'SI Oops' - A short 3-act play

[Rick_Strickert@radian.com]

ACT I - 
A $125 million spacecraft completes a perilous 10-month journey through
space to arrive at the planet Mars.  The NASA spacecraft receives its
maneuvering instructions that should put it into orbit around the red
planet, but, instead, it proceeds to do a flaming swan dive into the Martian
surface. 
ACT II - 
NASA convenes three different investigating panels including an internal
panel at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA.  Along the
corridors at the Pasadena laboratory, late into each night, hundreds of
engineers in their offices huddle over their computer terminals reviewing,
bit by bit, all of the computer codes, electronic schematics, test data, and
telemetry dumps trying to find the cause of this terrible scientific loss.
Suddenly, echoing through the corridors, up and down the stairwells, around
the corners, a single agonizing scream - 
          "Aaaawwwwww sssshhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeettttttt....!!!!!!!!!"
ACT III - 
Excerpts from a CNN News release, September 30, 1999 - 
"(CNN) -- NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because one engineering team
used metric units while another used English units for a key spacecraft
operation, according to a review finding released Thursday.  For that
reason, information failed to transfer between the Mars Climate Orbiter
spacecraft team at Lockheed Martin in Colorado and the mission navigation
team in California. Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft."
"'People sometimes make errors,' said Edward Weiler, NASA's Associate
Administrator for Space Science in a written statement."
"'Our inability to recognize and correct this simple error has had major
implications,' said JPL Director Edward Stone." 
A synopsis is at www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9903/30/mars.metric
<http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9903/30/mars.metric>  or www.jpl.nasa.gov
<http://www.jpl.nasa.gov> 

No cast party is planned.

Rick Strickert
Austin, TX

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