May 2007
A $125 Million Debacle
By Bernie Quintero
Back when I was a journalism student I had the most exciting job imaginable -- I was privileged to work at "The Lab," JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I became fascinated with the meticulousness of the work of the scientists and engineers -- the planning, review, testing, and revising of ventures that made our nation a leader in the unmanned exploration of space.
As a journalist you are trained to avoid "five-dollar words" when a "five-cent word" will work. Using this very basic measure, JPL's projects "worked" -- the Viking spacecraft took its lander to Mars, Mariner sent back data on Venus and Mercury, Galileo explored Jupiter. Somewhere among the many successes, however, was a $125 million surprise -- a space probe that did not work, that did not send back data. It was likely "destroyed by atmospheric stresses and friction" in the Martian atmosphere. In common words, it crashed and burned.
Many red faces and many reviews and many more hearings and reports later, the reason for the debacle was identified as a "failure to convert the English units of measurement used in construction into the metric units used for operation." The probe was 100 kilometers off course at the end of a 500 million-kilometer voyage, which put it into the Martian atmosphere at a level more than 60 per cent lower than intended. According to one internal JPL memo, "there might have been some overconfidence, inadequate robustness" in the processes or operations "and a failure to heed early warnings."
This certainly was an expensive failure, unlikely to be seen replicated in private business. And yet, the potential for "overconfidence, inadequate robustness" in processes or operations and "failure to heed early warnings" are present in every business. While it is simply impractical, if not impossible, to anticipate and map all potential variables, basic standards that allow comparison and support evaluation of key performance measures and progress are essential. How else can you know if your trajectory is taking you to the intended goal or is sending you off course to potentially crash and burn?
You owe it to yourself, any partners, and employees to define in writing why it is essential that your objectives be achieved -- call it a policy statement, a business principle, or whatever you like. Identify and agree on a correct, established method of doing whatever it is that "makes" your product or service; include at a minimum who should be doing what, when, where, and how. Documents like these will support accountability and minimize inconsistency within your organization and allow you time to monitor and evaluate, create, and troubleshoot -- when early warning signs indicate that something might be going in the wrong direction.
The lessons of that Mars Climate Orbiter.
Disclosure: Please note that quotes used in this article came from an article by James Oberg published in December 1999 in "SPECTRUM Magazine" as well as from an entry in Wikipedia and that the latter references various reports published by NASA and an article by E.E. Euler, S.D. Jolly, and H.H. Curtis published by The American Astronautical Society, "The Failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander: A Perspective from the People."