I feel for the engineers and technicians who watched their unique baby demolish itself.
It’s been a while since that sort of thing happened to me. There was a lab fire toward the end of my second year in Ph.D. We were in the corner room of a building dedicated to our laboratory, and it was very hot (and not air-conditioned). We think that dust under one of the refrigerators may have caught fire and smoldered until the flames were noticed by an early-arriving scientist at about 7:30 AM. In any case, nothing survived in that room except for an ancient CO2 gas canister. The fact that the fire happened in a corner room did save the rest of the institute, although black sooty water vapor coated the walls of the staircase, hall and most rooms. Luckily the library was in the farthest possible location, so it wasn’t completely ruined.
Yes, all my data went up in the same smoke, but it made me redo things and go off on a slightly different and more productive tangent. My colleague also came out of it (seemingly) fine in the long run, though she was really depressed to have lost 20 years worth of archives on her earlier work, and she also lost a manuscript in progress. (Her backups were in the same room.)
Anyone else have lab horror stories of this ilk to share? Along the lines of “but the human spirit prevails” would be even more appreciated.
Of course, the Chang’e-1 spacecraft (from your link) was meant to crash into the Moon. You would have had to feel sorry for the engineers etc. if it had missed!
Whilst we’re on the subject of disasters, Beagle 2 was not meant to hit the surface of Mars quite so hard :( After the event we heard a lot about risk, project management, and shoe-string budgets, but not a lot was said about the mission scientists left with very little to show for a few years hard work. BUT it was all in the nature of the game – exploration is risky. Better to try (even if against the odds) than not to try at all. The one thing that is absolutely certain about future space exploration projects: there will be some failures.
Good point about both craft. Then I suppose I could deviate into a muse about space trash – is it such a good idea to be crashing things, on purpose or not, into objects outside the Earth’s atmosphere? It’s not like they are ever going to decompose… well, if we don’t try, we won’t know.
I also wonder if deep-sea exploration is more tricky because the pressure differential is greater? this gets even less mainstream press than space exploration.
I quite like the idea of crashing probes onto other bodies. The remains will be the tourist attractions of the future if we ever colonise the moon/Mars/etc. And we’re only talking about a small number. I think maybe 10 probes have crashed into rocky planets and moons, and maybe 20-30 have soft landed. Of course, there’s the related issue of bacterial contamination, but that’s a matter for a whole book rather than a blog comment.
Maybe we can even start loading them with tacky souvenirs that would spread around the crash site after impact. Imagine the value that those could reach at the not-yet-built attached gift shop when you tell tourist that they had been there right from the beginning!
Which reminds me…this has already happened. Apollo 12 touched down close to an earlier probe called Surveyor 3. The astronauts were able to inspect it, and even brought parts home.
Well found! The said probes could be loaded with those little yellow plastic fellows on a transparent parachute (of which I couldn’t find the exact picture).
He’d have to be quite a dare-devil to take a parachute to the moon…
The Apollo 12/Surveyor 3 story is very cool – I seem to recall some audio where one of the astronauts says something like “look over there – it’s the old Surveyor!”. Of course they knew they were landing in more or less the same place, but it still would have been an amazing moment. Kind of like traveling to the middle of Mongolia, turning left at the crooked bush, and there’s the friend you were intending to meet.
On the topic of “things crashing into other things”, wasn’t there for a long time a kind of voodoo hex on Mars missions? I think there were a bunch of Soviet and/or Russian missions that went missing, crashed or otherwise had failures as well.
As Ian says – if you build something that’s never been designed before, fly it several million kilometres, and try and land it safely, there are bound to be some failures.