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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Has there ever been a major unmanned project like this that blew up on takeoff/failed in orbit in recent years?

I was listening to the huge list of gear they put on this thing by a project lead and the years of hard work by scientists and it would have been heartbreaking if it failed catastrophically.

https://youtu.be/Ljh2BKdjpmE

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During the JWST streams I recall hearing this is why they went with the Ariane 5 as it is the most reliable launch platform. It might not be fancy, reusable or even fastest or most powerful, but it will reliably lift the payload, not explode, and deliver it to orbit at just the right speed. Same rocket was used for Juice.

There were a few Earth Observation missions that didn't make orbit about 10-15 years ago. This was due to a failure of the Taurus-XL fairing separation.

The orbiting carbon observatory (OCO) failed to reach orbit in 2009 [1]. It got a replacement (a good thing, given how important these measurements are.

Glory [2] would have had a really cool polarimiter (measuring light polariasation as well as radiance, in a range of different directions, but it failed in 2011 for the same reason as OCO. Unfortunately, it didn't get a replacement.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(satellite)

A good summary of NASA's robotic mission failures: https://astronomy.com/news/2020/12/nasas-failures-robotic-sp... mostly early ones as NASA developed a better process and understanding for getting things right the first time.

YouTube JPL channel has a whole series of videos on all the major robotic missions and their engineering challenges.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTiv_XWHnOZqFnWQs393R...

Not sure if you count Zuma. Didn't really "blow up", but it did fail to separate from the 2nd stage.

IIRC, the USSR had really bad luck with the various probes they sent to Mars. A couple crashed, and I think one or two got off course and were lost.

Idk about Mars but that was definitely the experience on Venus (which was far more understandable since they were sending metal balls that would be crushed under pressure within minutes). Only survived about 2-3/10.

Feels like Mars eats most probes. Mars96 and Mars polar observer come to kind immediately. I believe my name was on a cd on one of them as an early internet thing you could do. Never made it to mars.

At least your name is floating on a disc in space that's still pretty cool.

But I wouldn't count the Venus probes as failures. Initially, they had no idea what the conditions would be like, so they built more and more robust probes until they did manage to land on the surface without dying immediately.

For some missions I think there's an exact copy left on earth for easier debugging/testing

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