[X] My Assistant

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

Well, we know that Mariner I failed because of a fault in the internal guidance computer ... but that was a mission to Venus ...
What about Mariner III and its nose cone separation failure ?
Who manufactures the shroud ...
The manufacturer of the shroud itself might have been JPL as they produced the spacecraft.
The Atlas launch vehicle was build by CONVAIR ( Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation ), which became later part of General Dynamics ...
The Agena upper stage was developed by Lockheed for the USAF ...
Probably NASA-JPL had to build the shroud as they knew best how to fit in the tiny spacecraft

Any suggestions ?

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Actually, last night I finally screwed my courage (or my stupidity) to the sticking-place and downloaded that entire damned 350-Mbyte JPL review of the early stages of the Mariner Mars 1964 program just to get the straight dope on the shroud -- and got about 20 pages on that subject. I've just skimmed it so far, but it seems to imply that:

(1) The main responsibility for designing the initial faulty shroud (as part of a major year-long program to develop a new lightweight shroud for all Atlas-Agena D probes) apparently actually fell to the Lewis Research Center, whereas Lockheed was mainly responsible for the crash effort to build the new Mariner 4 version. (Fortunately, everyone was on the ball -- the correct theory for the failure, which was that the fiberglass skin had peeled loose, was devised only a day after the failure and proven by tests only a couple of days later.)

(2) The failure can't be put down to serious negligence, as I had previously thought. As that earlier brief Web comment indicated, the failure was due only to a combination of launch frictional heating and vacuum. They had thoroughly tested the shroud for each one separately, but not for both at once -- and established procedure didn't call for them to do so. In short, like the subtle Ranger 6 failure, it looks more like Just One of Those Things.

[hendric]

(2) The failure can't be put down to serious negligence, as I had previously thought. As that earlier brief Web comment indicated, the failure was due only to a combination of launch frictional heating and vacuum. They had thoroughly tested the shroud for each one separately, but not for both at once -- and established procedure didn't call for them to do so. In short, like the subtle Ranger 6 failure, it looks more like Just One of Those Things.

So, assuming it had happened in today's environment, ITAR would have prevented any publishing of the investigation?