D'OH
The Genesis capsule just turned into a quarter-billion dollar egg drop test.
Sucks.
Insert failure-compounding NASA-supplied silver lining here.
The minutes, so far.
"The Genesis team is now following a contingency plan that was devised for precisely this scenario."
M E M O
Genesis Contingency Plan -- Classified
Broom
Dustpan
End communique
Metric bypass computes on overload retrace cause we're Lost in space.
posted by Luke @ 1:02 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Yeah, that's teh sucks. The reason they were going to snag the capsule out of the air with a helicopter was because they thought hitting the ground with the drogue chute open would still jar the contents too much and jeopardize the experiment (not to mention, there are a bunch of expensive-ass diamond and sapphire plates inside). After pickup, the capsule was to be taken to a clean room for unpacking.
Instead, the capsule hit the ground at over one hundred miles per hour with no chute. To complicate matters, the drogue chute was supposed to be deployed by an explosive. Since the chute didn't open, it was unclear whether or not the explosive had been triggered and they had to worry about that during the salvage operation as well.
I hope that they can still get some data out of it.
What I hate about failures like this is the public backlash that comes afterward. Yeah, it sucks that this (expensive) experiment didn't work. I would've rather given $250 million to, say, homeless people for booze than to crash a washing machine full of precious jems into the Utah desert a high speed, but I'm more than happy to have ponied up the money in the first place. I'd be perfectly happy with the price tag if the experiement had worked. This is just a risk that is involved. We can't go cutting science spending just because something didn't work. By that logic, the march of science is dramatically slowed.
Still, it's a bummer that this didn't work. Come to think of it, I seem to remember that my uncle Tom (Don's dad) worked at JPL back in the day. If you're looking to point fingers, maybe you can blame him.
--Mike Sheffler
... turning to the 3-D map, we see an unmistakable cone of ignorance
Right, cut military before science FA REAL.
And I blame Don.
It's just that NASA has had a few collosal failures in a row, almost seems like they're snoballing.
Am I wrong?
Sure, blame the quiet dude!
Mike -
You know, for a guy whose weapon of choice was a slide-rule, Dad's had an amazing career. Underwater Lasers, satellites, a radio still sitting on the Moon ... all in a day's work for humble Engineer Tom.
We've had a lot of discussions over the years about space missions going catastrophic. I'm pretty impressed every a full round-trip is actually successful.
He's mostly been in telemetry and aerospace, but that has to include highly specialized components like self-destruct systems for wayward rockets. So if his handiwork had been included on this mission the capsule would have incinerated itself before bothering to dent the desert floor. No Broom, No dustpan!
-- Don Sheffler
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