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Comment by troymc | Hacker News Reader

The Ariane 5 rocket was carrying four ESA spacecraft known as "Cluster" (because they were to work together, in a tetrahedral formation). The bug and subsequent failure give another meaning to the word "clusterf%#k".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_%28spacecraft%29

Edit: The above Wikipedia article has the Ada source code that caused the problem.

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I worked on the Cluster project as a software developer for many years, at the University of Sussex in Brighton. My first job. And it blew up. Great first job. I was watching live with hundreds of engineers and scientists at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. There was silence. All we could hear were birds singing, coming over the satellite link. Quite an experience. Amazingly, the Cluster project got up and running with replacement hardware a few years later, and I was back on the job.

Don't pretty much all launches have insurance? The rate of failure is high enough that it seems necessary unless you are a gambler.

Commercial payloads, yes, government payloads tend to "self-insure" or not insure at all.

Monetary compensation isn't everything, if you've already put years of effort into a project and the failure means additional years of effort are required to prepare for a new launch. The wikipedia article notes that replacement spacecraft were not launched until four years later.

Indeed, Cluster II was a brilliant success, with over 10 years of successful scientific operations in space. Kudos for any part you played in that.

+1 for excellent reverse etymology.

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