The Missing Hyphen That Cost $80 Million
Little things can have massive consequences
Small errors can have devastating consequences, and nowhere has this point been proved more adequately than in efforts to send satellites, probes and human cargoes into space.
One early example was the failure of Mariner 1 in 1962. When the United States and the Soviet Union entered the “space race” in the late 1950s, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab came up with grand plans for a series of large, sophisticated interplanetary space probes, to be named Mariner. However, the launch of such large space probes was dependent on the development of a new and powerful booster, the Atlas-Centaur, and this development program proved troublesome.
JPL finally had to settle on a less-sophisticated design, based on the simpler Ranger Moon probes. The stripped-down Mariner was originally named Mariner Ranger or just Mariner R, and would be launched on the available Atlas Agena B booster. Even so, the Mariner program cost more than US$500 million.
Mariner 1 was supposed to be the first interplanetary spacecraft. It was the first of the Mariner series of unmanned probes, which were supposed to explore the nearby planets of Venus, Mercury and Mars. Mariner 1 had wings with solar cells to help power its voyage, and it was equipped with instruments for…
