Amazing how something as trivial as, oh, installing a couple of gravity switches upside-down can lead to a $260MM multi-year space probe being smashed to flinders in the Utah desert.
(via Zak)
41 view(s)
Trifles make perfection
Amazing how something as trivial as, oh, installing a couple of gravity switches upside-down can lead to a $260MM multi-year space probe being smashed to flinders in the Utah desert….
Yes…
And from the same company that couldn’t figure out the difference between Metric and English units.
Hopefully they won’t be granted any more contracts by NASA. It won’t happen, but I can always hope.
Or how to have the landing sequence work correctly on the Mars Polar Lander. Or that if you are working on a satellite, you ought to clamp the multi-million dollar thing down so it doesn’t fall over and have somebody say “Oops”.
Lockheed Martin. Home of many expensive mistakes.
Of course, it’s not just in space science where putting something in upside down can cost you hundreds of millions. This story outlines how a lawyer for the EU faxed an appeals court there the prosecution’s justification for the prosecution … backwards. The court got a hundred blank pages, the deadline passed, and the banks that had been fined 100MM Euros got their money back.