NASA Chief Blames Self for Botched Missions
P A S A D E N A, Calif., March 30, 2001 -- NASA Administrator Dan Goldin is taking the blame for last year’s botched Mars missions, saying he pushed too hard, cut costs and made it impossible for spacecraft managers to succeed.
But Goldin said he will not abandon the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s “faster, better, cheaper” approach. Mission managers will get enough money and personnel to do the job, but there won’t be a return to the days of big, expensive spacecraft.
“We’re going to make sure they have adequate resources, but we’re not going to let the pendulum swing all the way back,” Goldin told employees of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter were managed.
Goldin visited the lab Wednesday, a day after two reports were released on the recent Mars fiasco. The reports found mismanagement, unrealistic expectations and anemic funding were to blame as much as the other mistakes that doomed the missions.
No Single Person Carries Blame
“In my effort to empower people, I pushed too hard,” Goldin said. “And in doing so, stretched the system too thin. It wasn’t intentional, and it wasn’t malicious. I believed in the vision, but it may have made some failure inevitable.”
Richard Cook, project manager of the lander and orbiter at the JPL, agreed with the reports but said no single person should be blamed.
“We’re all part of this,” he said. “The constraints were certainly part of it, but some of the ways we did business could stand to be improved.”
Investigators found resources were spread too thin for success. Too many risks were taken by skipping critical tests or overlooking possible faults. And nobody noticed or mentioned the problems until it was too late.
The $165 million Mars Polar Lander was most likely doomed by a sensor that mistook a spurious signal for landing when the legs deployed, causing the descent engines to cut off while it was still 130 feet above the planet’s surface.
Lander Likely Burned Up
The problem could have been easily resolved by beaming new software to the lander during its 11-month cruise — if it had been noticed, said John Casani, a former JPL chief engineer who led one of the investigations. The lander was last heard from Dec. 3.
Mars Climate Orbiter was lost Sept. 23 when nobody realized that Lockheed Martin Astronautics delivered navigation data in English units rather than metrics. The $125 million craft burned up in the Martian atmosphere.
Their combined cost was about the same as the last successful spacecraft to land on Mars — Pathfinder in 1997.
Since 1993, NASA’s budget has decreased by 5 percent. During that period, 146 payloads valued at $18 billion were launched. About $500 million worth of that was lost, Goldin said
