NEWS: Backup Parachute? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Backup Parachute!

GEEK: Backup Parachute? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Backup Parachute!

Remember that space capsule that was supposed to be caught mid-decent by two stunt pilots in helicopters? Well, it smashed into the desert at 150 miles per hour.

I think it would have been extremely wise to put a backup parachute in there, but apparently NASA is unfamiliar with them.

This is absolutely heartbreaking. Six years. It was a great mission - exactly the sort of thing the New Horizons program was trying to accomplish. But as was shown with Mars Polar Lander and now Genesis, the Cheaper part of "Better, faster, cheaper" increases the risks substantially. I am sure everyone involved would have loved to have a backup parachute. But that would have been, let's say thirty pounds. That's thirty pounds' worth of science that wouldn't have been done. These missions are cut to the bare bones. This is what happens when you try to do space on the cheap.

But don't dismiss the mission planners as idiots. They did the best they could with the budget they had. I am sure they are shedding more than their share of tears right now. This is six years of their life - smashed in the desert because NASA decided to cap missions at, what, $250 Million?

Of course, the Mars Orbiter was around $1Billion and it blew up anyway. Money is no guarantee of results. Space hates us.

Thats funny but I may or may not be intoxicated, the world will never know!

NASA now seems to be getting it wrong more often than they get it right.

Yeah but when they do it right they seriously get a lot of bang for their buck. How many months past expiration are those two rovers? That other one (Sojourner?) went for months past expectency also. Galilleo too. It kept going and going until they finally decided to do a suicide dive in Jupiter with it. Sure...Mars may eat a probe now and again or we get confused with measurement systems but all in all I think they do pretty damn well.

that sucks. it really does.

jesus christ that sucks. I can't even imagine how bad NASA feels.

JPL, actually. NASA just wrote the check.

http://www.genesismission.org/

[Edited on Sep 08, 2004 9:46PM]

32 million dollars, 193 MPH.

i can see one of those mastercard "priceless" jokes in here somewhere

it always amazes me how nasa and other space related organizations(jpl) does the impossible six days a week but they fuck up on a sunday and everyone is shocked. its like two shuttle crashes and all the succesful missions don't count. sucks.

They did have 2 chutes. Neither deployed.

There's your real reason for the failure right there.

Seriously though, its a bummer, and I still think that they should have kept the coverage to a minimum.

This reminds me of the call for escape systems after the Challenger disaster - it's hard for those of us thinking of concentional engineering to realize what systems Just Don't Work in the context of space flight.

One new failsafe system proposed after the Challenger Disaster was an escape hatch on the shuttle, with an external open/close lever on the side of the cockpit. I was in Space Academy at the time and one of the instructors there explained it like so:

OK. What would have to happen for YOU to use this lever to save the astronauts? How could this safety system serve its purpose?

Well, first off, something has to go wrong. The space shuttle crashes. It crashes next to you. So: You're sitting in an empty field, waiting for the space shuttle to crash.

Mind you, it can't crash badly. It had to BARELY crash. If it slams into the ground at Mach 14, there's nothing left to save. The area where the shuttle crashed had to be essentially a runway. So, now you're standing in a large, open field, wating for the shuttle to crash.

So now you open the hatch, the astronauts pop out and you're a hero. No, wait. The hatch is 9 or 10 feet up the orbiter. So, when you go to your wide open field, waiting for the shuttle to crash, bring a stepladder with you.

Okay, you climb up the stepladder, use the lever, pop the hatch, and save the astronauts. No, wait. You burn your hand to a cinder on the lever. It just re-entered the atmosphere at Mach 14. It's a few thousand degrees hot. Bring a pot-holder. Bring 2.

So, you climb up the stepladder, grasp the lever with your potholders, pop the hatch, free the astronauts and... no wait.. you're passed out on the ground. Seems that for the first many minutes after re-entry, toxic gasses pour off the super-heated body of the freshly re-entered shuttle. You'll need a gas-mask, too.

So, YOU TOO can save the astronauts. All you need is to know about the Orbiter's escape hatch, and to be standing in the right empty field when it crashes in a way that no spacecraft in history has ever crashed, ready with a stepladder, a couple potholders, and a gas-mask.

You did bring gas masks for the astronauts too, didn't you?

There is video of it on usatoday.com. It's fucking hilarious. Looks like my early Estes rockets.

Given that they are a bunch of rocket scientists, those guys sure have a terrible track record for this kinda stuff!

mighty good point. however they seem to TOTALLY fuck it up on sundays, though. and more than once.

They were both meant to deploy at the same time. They said on the news that NASA thought a backup parachute wasn't necessary. Haha. What a mistake that was.

Sure, it's easy to criticize someone else's work. THEY fucked it up. THEY suck. THEY are stupid. If it's so easy, why are you working at Tower Records and not making 6 figures sending probes into space? Oh yeah, because you are too busy probing your left nostril with a pen you found on the floor.

Personally, I think it sucks that NASA crashes something every couple of days, but they are doing the best they can. But I also think that 236242473 BILLION dollars could be spent fixing things here on earth instead. Like "Screw the homeless, I want to see some guy walk around on Mars. Mars is cool. The streets of DC are not."

Dude, do you have any idea what NASA's budget is every year? It was $15 Billion last year. Compare that with the $500+ billion dollars spent by the Dept. of Health and Human Services (the people who take care of the 'homeless') in 2003 and I think it's pretty clear that your opinion of NASA is completely uninformed and just plain wrong. If we spent as much money on space exploration and research as we do on battling 'poverty', we would have daily shuttle service to the moon and a vacation resort complex on Mars.

I'm betting you're a big Nader supporter, aren't you?

How disappointing

More like "we can do a whole lot more science with that thirty pounds, and parachute deployment systems have a very good track record for reliability". Come back when you have some actual engineering experience, with real physical systems, not software, under your belt -- until then, you aren't qualified to pass judgement on the Genesis team's engineering decisions.

Dammit....

NASA guys use too much Viagra! They can get it up....but they can't get it down.

if i hire someone to cater a dinner for me and they serve dog food, you bet i'm going to say they suck and they fucked it up and they're stupid. same with this. i would expect with their level of expertise that jpl would have a good idea of what they were doing. they're getting paid 6 figures for their genius and their aerospace engineering degrees.

i don't think it's necessary to insult the rest of the population just because we weren't born with the ability to understand quantum physics.