Now that it seems the European Space Agency has gotten their Huygens probe to land softly on the surface of another planet’s moon, why do they not seem to have the kind of high-profile disasters that NASA does? Is it just that NASA’s mistakes are so well-publicized and blown out of proportion that my interpretation is skewed? How can the ESA land a probe on another planet’s moon - something that took several different parachutes opening at specific points during its descent, as I understand - when NASA can’t even get a probe landing in the desert in our own country to open its parachute like it should? Are we more inept or just doing so much more in space that, though our failures are still proportional to theirs, there are more of them? Is it a problem of politics having too much say in what NASA does? Is it a problem of NASA trying to spread themselves too thin? I would appreciate it if anyone could shed some light on this for me…
Two words: Spirit and Opportunity.
Those have exceeded their predicted operating lifespan, what? Three times over? Then there’s Pathfinder and Soujourner, which provided the foundation for Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
Then there’s the Beagle. If memory serves, that was ESA and it crashed somewhere near Mars’ north pole, correct? A year ago, one could have asked the same question you are, only with the positions of NASA and ESA switched.
I don’t actually have answers to your questions, but I’d like to point out that it was NASA’s Cassini probe that got Huygens to Titan, and it’s that same NASA probe that’s relaying all the data. So NASA does get it right (and spectacularly) from time to time.
Didn’t they have a probe go tits up going to Mars recently (well, a couple of years ago). It could be that the ESA just doesn’t do as much as NASA does. If NASA does more then they are bound to have more failures. After all, if you never do anything at all you will have no failures are all…no?
When the ESA puts a manned flight into orbit, when they put up their own spacestation or land a man on the moon, or when they send out probes to the planets that bring back a 10th part of the data NASA has, then we can talk about how effective they are and how inept NASA is.
(its ironic for me to be defending NASA since I DO actually think they are inept and bloated, pulled off on tangents by political whim and without a clear direction. But I don’t think the ESA is much better from what I know of it).
-XT
They have had their problems. (Half a billion dollars worth of satellites lost on launch.)
The answer to your question is that space exploration is hard and all the technology has to work flawlessly all the time.
I won’t say that NASA isn’t an underfunded bureaucratic nightmare, because it probably is, but they’ve done some amazing things. Consider that the two Mars landers wandering about the surface right now have lasted months longer than anyone expected.
Also, I don’t think it’s fair to invoke a test where equipment failed ON EARTH. Why fault someone for screwing up in a practice session when it’s in the game where things really count?
My bad… I thought the one that crashed into one of the poles of Mars was NASA too (was that the one that used both metric and english measurements to disastrous effect?). Who decides on funding for the ESA anyway? The EU? The individual participating nations? I probably should have researched this more… But it seems to me every time that NASA f-'s up, people are trying to use that as an example of why we throw too much money at it. I wanted to hear some of the arguments from that camp.
Sorry… I was talking about this mission which actually was “the game”: here
And I realize it worked out ok in the end… but it seemed silly that they had made such a big spectacle out of hiring a hollywood stunt pilot and then the damn parachute didn’t even open…
The problem getting the people want to answer is that I suspect the only ones who keep track, over time of successes vs. failures of probes in space are going to be the space boosters, and as a group we tend to think NASA has done some extraordinary things.
In addition to the successes already mentioned, we’re still getting useful data from Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and Galileo was shut down deliberately 10 years after it’s planned end of life, not because it had stopped working, but because it was running out of fuel for orbital corrections - and a decision was made to crash it rather than risk it crashing into Europa, which might harbor life.
Well when spacecraft do things right… its normal to emphasize their mission and the results…
When spacecraft crash and blowup… its normal to emphasize how much they cost ! 
So NASA having usually more expensive missions… will have a greater share of “crash and burn”.
Oh yeah. THat. :smack: 
Before you jump to too many conclusions, you may want to read Titan Calling, an article from IEEE Spectrum. Due to a design defect in a radio receiver supplied by Alenia Spazio SpA, ESA and NASA came close to losing all of the data from the Huygens probe. The problem was discovered by an ESA engineer well after the spacecraft was on its way to Saturn.
I’d also like to point out, as I always do, the phenomenal success of the ass-kickingly powerful Spitzer Space Telescope, a woefully underappreciated NASA success story.
Indeed. And a shout out for COBE (http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/cobe/), Magellan (http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/magellan/), Mars Global Surveyor (http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/), NEAR Shoemaker (http://near.jhuapl.edu/)…
Not to mention everything else that NASA is doing right now
For the record, we still get signals from the Voager spacecraft, and will be using them to explore the very limit of our sun’s influence, but Pioneer 10 and 11 are over (one was shut down, the other lost)
That list, by the way, doesn’t seem to include the experimental aircraft they work on as well.
Keep in mind that NASA gives away alot of information , to just about anyone. While the ESA has done their share of work , just having data on satellite performance , reliabilty, and where NASA has gone wrong ,would give anyone a leg up.
I would say that the ESA gets props for recognizing and capitalizing on what NASA did right.
Declan
What about the fact that NASA lost TWO previous Mars probes, and one due to the fact that someone used FEET???! instead of meters in their calculations??
I mean how incompetent is that? What scientist doesn’t use the metric system?
You have no idea what you’re talking about, do you?
Well, it turns out that a whole bunch of data was lost from the Huygens probe, because the ESA forgot to turn on one of the communications channels:
Huygens loses communications with Cassini
As someone else said - spaceflight is hard. Mistakes happen, even stupid ones. ESA also lost an Arianne 5 rocket because of an unhandled exception in their software when it tried to divide by zero. Freshman programming error. Stuff happens.