Rocket science is hard. Famously so. Spacecraft have millions of components, each performing thousands of steps. A single mistake can jeopardise the entire mission.
Mission runners can’t simply dispatch a technician to Mars or the deep void of space to fix the problem if something goes wrong. Instead, they spend hours checking and testing every aspect of the mission to make sure everything is working as planned.
But even rocket scientists are still only human. They have their bad days and sometimes make foolish mistakes.
From forgetting to turn on the radio to farting astronauts, here are 10 of the most embarrassing space screw ups ever.
A NASA probe was destroyed by a very expensive maths error
On 23 September 1999, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) arrived at the Red Planet, ready to monitor Mars’s ever-changing weather.
First, it needed to enter orbit. Rather than using thrusters to slow down, NASA planned to skim across Mars’s thin atmosphere, using the drag as a brake.
Minutes before the manoeuvre was due to occur, the spacecraft’s signal vanished, never to be heard again.
The reason for the failure turned out to be a single number measuring how much force MCO’s thrusters were producing.
A piece of software supplied by US company Lockheed Martin provided the value in standard US units, pound-force seconds.
NASA, however, uses international standard metric units, Newton seconds. This meant the value was off by a factor of 4.45.
The mix-up meant MCO approached the planet at a much lower altitude than intended, where the atmosphere is much thicker, causing the delicate spacecraft to break apart.
Orange juice left moonwalking astronauts seriously gassy
NASA constantly measures the vital signs of its crew, ready to intervene at the slightest sign of ill health.
So, when the crew of Apollo 15 showed signs of heart irregularities, the mission doctors feared that weightlessness was unbalancing the electrolytes in their bodies.
To remedy this, they prescribed the crew of the following mission, Apollo 16, vast amounts of potassium-rich citrus and fortified orange juice.
While it might have kept their hearts healthy, the juice tasted awful, plus the acidic citrus caused some… undesirable side effects.
“I got the farts again,” John Young lamented to his colleague Charles Duke as they rested in the cramped, air-tight lunar module between moonwalks.
“I got them again, Charlie. I don’t know what the hell gives ‘em to me, I really don’t... I haven’t eaten this much citrus fruit in 20 years. And I’ll tell you one thing, in another 12 f***ing days I ain’t never eating any more.”
A UK newspaper outwitted the Soviet space programme
In 1966, the Soviet Union was firmly leading the Space Race. They’d already chalked up a litany of firsts – first satellite, first human in space, first images of the far side of the Moon.
On 3 February, the Luna 9 mission added to the list when it made the first soft landing on the Moon, touching down in the Ocean of Storms.
The robotic lander swiftly set about taking panoramas of the lunar surface for the Soviets to show off proudly. And they weren’t going to share them with the Western press.
Meanwhile, astronomers at Jodrell Bank just outside Manchester, UK, were keeping track of the mission with their huge radio telescope – one of the only facilities in the world capable of picking up the transmission.
A reporter covering the story, Terry Pattinson, realised the Russians were transmitting the images using Radiofax, the same system newspapers at the time used to send images.
Sensing the scoop of his life, Pattinson made a phone call to a field office 15 miles away. His colleagues had to knock down a wall to get the heavy machinery out of the dark room, but they managed to get the equipment to Jodrell Bank in time to intercept the images.
The next day, the Daily Express’s front cover proudly showed the world the first ever image from the surface of the Moon before even the Soviet papers had time to print it.
The Soviets started encrypting their signals after that.
Poor glueing technique almost cancelled a mission to Mars
When the launch of NASA’s Mars rover, Opportunity, was held for a few days due to bad weather, no one was too concerned – such delays happen all the time. It was only when technicians checked the rocket after the storm and found its outer layer of cork was peeling that they realised they had a problem.
Yes. Cork. The lightweight and cheap material is a fantastic insulator to protect rockets from the intense heat of launch.
The glue fixing the cork panels in place should have been spread from side to side to keep the rain out. Instead, it had been laid on from top to bottom, allowing the water to run down the panels, causing them to separate.
The technicians tried to stick the cork back on the rocket, but it kept peeling away.
After several frantic calls to the glue’s manufacturer, NASA managed to get the panels to stick, allowing Opportunity to head on its way to Mars on 7 July 2003.
Apollo 11's moonwalk footage had to be 're-filmed'
NASA knew that Neil Armstrong’s ‘one small step’ onto the Moon in 1969 would be a historic moment that the world would want to watch.
To capture the event, they mounted a special camera on the outside of Apollo 11's lunar lander, which Armstrong would deploy just as he prepared to step out onto the lunar surface.
Even for the time, the camera was very simplistic, taking black and white footage at 10 frames per second (fps). This was much slower than the standard 30fps used by broadcast TV at the time.
To convert the Moon video to something broadcasters could use, the team used a surprisingly low-tech option. They played the 10fps film on a 10-inch screen, then re-recorded the monitor with a 30fps camera.
Though low quality and grainy, the footage of the ‘giant leap for mankind’ was played and replayed across the globe. With so many recordings of the broadcast version available, the tape recordings of the original 10fps footage were largely forgotten.
In the early 2000s, however, a team searched for the recordings with the aim of creating a newer, better conversion, but the tapes were nowhere to be found.
An investigation determined that following standard procedures in the 1980s, the tapes had probably been erased and reused without realising their historic contents.
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An Apollo astronaut had terrible luck with cameras
After the grainy black and white views of the Apollo 11 mission, NASA was happy to announce Apollo 12’s TV cameras would deliver colour footage in a broadcast-ready 30fps.
Rather than being mounted on the lander, the camera was on a tripod, allowing the moonwalkers to set it up in the best position.
Unfortunately, there was one vital piece of kit the camera was missing – a lens cap.
As astronaut Alan Bean was setting up the camera during a moonwalk, he inadvertently pointed the camera directly at the Sun. The intense light of the Sun instantly destroyed the camera's light-detecting pickup tube, rendering it useless.
Bean’s bad luck with cameras didn’t end there either. In the hustle and bustle of packing up to leave, he accidentally left behind several rolls of colour photos on the lunar surface, where they remain to this day.
They visited an alien moon and forgot to turn the radio on
After seven years together while travelling to Saturn, the Cassini orbiter and Huygens lander separated from each other on Christmas Day 2004.
Huygens, operated by the European Space Agency, was on its way to Saturn’s icy moon, Titan.
It began its perilous journey through the moon’s atmosphere on 14 January 2005, successfully touching down on the icy surface.
The lander’s battery lasted just three and a half hours, but Huygens still managed to gather around 700 images of the strange moon.
As its radio wasn’t powerful enough to transmit the 1.4 billion km (900 million miles) back to Earth, it uploaded its data to Cassini. The orbiter then used its much larger radio antenna to transmit the signals back to Earth.
After years of waiting to see the images, the science team eagerly watched the data coming in, only to realise that half of them were missing.
Huygens, it turned out, had two radio channels, each serving as a backup to the other. While mission-critical data was transmitted on both to ensure it reached Earth, the operations team had attempted to double their science output by sending a different set of images on each channel.
However, they had forgotten to send Cassini the order to turn on one of its receivers. Though Huygens transmitted loud and clear on both radio channels, Cassini had only been listening to one of them.
Astronauts keep losing their toolbags
When doing DIY around the house, one thing you can usually rely on is that your toolbox won’t wander off on its own. Not so for astronauts.
In 2023, astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara were conducting a spacewalk to maintain the International Space Station’s (ISS) solar panels.
A few hours in, the pair reached for their tools only to realise a bunch had gone missing. They managed to track them down a short time later… floating behind the ISS.
Astronauts take great pains to make sure that every single thing they use during a spacewalk – including themselves – is tethered down. But sometimes a clip might get forgotten, not be done up properly, or work itself loose, and things go for a wander.
In 2017, Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson – on her eighth spacewalk at the time – lost a 1.5m (5ft) long debris shield while setting up a new docking port and were forced to watch it slowly drift away, unable to grab it.
On another spacewalk in 2008, Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper’s grease gun exploded.
While she cleaned up the mess, her tool bag slipped from her grasp, drifting off into the void.
Even during the first-ever US spacewalk in 1965, Ed White dropped one of his spare gloves. You can see it spinning towards the camera before it floats away.
Cost-cutting ended up costing the Soviets their Mars missions
The cash-strapped Soviet space programme of the 1970s needed to cut costs. At the time, they were building Mars 4 through 7, spacecraft designed to enter orbit around the Red Planet and drop off landers on the surface.
To save a few Rubles, the team swapped out the gold leads on their transistors – switches which are the basis of all advanced electronics – for aluminium ones. They were cheaper and seemed to perform equally well in testing.
Unfortunately, no one thought to check how long they lasted. Aluminium degrades much faster than gold, and so the leads began to fail after about two years, around the time it takes to build a spacecraft and get it to Mars.
Miraculously, all four survived launch, but only a few months into the journey, Mars 6 failed. Then, Mars 4 messed up its correction burn, missing the planet by 1,800km (1,100 miles). Mars 5 made it as far as orbit before it sprang a leak. Mars 7 released its lander and looked like it might make it, only to fire its engines the wrong way.
It seemed like all was lost until a surprise signal appeared – from Mars 6!
It was just the transmitter that failed. It had carried on its mission and released its lander, which was now communicating directly with Earth. It fired its thrusters the right way, made its way through the atmosphere successfully, touched down and started broadcasting from the surface.
For 1.3 seconds, before it, too, died.
A new addition to the ISS left astronauts in a spin
The Russian-built Nauka module arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on 19 July 2021, a mere 14 years behind schedule.
At first, all seemed to be well. The crew were preparing to open the hatch when a computer glitch caused Nauka’s thrusters to fire.
With the crew unable to turn them off again, the ISS fired its own thrusters to keep the station steady until Nauka ran out of fuel around 40 minutes later.
During the tug of war, the station had flipped over one and a half times, which came as something of a surprise to the astronauts, who reportedly felt nothing.
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