Strange Accidents

Blunders and Foul-ups

THE ancient Romans had a convenient word to explain why things went wrong: ``accidet.'' This did not merely mean that there had been an accident, but that it was an act of the gods, beyond Man's control and not worth fretting about. NASA'S managers, blamed for constant mishaps, must be wishing they could adopt this comforting philosophy. But instead they find themselves ruled by a much sterner 19th century rule of physics - that nothing happens without a cause, that there are no ``accidents" in the Roman sense, and that whenever something goes wrong, somebody, usually one of them, has been ``incompetent". If this is true, the incompetence of space scientists and managers must be beyond belief. The story is told (which I can well believe) of an astronomer long ago who claimed to have seen an elephant on the Moon. In fact there was a fly in his telescope lens. Another more recently said hundreds of house-sized comets were crashing daily into the oceans. Colleagues, puzzled that these comets never crashed on land, concluded that there were glitches in his satellite images.

An act of the gods?

At NASA, red faces are almost as frequent as triumphs—and have always been so. The main antenna jams on the Galileo Jupiter probe, apparently because it was jarred during road transport. Mariner I, the first interplanetary probe, vanishes on the way to Venus because of a missing hyphen in its computer software. A muddle between miles and kilometres dooms a Mars probe. An erroneous Russian command sends a mission to a Martian moon far out into the asteroid belt. A design can be perfect, but perfectly wrong, like the Hubble Space Telescope's flawed mirror. Even a well-rehearsed speech can come out as gibberish, like Neil Armstrong's "A small step for man...", when he omitted the "a". Yet perhaps the Romans may not have been entirely wrong. True, events must have causes, but the number of conceivable causes can be so gigantic as to be beyond human imagination. There so many of them that the number of dangerous risks is immeasurably multiplied. This particularly applies to space. Try answering the following two questions: (1) how were our planets arranged three billion years ago? and (2) how will they be arranged a billion years hence? If one wants precise statements and not probable guesses there is no way to answer these questions. Over time, a zillion factors can change planetary orbits. A planet could even be flung out of the Solar System. Freeman Dyson told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that he would find it dull if space missions never went wrong, and that the chances of disaster added to the excitement. It is certainly a robust way of looking at the matter, even if one that will not appeal to a NASA administrator. But at least space managers have not made the excuse that the Romans made when the "accidet" plea failed to satisfy. They would say that a disaster had to happen because it had been prophesied.