Another of our space craft is missing (...and another...and another)
By Robert Matthews

TO lose one spacecraft on the planet Mars may be a misfortune, but to lose four in just 10 weeks really would seem like carelessness on a cosmic scale.

Lost in space: the NASA Polar Lander

As these words are written, engineers at Nasa, the US space agency, are desperately hoping to hear some binary bleeps from 170 million miles away. These will reveal whether the Mars Polar Lander has successfully touched down on the surface of the Red Planet - or whether the Wildean paraphrase has proved disastrously apt. 

If so, Nasa may be about to face the gravest challenge to its future since the Space Shuttle disaster of 1986. At stake is the reputation of Nasa as the standard bearer of mankind's exploration of space - and possibly the very future of Nasa itself. In September the once-proud space agency became the laughing stock of the western world after its £80 million Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into Mars - because Nasa had sent metric instructions to the probe, which only understood Imperial units.

 Last night Nasa engineers were desperately trying to make contact with three other probes launched shortly after the Climate Orbiter 11 months ago: the £100 million Mars Polar Lander, and two £10 million probes known as Deep Space II. The spider-like lander was supposed to have touched down near the unexplored south pole of Mars on Friday evening. Its mission was to study its frigid surroundings using cameras, weather sensors and a soil scoop to see if conditions have ever been suitable for life. So far, however, it has failed to report its safe arrival. 

The task of the two football-sized Deep Space II probes was far simpler: merely to smash into the planet at 400mph, pierce its surface and look for signs of water in the subsoil. But last night the two probes appeared to have taken their kamikaze mission rather too literally. Nothing had been heard from either of them. Nasa engineers were yesterday still insisting that it is far too early to write off the three probes as Missing in Action, let alone Presumed Dead. The Lander's main antenna could be temporarily misaligned with the Earth, they explain, or the probe could have gone into silent mode while it sorts out a problem it has detected. 

But the omens are not good. Leading space engineers have been warning of trouble for the Mars mission for weeks. Previous probes to Mars have shown the surface to be littered with boulders, and recent high-resolution images of the proposed landing site revealed it to be rougher than expected. Mission planners decided to stick with the original plan rather than switch to a second site. Yet the spindly legs of the Mars Polar Lander are ill-suited to cope with rough terrain. This has raised fears that the probe could clip a boulder on its descent, leaving it as helpless as an upturned beetle on the Martian surface.

 Concern has also been expressed about the engines used to slow the probe down from its 15,400mph approach speed to the 5mph needed for a soft landing. The lander has been fitted with a radical new design of retro-rocket, known as pulsed jet engines, which some space engineers say makes the final descent far trickier than necessary. Yet it is the silence from the two Deep Space II probes that is hardest to fathom. Their very simplicity was expected to all but eliminate the chances of failure. 

Nasa officials were yesterday suggesting that these two probes may have landed awkwardly in craters, making communication with Earth difficult. They are fast running out of time, however: both probes will have already gone into automatic transmission mode, and their batteries have barely a day's energy left to run. If anyone can rescue the situation, however, Nasa can. The agency has an astonishing record for snatching at least partial victories from the jaws of defeat. Its engineers have managed to bring damaged satellites back from the dead, make myopic orbiting telescopes see again - and, famously, rescue Apollo astronauts half-way to the Moon. 

Such tales of ingenuity and derring-do cannot hide a simple fact, however: they should never have been necessary. Yet the history of Nasa shows that they have been necessary far too often: failure is not a new phenomenon for the space agency. Despite its image as the epitome of the most advanced engineering, Nasa has been dogged by embarrassing and sometimes fatal failure since its earliest days.

 Created in 1958 following the humiliation of America by the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union the previous year, Nasa had repeated failures with its early rockets. Unable to build trustworthy boosters, the agency was forced to let the Soviets clock up one space "first" after another: first probe to Venus, first probe to Mars, first soft landing on the Moon, first man into space, first team of men, first space-walk.

 Not until 1968, when the three astronauts circumnavigated the Moon in Apollo 8, did Nasa finally overtake its superpower rivals. Even this was a success not bought without cost. Three astronauts had been killed in a fire the previous year during a test-run of the Apollo capsule; Nasa was widely blamed for ignoring the warnings of its own astronauts, and for allowing fatal design errors to go uncorrected. 

The agency came within an ace of an even more appalling disaster two years later, when the service module of the Apollo 13 moon mission exploded almost 200,000 miles from Earth. The rescue was undoubtedly a triumph of ingenuity: the cause, though, was a scandalous example of careless engineering. When all the electrical systems aboard the spacecraft were uprated to 65 volts, someone forgot to replace a single switch, rated at just 28 volts. It had melted, allowing electric current to pour into a liquid oxygen tank until it exploded. 

The rest of the Apollo moon missions went off uneventfully - which has led to the principal source of Nasa's recent woes. For with the novelty of the lunar landings long gone, the agency found itself strapped for cash. The Space Shuttle, designed 30 years ago, was supposed to solve the crucial financial problems of space flight. Re-useable and ready for new missions in just a few days, the shuttle was to have been part of an integrated project, involving an orbiting space station and a base on the moon that would ultimately lead to astronauts going to Mars. 

In attempting to make this dream a reality, however, Nasa managers leaned heavily on engineers, compelling them to stick to tight launch deadlines. Their aim was to show that spaceflight could be almost as routine as air travel. By the mid-1980s the agency was coming close to hitting its own launch schedules. But in January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger took off from Cape Canaveral in freezing conditions. Less than two minutes later, the shuttle exploded, killing all seven aboard. 

The subsequent inquiry revealed that a rubber seal on one of the boosters had been too cold to work properly. Nasa officials had been warned of the problem by engineers, but had decided to go ahead anyway - because of its insistence of meeting its dream of "routine" spaceflight. Four years later, another space shuttle carried the billion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. Within days, another appalling blunder had revealed itself: engineers discovered that the telescope's light-gathering mirror was faulty. 

The subsequent inquiry showed that an error had been made by the makers of the mirror, but it had not been spotted because Nasa had dispensed with extra tests - to save money. It took another half-a-billion-dollar Space Shuttle mission to rectify the blunder. Bizarrely, cost-cutting became official policy at Nasa shortly afterwards, following its adoption of "Better, Faster, Cheaper" as its corporate mission-statement. But the loss of an earth-observing satellite in 1997, the near-loss of a sun-watching satellite last year, and the metric-to-imperial debacle of the Mars Climate Orbiter in September, suggests that Nasa may be achieving the last of these goals, but at the cost of the first. 

That conclusion will be unavoidable if Nasa's engineers fail to make contact with its latest Mars mission. It may also prove the final straw for US taxpayers, who have seen more than a few missions vanish without trace in the cold wastes of space. For the awful truth is that they get precious little reward - other than a few natty photographs - even when these missions succeed. But when they fail, all that is left is a heap of metal on a distant planet, and a sense of an ailing organisation whose glory days are long gone.