smooth wombat's Journal: DART mishap follow-up

I had previously posted a rejected story about the DART spacecraft and its non-completion of its mission (see a few entries down). It now appears that the robotic craft crashed into the satellite it was supposed to rendezvous with.

From the article: Investigators blamed the collision on faulty navigational data that caused the DART spacecraft to believe that it was backing away from its target when it was actually bearing down on it.

"The inaccurate perception of its distance and speed ... prevented DART from taking effective action to avoid a collision," the summary said.

Interesting

[DisownedSky]

I was pleased to se that one of the MIB's recommendations got shot down - to effectively do away with the NRA process for the design and construction phase. All that would do is create budget-busting makework and no real improvement in quality or reduction in risk. Simply put, many fewer things would be possible under this regime because of the higher costs.

Another point - ITAR is singled out as a culprit here - the contractor couldn't properly exchange information with a foreign vendor (my guess is that

Smacks too much of...

[Billosaur]

...confusing feet and meters. I have a suspicion that if America is to stay in the space business, it needs to start investing heavily in education and getting people ready for the space age now. I think the Moon landings did a lot to inspire people and get the ball rolling, but there's been nothing comparable since, and things like this don't help. If America is losing its tecnological advantage in the space frontier, then Americans may start to wonder of they should be footing the bill for anything space-