It is not known with certainty what happened to the Mars Climate Orbiter. 3.Īn independent NASA failure review board will be formed shortly. NASA officials say they are checking to make sure the same error does not occur in the Mars Polar Lander, which is en route to Mars and scheduled to reach the planet on Dec. The House recently moved to strip $1.8 billion from Lockheed Martin's F-22 fighter jet program, citing technical difficulties with the program. These failures led the company to restructure its operations and change management in its space business. The failure is also another black eye for Lockheed, the nation's largest military contractor, which in the last year or so has suffered several failures of rockets and missiles it has developed. The question that will have to be asked here is whether in cutting costs, they cut corners.'' Pike said: ''Obviously the question they are going to have to ask is maybe it was a little too cheap. Stone, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory director.īut Mr. ''There is not a single mission in the program that is critical to the overall program,'' said Dr. That limits the damage done by the failure of any single mission.
It cost only one-half to one-eighth as much as recent missions and is part of a new strategy to fly more but less expensive missions to Mars. The Mars Climate Orbiter, the first spacecraft specifically designed to study the climate of another planet, was inexpensive by NASA's standards. The failure could raise questions about whether NASA and its contractors are skimping on safety to cut costs.
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