Our last scandal is far less serious than the catastrophic destruction of a space shuttle, but stands out because it’s so absolutely, unbelievably stupid. It therefore demonstrates exactly how easy it is even for the brightest minds on Earth to error out, and perhaps why so many other scandals have struck NASA over the years — especially as an organization with so much complexity and so many moving parts.
Case in point: the lost probe of 1999. As the Los Angeles Times says, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter simply vanished from space that year. Worth $125 million (about $234 million today), it wasn’t the priciest of NASA’s gadgets or missions, but it wasn’t ultra-cheap, either. This lost probe wasn’t an isolated incident, but happened at the end of a string of failures that burned through billions of dollars and served as a humiliating capstone for the trends of the time.
So what happened to the Mars probe, exactly? It used the wrong measurement units. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used metric units, but the probe’s manufacturer — Lockheed Martin Astronautics — programmed it in imperial units, i.e., the dumb, weird units used only by the United States, Myanmar, and Liberia. This caused the probe’s data transmission to fail and the probe itself to be lost. To this, the director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute John Logsdon rightly declared, “That is so dumb,” according to the LA Times. He also called out a trend of “insufficient attention to detail” amongst the “space community” of the time.
