European Space Agency suffers another setback

As reported in USA Today, the European Space Agency has suffered another major setback with the loss of a satellite that failed to reach orbit and broke up.

MOSCOW (AP) — A European Space Agency satellite that was to have collected data on polar ice broke up in flight after being launched on a converted ballistic missile, a Russian space agency official said Saturday.

Remnants of the satellite crashed into the ocean, Vyacheslav Davidenko, a spokesman for the Russian Federal Space Agency, told The Associated Press.

The loss of the CryoSat satellite is a major blow to the agency, which had hoped to conduct a three-year mapping of polar sea ice and provide more reliable data for the study of global warming.

The incident also damaged the reputation of the Russian space agency, which is aggressively trying to move into the commercial satellite launch business. German news reports said the satellite cost an estimated $210 million.

The problem appeared to be with the booster rocket that was supposed to lift the CryoSat unit into orbit, Davidenko said.

"The booster unit did not switch on and it resulted in the failure of the satellite to reach orbit," he said. "The remnants of the satellite have fallen into the northern Arctic Ocean."

This major mission failure follows on the heels of the ESA's disastrous Mars lander mission, where the lander separated from the orbiter and headed for the Martian surface, never to be heard from again. And it points out a simple fact that is sometimes lost on the American public: space missions, manned or otherwise, are extremely complex undertakings. There are a multitude of highly complicated procedures and processes, for the most part computer-controlled, which must take place exctly as planned for any space mission to succeed.

We really shouldn't be surprised when a mission fails. We should be surprised that so many go as planned. And we should be astonished at the ingenuity and technical expertise and flexibility that has enabled many missions which experienced difficulties, such as Apollo 13 and the Hubble Space Telescope, to be salvaged short of the worst possible outcome.