Beagle 2: A Fortunate Failure

In article , Dr. O
writes

"Alex R. Blackwell" wrote in message
...
Beagle 2: A Fortunate Failure
by Jeffrey F. Bell
Honolulu - January 13, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/beagle2-04a.html

If Beagle had performed as expected then NASA would have undergone a serious
grilling by some Congressional commitee, no doubt. So in that sense, it's
certainly a fortunate failure, for NASA.

I'm not at all convinced that you need a multi $100 million budget to
finance a Mars probe. I'm more interested what, if any, an investigation on
the Beagle 2 loss will bring up. I'm pretty sure it was a design fault,
somewhere. I sincerely hope ESA and the UK will fund another Beagle (which
is almost certain) and that it can carry out its mission succesfully. Maybe
Blair can ask Bush to let the guys at JPL take a look at the design and
point out any shortcomings.


It seems more likely to have been an unfortunate rocky landing. When
will it be possible to see if this is so?
--
Eric Crew

"The Plankmeister" wrote in message
. ..
I think the idea of 'cheaper, faster, better' missions is
still in its infancy. I think it's inevitable that there will
be more 'cheaper, faster, better' missions in the future...

I agree that a successful cheap mission could lead to cost saving on future
missions. Certainly the diversity of different countries building missions
to different scales is healthy.


"Alex R. Blackwell" wrote in message
...

I sincerely hope ESA and the UK will fund another Beagle (which
is almost certain) and that it can carry out its mission succesfully.

I am concerned that having failed in their first attempt, the British
government decides that missions of this type contain too much risk. Beagle
does not seem to be part of a systematic long term plan of space
exploration. It was a tentative initial step at best, and judging by the
involvement of Blur and others, a faddish exercise at worst. The overriding
and as yet unanswered question for me is: are they truly serious about long
term space exploration?

--
Michael Anthony

I think it is better to get something to work in the first place.
The next thing one might do is to get it to work on
a cheaper budget. But maybe not by the yuppie strategy - faster,
better, cheaper, etc. etc.

It's a bit strange that Pillinger & co. thinks one can land on Mars
for £ 35 mill.(~60 mill. $), when NASA said that the demise of Mars
Polar Lander was due to the low cost of that mission - 250 mill $!
Did Pillinger ever read the failure report of MPL?

Bjørn Sørheim

"Alex R. Blackwell" wrote:

Beagle 2: A Fortunate Failure
by Jeffrey F. Bell
Honolulu - January 13, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/beagle2-04a.html

--


Alex R. Blackwell
University of Hawaii


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In article ,
Bjørn Sørheim wrote:
It's a bit strange that Pillinger & co. thinks one can land on Mars
for £ 35 mill.(~60 mill. $), when NASA said that the demise of Mars
Polar Lander was due to the low cost of that mission - 250 mill $!

NASA said nothing of the kind. If you read the MPL failure report
carefully, while it identifies a number of things wrong with the way MPL
was run, and blames a lot of them at least partially on inadequate
funding, you'll find that it never actually quite says that more money
would have saved MPL.

Indeed, the consensus of the people who were there (see the Euler et al
paper in G&C 2001, published as Advances in the Astronautical Sciences
vol. 107) is that the MPL touchdown-sensing software problem would have
killed a billion-dollar megaproject just as easily. "All customary and
prudent steps were executed in the development process"; each of the steps
had a subtle flaw, and the combination caused the error to slip past.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

wrote:


The Plankmeister wrote:

And that guy is supposed to be a professor? Of what? Americanism? He may as
well have just said "Only America knows how to do anything with
technology... All you other countries just go back to building mud huts."
What a sarcastic ass.



It seems we have here a tale of two Meterorite/Asteroid scientists.

Essentially, one decided one day he wanted to send a spacecraft to
Mars AND DID IT.

The other sat in his office and wrote a ****ey article that, had it been
posted here, would have been considered trolling and got the author
killfiled.

Ladies and Gentlemen, who do you think deserves more respect?


The guy from UH, of course. My trolls never get published like this.

Corry

--
It Came From C. L. Smith's Unclaimed Mysteries.
http://www.unclaimedmysteries.net

"The Plankmeister" wrote
I think Beagle 2 was a
bit of a trail blazer in this respect. People will realize that it IS
possible to get a mission off the ground fairly cheaply and more people
will
give input to such projects which inevitably leads to more reliability and
a
better chance of success.

One difference between the MER cost and that of Beagle is that the latter
hitched a ride, while the MER total includes the cost of the launch?

"Henry Spencer" wrote in message
...
NASA said nothing of the kind. If you read the MPL failure report
carefully, while it identifies a number of things wrong with the way MPL
was run, and blames a lot of them at least partially on inadequate
funding, you'll find that it never actually quite says that more money
would have saved MPL.

"The Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter were probably under-funded
by about 30 percent," Edward Weiler, NASA associate administrator for space
science said, reiterating a finding of the MPIAT group.

NASA headquarters will establish, in a sense, a Mars "slush fund." Monies
are to be held in reserve for Mars spacecraft that run into technical
difficulties. In recent years, such funds were not available, Weiler said.
"That did not inspire a lot of communications. If you ran into trouble, you
knew there was no more money. By establishing program reserves at NASA
headquarters we will automatically inspire communications," he said.

end quote

That slush fund was used to great advantage in resolving the MER problems
encountered during test. Beagle had no such fund.

The *underlying cause* of the MPL failure was cited as "inadequate funding
and inadequate margins."

More quotes from the MPIAT:

"The pressure of meeting the cost and schedule goals resulted in an
environment of increasing risk in which too many corners were cut in
applying proven engineering practices and the checks and balances required
for mission success. Examples include incomplete systems testing, lack of
critical event telemetry, and requirements creep. JPL and LMA also failed to
ensure adequate independent reviews and adherence to established policies
and practices."

"Inadequate project staffing and application of institutional capability by
JPL contributed to reduced mission assurance. Pressure from an already
aggressive schedule was increased by LMA not meeting staffing objectives
early in the project. This schedule pressure led to inadequate analysis and
testing. The desire to reduce cost led to the decision by JPL to create a
multimission operations project separate from the flight project. The result
was to bypass the traditional cradle-to grave responsibility of the project
manager in most projects. This led to a discontinuity of expertise in the
development and operations handover, characterized by a lack of
understanding of navigation and operations issues by the development team
and a lack of understanding of the spacecraft by the operations team."

"The dominant Mars '98 problem was inadequate funding to accomplish the
established requirements."

Such morals to the story of course are bad news for advocates of commercial
space exploration, as even at FBC budget levels there is no conceivable
business plan for planetary exploration as a stand-alone profit center, now
or a hundred years from now. If the surface of Mars were littered with
diamonds three feet deep, it would not be economical to retrieve them. Space
travel is a job for the government, funded by tax dollars, as a benefit to
society as a whole, & it's best not to be diverted into unworkable schemes
of doing things on the cheap, or take the advice of those who would make the
perfect the enemy of the good--trashing all current efforts, Shuttle, Space
Station, Galileo, etc. in lieu of a utopian, unworkable alternative.

Joe

I suggest the name of the next probe should be "Wallace".

Named after Alfred Russel Wallace, with his theory that some sort of
spirit guided evolution.

Besides, it sounded Brittish (means Welshman, though I think that it
also means stranger) and a good named for a Beagle.

"Joe Knapp" wrote in message
news
"The Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter were probably under-funded
by about 30 percent," Edward Weiler, NASA associate administrator for
space
science said, reiterating a finding of the MPIAT group.

"The dominant Mars '98 problem was inadequate funding to accomplish the
established requirements."


So it had nothing to do with certain people living in the dark ages and
being unable to use SI units?

"Alex R. Blackwell" writes:

Beagle 2: A Fortunate Failure
by Jeffrey F. Bell
Honolulu - January 13, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/beagle2-04a.html

Well, the article sort of identifies ESA with the EU (discussing the
non-accountability of Eurocrats, etc). This is unnecessary confusion, as
ESA and the EU are not at all the same thing. From my limited experience,
I would say that ESA seem to be vigilant as to how their funds are used. YMMV.