#mariner 1

[duck-duck-newton]

The NASA employee seeing Mariner 1 veering towards shipping lanes 

[humanoidhistory]

55 YEARS AGO TODAY – Here’s a fun fact: The Mariner 1 mission only lasted 4 minutes and 53 seconds. Shortly after launching the Venus-bound space probe from Cape Canaveral on July 22, 1962, a range safety officer was forced to remotely destroy the probe-carrying Atlas-Agena rocket when it flew off course. What caused this catastrophe? Legend has it that a dropped hyphen in coded computer instructions lead to the rocket’s guidance blunder. Years later Arthur C. Clarke wrote that NASA’s first attempt to explore Venus was "wrecked by the most expensive hyphen in history.”

As they say, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. But it wasn’t a missing hyphen. More likely it was a missing overbar like you see here:

This “overbar transcription error” happened when an oh-so-imperfect human being forgot to include the superscript bar, or overline, when transcribing the guidance instructions thingamajig data into the programming for the flight. Ouch. Lesson learned, NASA moved quickly to successfully launch the duplicate Mariner 2 probe just over a month later on 27 August 1962.

(Sources: 1, 2, 3)

[9to5buzzcom]

On Jul 22, 1962, The Mariner 1 Space Probe was forced to self-destruct minutes after launching.

[theinvisiblenarad]

The Impact Of Mariner 1's Failure On Space Exploration Strategies -

Discover the shocking truth behind Mariner 1's catastrophic failure! Learn how a simple coding error derailed NASA's mission to Venus and pa

[grandpadinosaur]

Teething Troubles 1962: America’s first space mission to another planet came to a very premature end. The Mariner 1 spacecraft was supposed to fly past Venus, but the rocket carrying the spacecraft began to behave erratically soon after lift-off from Cape Canaveral, forcing NASA to blow it up five minutes into the flight.

[astronotmovie]

Night flight to Venus. Mariner 1 blasting off in 1962. http://bit.ly/FBAstro

[ultimavoce]

Il breve volo del Mariner 1

#Mariner1: Quando dimenticare un piccolo trattino causa la perdita di 18,5 milioni di dollari.

Quando dimenticare un piccolo patetico trattino come questo ( – ) può causare la perdita di 18,5 milioni di dollari. E’ la storia del Mariner 1

La storia della conquista dello spazio è una storia di progresso scientifico e tecnologico, di coraggio, ricerca, tenacia e… fesserie, perché non c’è nessuna attività dell’uomo, complessa o elementare che sia, immune dalla perniciosa categoria dei Fessi.

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[mindblowingfactz]

The Mariner 1 probe, which was meant to orbit Venus, failed because of a missing hyphen in a line of code.