Before I have to read the science nerds posts, let me ask. How do these people still have billions of dollars in funding? Can they freaking do anything right? Lets leave space alone for a while. We are obviously losing.

Who's going to be the first joker that puts it up on EBay?

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of atoms suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced

/everyone is forgetting the real victims here. RIP solar particles

it had a "bad motivator" apparently

From the monitoring thread:

2004-09-08 11:56:39 AM Theaetetus
This'll either be really cool, or really funny.


Fark 1, Nasa 0

faster, better cheaper.

Pick two, you can't have all three

Tait123

it had a "bad motivator" apparently

You mean...Richard Simmons was on board? COOL! Yea for NASA!

WHHHHHHEEEEEE!

" Scientists had expected to study the material for five more years. "


Oh, I get it...now they'll be "studying" the cause of the malfunction for SEVEN years. Quick! Someone get these winners a few billion MORE dollars!

Boy, I sure hope somebody posts more pictures of Simpsons characters. A joke that good just gets funnier and funnier the more you do it.

The folks who think that NASA faked the moon landings often point to familiar footage of a rocket stage tumbing away from the spacecraft, shot from inside the stage. "If the footage was authentic, then how did the camera survive after the spent stage crashed into the ocean? Even if it did, how did NASA even recover it, huh?"

Well, the film cartridge was ejected from the stage and it was caught in mid-drop...by a plane towing a huge net, Wile E. Coyote-style.

The mid-air recovery scheme wasn't a dumb idea. If the chute had deployed it would probably have just worked just fine.

[/b]

pontechango
The Iridium project was a mess. Motorola and Boeing both lost huge $$$ on that folly. No one but CNN correspondents and polar explorers were interested in paying $10 per second ( ok, maybe that's a little inflated) to place a phone call. Aside from total lack of market for said service, the companies involved not only wasted their own money but they are responsible for a HUGE breech of national secutrity as a result. In order to reach an agreement to sell Iridium phones in Russia and China the US aerospace community had to give them the launch contracts for a certain amount of payloads. The Iridium payloads were launched either 3 or 5 at a time on Boeing Delta II rockets. China didn't have the technology in the guidance systems to do this with their launch vehicles. Loral and Boeing and all the rest sold them the tools and tech to put multiple payloads on one booster. Sound familiar? It's the same info needed to launch MIRVs (Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles), in lay-speak many nuclear warheads on one ride. That's what privatized space industry does for you, not to mention that your tax $s paid NASA for the technology first, which they then GAVE away to the private companies.

SPLAT!

headline at foxnews.com

I bet the company in charge of the parachute design was also in charge of this:

Lets not forget about what NASA has contributed to this world...

The obvious cheap shot is that NASA hasn't been the same since the last of its Germans died.

It's a pity this has happened, but there's always a slim chance that they can salvage some data from the wreckage, and who knows, maybe useful techniques will be developed as a result.

It is Rocket Science, folks, and sometimes things go wrong. Leaving the probe in Earth orbit wouldn't have helped, by the way; we have no means of retrieving it.

Think they'll give it a Purple Heart?

/troll on!

Somebody go back to town and get me a shiateload of BONDO!

i'm sorry, i find this hilarious.

"The capsule has suffered extensive damage. It has broken apart on the desert floor," said an official on NASA TV...

The sturdy container contained atomic isotopes collected as particles streaming off the sun, known as the solar wind...

In other words, the probe "broke wind"...

/obvious

Wow, that was a really stupid idea, and I don't even have to sit down and do the math to know so. Sounds like NASA hired all the bozos that were in my engineering classes that didn't have one ounce of common sense, who would put forth the most hairbrained ideas.

Befuddled

Those bozos successfuly used the snag-the-probe-in-the-air trick to recover film from Corona spy satellites from the late '50s to the early '70s. Parachutes have been used for space recovery since, well, the START of the space age. The shuttle is the only spacecraft that lands like a glider.

What moron decided it was a good idea to have a vessel that had been on 3-year mission to the Sun come back to Earth ona parachute?
Why not just have it orbit the Earth and have the Space Station people pick it up?

Xomber

Take a class on physics and maybe you'll understand this was the cheapest, PROVEN method of recovering spacecraft. How do you think astronauts got back from the moon? By a bus from the soundstage? Take a more advanced class to calculate the energy involved and you'd know that building a probe capable of matching orbits with the space station would've cost a LOT more.

Americans are spoiled by our successes and start crying like whiny biatches when our expensive endeavors to improve our knowledge occasionally go splat. If you've learned everything you want to know about the Universe, put down your Bible and go whittle a stick or something.

/Traveling through space ain't like dusting crops, boy!

Is it just me, or does the picture of that guy walking towards the capsule look really fake?

The helicopter pilots were actually movie stunt men who were capable of plucking this thing outta the air.

Stunt pilots were used because military pilots could not make the six year commitment to the project. After all, they used to do somethng quite similar 30 years ago.

NeonSnake, we got a Tempur-Pedic last year. Absolutely love the thing!

Putting money in Nasa : instead of using it to improve life on earth.... is like buying stock in Nabisco: instead of buying food for your starving family.

Well put, Prussian_Roulette.

/golf clap

This depressed me. Three years and all that anticipation, with all that scientific potential, just to get farked on the last stage of the trip.

I bet you alot of NASA workers are going to be drowning their sorrows with burbon tonight.

I'll always remember where I was when the Genesis capsule crashed.

"to touch the face of God"

/weeps

Where's Reagan when we need him?

It's OK. We've still got the Mars trips to look forward to.

"Aerobraking manuever: complete."
"Lithobraking manuever: BONUS!"

Obviously a major malfunction.

Oh, and for the people who wanted airbags? Not going to work nearly as well for things landing on Earth vs. Mars. Hint: It has to do with the planetary mass. (Cripes, even an English major knows that one.)

Those bozos successfuly used the snag-the-probe-in-the-air trick to recover film from Corona spy satellites from the late '50s to the early '70s. Parachutes have been used for space recovery since, well, the START of the space age. The shuttle is the only spacecraft that lands like a glider.

Prussian_Roulette, I was commenting on the idea of spinning the satellite for stability during reentry, not on the plan to catch it out of the air with a helicopter.

People: Space exploration is still in its infancy - expect failure. Besides, NASA has been able to pull of some pretty amazing stuff lately on Mars and Saturn. so let's not give them too much crap if they can't catch a ball now and then. (they are nerds after all)

Genesis crashed, A NASA engineer was quoted as saying 'I don't care anymore'. When asked about their quality control procedures, one scientist said 'we're throwin it all away' and another, when asked about extraterrestrial contaminents in the probe was quoted as saying 'it's no fun being an illegal (space) alien'

xlsport

The Iridium payloads were launched either 3 or 5 at a time on Boeing Delta II rockets. China didn't have the technology in the guidance systems to do this with their launch vehicles. Loral and Boeing and all the rest sold them the tools and tech to put multiple payloads on one booster. Sound familiar? It's the same info needed to launch MIRVs (Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles), in lay-speak many nuclear warheads on one ride. That's what privatized space industry does for you, not to mention that your tax $s paid NASA for the technology first, which they then GAVE away to the private companies.

Very interesting. So was that the big national security debacle that Al Gore was responsible for? Allowing the Iridium payloads to go up?

Genesis never would have crashed and burned had Steve Hackett not left.

/or Peter Gabriel, if you prefer . . .

//"Negative . . . didn't go in . . . just impacted on the surface"

So... this means we won't get to see Robin Curtiss pon farking an adolescent Spock after all?

SOMEHOW, it's all that wascally wepubican Bush's fault. Did you know that anything that goes wrong is Bush's fault?

Funny, the image on television looks a little different...

yehti7

No, but you know if it was caught successfully, he sure as hell would have took credit for the success.

When did NASA start taking lessons from the Keystone Kops?

I'm sure that NASA is in a land of confusion right about now. Perhaps, with this project, they just went in too deep. Well... like it or not, NASA's done a lot of good for us. So I'm sure that after the ordeal, they'll be able to recover some face. But me and Sara Jane aren't gonna hold our collective breath.