Will Polar Lander's Design Flaw Help or Hurt NASA?

NASA, once the federal government's crown jewel, has been under Congress's microscope in recent years as politicians have squabbled over the agency's value in the post-Cold War era. Critics and advocates of slashing NASA's budget both received plenty of fodder from a federally commissioned report released Tuesday on what went wrong with the $165 million Mars Polar Lander. The report, assembled by former NASA executive Thomas Young, concludes that the Polar Lander broke into bits on the planet's rocky red surface because of a design flaw that turned off the braking system too soon, causing it to hit the ground at about 50 miles per hour.

For those on Capitol Hill in favor of reducing NASA's role (or doing away with it altogether), the report offers proof of how flawed the agency's management is, particularly at its Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, which operates the Mars missions. Factor in the botched mission of the Mars Climate Orbiter, which burned up in the Red Planet's atmosphere three months earlier because someone forgot to convert miles into meters, and in the past year the lab has squandered more than $300 million of taxpayer money through human error.

But the report also cites a lack of funding as one of the principal causes of failure. Young concludes that funding restraints prevented the engineering team from running a software simulation that would have caught the defect. That, of course, is sure to fuel the argument for increasing the agency's funding: No matter how pricey that software is, you can bet it's somewhat less than the $165 million worth of machinery that came apart on the Red Planet's surface.