09-08-2004, 07:24 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 36
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Before the "uh oh, there go those idiots at NASA again!" posts start popping up, please allow me to give you a first-person perspective on this disaster.
I was part of the mission operations team for this spacecraft, and I put in a 12-hour shift last night and this morning working the final release of the capsule. Remember, a mission like this isn't just about NASA throwing money around. There were a lot of very good engineers working this mission, people I work with on a day to day basis.
The Sample Return Capsule release went flawlessly this morning. From the tracking stations that kept us in communication with Genesis to the individual engineers working different spacecraft systems, we'd all invested countless hours of effort trying to make this work. It could end up being a small, seemingly insignificant problem that prevented the drogue chute and parafoil from deploying. It doesn't mean, however, that NASA or Lockheed-Martin are a bunch of idiots! Like any human endeavour, this one was undertaken with the very real possibility that things might go wrong. People would have started the naysaying had one or both of the Mars rovers failed to reach the surface of Mars intact and functional. After all, it happened to the British Beagle 2 lander back in December.
It's easy to laugh or mock when something like this happens, but imagine how my Genesis teammates and I feel watching all of our work end up like this. How would you feel if years of your hard work were now laying smashed and half buried in the Utah desert? This isn't about bumbling NASA bureaucrats, it's about engineers, pilots, and scientists who did their jobs, and did them well.
The spacecraft bus which carried the Sample Return Capsule is still alive and functional. I have to go into work tomorrow and work with an empty spacecraft bus knowing that this has happened.
Sad! Sad, indeed!
Paul
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I knew they wouldn't catch it.
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