Ravenwood - 01/21/05 07:15 AM
The recent mission to Saturn was largely successful, but not without it's typical boneheaded NA$A mistakes.
David Atkinson spent 18 years designing an experiment for the unmanned space mission to Saturn. Now some pieces of it are lost in space. Someone forgot to turn on the instrument Atkinson needed to measure the winds on Saturn's largest moon.Actually, the AP gets it wrong. Atkinson's team spent 18 man-years, not years (as in 18 men spent 1 year, or 9 men spent 2 years).
While this was a cooperative effort between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency, the mistake is typical of NASA. Consider the following:
And that's just the highlight reel. Let's not forget two space shuttles and 14 astronauts that were lost largely due to NASA's unwillingness to listen to the concerns of lower level managers.
While NASA may be having problems the Weather Satellite that fell, a NOAA-N Prime, was not NASA's, but NOAA's, a different agency. Also it was all Lockheed Martin's fault. See this story from Red Nova (http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=13472)
Posted by: lplimac at January 21, 2005 12:32 PMMy understanding is that the satellite may belong to NOAA, but the oversight was being done by NASA.
Your link seems to be the same AP article that I linked to over a year ago. From the article: "The construction and launch project is being overseen by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. After launch and testing, the satellite was to be turned over to NOAA."
Posted by: Ravenwood at January 21, 2005 1:19 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
