

  would be to ignore Congress's underfunding, NASA's swaggering overconfidence, and bad management that trickled down into a culture of poor communication and fear of questioning authority. To top it all off, weeks later, the Mars Polar Lander was also lost because of an entirely different mistake. A software error shut off the burners early, causing it to crash into the Martian surface. After the loss of both spacecraft and months of reviews by several panels, NASA made a slew of changes. They rebuilt project management structures, implemented stricter review processes, and emphasized the importance of training. In a sense, you could say these changes worked,

• 18:22Speaker 00

  considering nine of the 11 missions to Mars since 1999 were successful, including the twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the atmospheric orbiter Maven, whose mission was similar to that of the Climate Orbiter. Whether NASA's changes were enough to ensure its continued success in the future is still an evolving question. Its budget remains a fraction of what it was in the Apollo years, just about 0.36% of the US federal budget. A tiny budget leads to small team sizes. How thorough can you really be if you're overworked and spread thin? As for the less measurable changes to NASA's culture,

• 19:04Speaker 00

  is it even possible to convince a sprawling tech agency to slow down and embrace a more thoughtful approach in the 21st century? An official NASA document from 1970 called "What Made Apollo a Success" included this surprisingly folksy passage from NASA engineer Bob Tindall. Quote, "Of course, the way we got this job done was with meetings, hundreds of meetings. The thing we always tried to do in these meetings was to encourage everyone, no matter how shy, to speak out, hopefully, but not always, without being subjected to ridicule. We wanted to make sure we had not overlooked any legitimate input," end quote.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  By my extremely careful measurements, that's about 200 million miles from damn Golden's "Faster, Better, Cheaper", which according to one eyewitness allegedly led Golden to hurl a projector at the wall when somebody suggested a backup plan in case a Russian module didn't arrive on schedule. In the end, it was indeed late. Sometimes the work needs to be slow. Sometimes it isn't about the money. And despite your best efforts, sometimes you will fail. Because going to space is extremely difficult. But it is most definitely worth it. Just ask Major Tom from David Bowie's Space Oddity, floating in his capsule high above the world, marveling at a sight few of us will ever see,

• 20:31Speaker 00

  contemplating the progress of humanity and the strange peace of the great beyond. He sings that, quote, "I'm feeling very still, and I think my spaceship knows which way to go," end quote. Sure does, Major Tom. Well, assuming they all used the same units.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  The scariest part of Halloween isn't the full moon or a chainsaw starting up in the distance. It's running out of Reese's Cups. Because when you open the door to four princesses, six superheroes, and three Draculas all reaching for your Reese's Cups, things can get scary fast. Especially when you were kind of counting on some leftovers. So this Halloween, buy extra. Because your neighbor Jeff dressed like a kangaroo? That's scary enough. Running out of Reese's Cups doesn't need to be.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  I'm not great at costumes, but I know which bottles to bring. Every Halloween, I stop at Total Wine & More before the party. Cold beer for the crew, ready to drink cocktails for the night, and a bottle of tequila for whoever wins best costume. Halloween plans come together fast, and Total Wine & More makes it easy to bring something for everyone at the lowest prices. I'm ready for Halloween. Are you? Get the party started for less at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B21.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.