[X] My Assistant

[dvandorn]

Just to start a general topic, we've discussed some aspects of the old Soviet planetary exploration programs, but we've never had a topic devoted to the discussion, where we can discuss it in general terms.

So, the question is, did the Russians have significantly more problems with their early lunar and planetary probes than the U.S. did? How about ESA or JAXA? How do they all compare?

And what would y'all say is the reason for differences in success/failure rates, and quality of data returned, by probes built and flown by the various polities which have attempted them thus far?

I can think, specifically, of Russian lunar orbiters that returned image data of far poorer quality and usefulness than contemporary American orbiters... of the '71 Mars debacle, in which a functioning Soviet orbiter couldn't be re-targeted real-time and spent all of its pre-planned science program photographing the blank, featureless top of a global dust storm... of more than their fair share of probes ending up as junk decorating the steppes of Kazakhstan.

But, then again, you can always bring up the failures of Rangers 1-6, two of the seven Surveyors, the partial failure of Lunar Orbiter 1, etc., etc., etc., while the Russians were merrily taking pictures (albeit low-quality ones) of the far side of the Moon and landing small pods on its surface.

What do y'all think the balances were? What learning-curve lessons-learned are we seeing repeat themselves in the ESA and JAXA programs?

Just trying to get a sense of the group on this one.

-the other Doug

[edstrick]

Luck plays a big role in all missions, but you have to make your luck.. and buy it.

Mars Observer failed primarily because of "ideological" mission design requirements forced on the project by NASA HQ, followed by sloppy management and inadequate attention to detail where needed. The main assumption was that you could take a nearly off-the-shelf spacecraft (geosynch comsat bus, I think) and modify it for a planetary mission and stick instruments on it. It wasn't anyway near that simple.

The 98 missions failed ultimately because they were pennypinched to death. There weren't enough money, people, time, and management to cross all the "i"s and dot all the "t"s <wink> and doublecheck everything backwards and forwards. Same as with the Genesis crash. All these missions were basically sound, we think, but bad management structures and not enough money made the difference.

The MER rovers came close to disaster, but beyond luck... there was enough capability and enough money spent on the human resources to have that capability, to catch the potential disasters and fix them just in the nick of time.

[mcaplinger]

Luck plays a big role in all missions, but you have to make your luck.. and buy it.

Sure, but luck doesn't usually come with a clearly-marked price.

The 98 missions failed ultimately because they were pennypinched to death.

This is the conventional view (and, as a Mars'98 veteran, one I'm getting tired of hearing, can you tell?) But how much more money would it have taken? Ultimately, both Mars'98 failures and the Genesis failure could have been fixed with 5 extra minutes of engineering time apiece, costing a few dollars. If you think that you eliminate mistakes, even stupid ones, with buckets of extra money, you're dreaming. Look at how close some of the MER problems came to failure, and they spent 4x what Mars'98 cost. Look at the HST and Galileo problems. I suspect that a large fraction of the money spent on mission assurance is "wasted" in that it solves no problem that could have caused a failure. Taking a completely scattershot approach to mission assurance has lead to escalating mission costs. There simply has to be a balance. I can think of a lot of mission assurance effort on Mars'98 that could have been left out, and which only diverted attention from the real problems.