"You make a thing foolproof and they invent a better idiot" - somebody, sometime

One of my favorites was when NASA sent up a nice, new, high res digital camera up to the ISS, and forgot to include the memory card to go with it.

7:50 Russian scientists: "Venus is composed entirely of lens caps!"

I was watching the live coverage when Alan Bean destroyed his camera, and you left out the best part of the story. While they were trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the camera, the picture seemed to clear for just an instant, and capcom said something like "what did you do?" Bean was silent for a moment, and then said meekly, "I hit it on the top with my hammer."

*Revert Flight > Revert to Vehicle Assembly Building*

Astronauts: "We're finally going to get full-color video from the Moon!" Sun: "No paparazzi!"

Yeah yeah, the LEM used 'metric'. But we all know the computer used wire-wrapped magnetic core memory which stored data in knots.

God, could you imagine actually successfully landing something on another planet, after so many failures, after all that effort, after so much money. And then realize that the lens cap won't come off.

"It had to launch, flip 180 degrees, and then turn on the engines." Soo.... they were KSPing in real life. Got it.

Who knew that despite the appearance of a rocky mineral surface, Venus was in fact made of plastic & rubber

I think there's one that ought to get a special mention for being a dumb moment that actually turned out really well. When testing out the Apollo launch vehicle abort system (that solid rocket mounted on top of the capsule) they launched a boiler plate with a functional abort system on board a test rocket called Little Joe. However one of the steering fins had been wired up wrong so when the rocket started to roll, instead of correcting the role, the fin that was wired up the wrong way exacerbated it until the rocket broke up. However, this triggered the abort system to fire. It functioned flawlessly and pulled the boiler plate capsule free of the disintegrating rocket before it could be significantly damaged. What's more it had done so under conditions that were far closer to what an actual in-flight emergency would be like than the simulated emergency ever would have been

"John, this accelerometer on this very sensitive guidance system for a hugely complex apparatus that has to be checked dozens of times to make sure the millions of funds don't go down the drain is a bit tough to mount. Is this the correct way of doing it?" "Just use the sledgehammer I wanna go home."

Two incidents that I missed (those would be on my top 10 list): 1. The NOAA-19 satellite Prior to launch, the satellite tipped over and fell to the ground, because a technician had removed the bolts securing an adapter plate to it, and he forgot to document his action. Repair cost: $135 million. The satellite eventually launched into orbit where it's still operating. 2. The Genesis spacecraft It collected samples of solar wind, and was to be returned to Earth in a capsule. However, the parachute didn't work because of an accelerometer that was installed backwards (deja vu). Luckily, while the capsule was destroyed at impact, some of the samples remained intact and could be used for science. Anyone else who is reminded of Murphy's law? It is worth noting that the original story told by Edward A. Murphy Jr. involved an accelerometer installed backwards!

Here I am trying to laugh at these mistakes when I realize, I put my underwear on backwards this morning.

Number 10: Rocket mounted upside down, then turns 360 degrees. Sounds like Kerbal meets Wile E. Coyote.

"The accelerometers could still be put upside down if you brute force it." This is literally the most Russian thing I've heard in a while.

No matter how much you screw up in rocket science... There will always be fireworks to cheer you up =)

My favorite one that wasn't listed: The Mercury-Redstone 1 mission. A launch disconnect plug that connected the booster to the pad didn't quite fit the socket on the booster correctly, so a pad technician cut a quarter inch off one of the prongs without telling anyone. When the rocket lifted off the plug came out as designed but one prong disconnected a few milliseconds before the other, which sent an error signal to the booster indicating a launch failure and shutting the engine down. Meanwhile, the accelerometers in the capsule detected the acceleration as the stack lifted about 2" of the pad then felt the deceleration when the engine shut down and took that to mean it was at the end of powered flight, and it was time to jettison launch escape tower. Then the capsule fired the chaff intended to assist in tracking as it descended and ejected the parachute.

Scott I agree entirely that the Space Shuttle was a technical marvel but failed spectacularly in its primary mission in reducing the cost of lofting payloads into orbit. However, NASA’s SLS simply trumps the Shuttle for being the dumbest mistake. The SLS rocket takes all of its components developed for the ‘re-usable’ Space Shuttle (RS-25 engines, hydrogen tank and solid rocket boosters) and intends to use them in an expendable design. The cost of launching the SLS Is so astronomically high that NASA can only afford one or two flights a year. Additionally, NASA is hunting around for missions to fly on this boondoggle. Finally, as if to add insult to injury, the development cost for the rocket is billions over budget and is years behind schedule even though the components are ‘tried, tested and off the shelf’. You could not make this sound more farcical even if you tried.

"people are very very good at finding new ways to do things badly"- those are some wise words

Project manager to lens cap guy: "You had _ONE_ job!"

To be fair: getting a lens cap ejected that's being pressed down on by the *pressure of Venus atmosphere* is actually no trivial feat.

A hilarious dumb mistake is in the beginning of the book "Ignition" where the head of NARTS(?) wanted to test the ignition time of various hypergolic fuels. He had an elaborate piece of test equipment built that was going to make very precise time measurements and film the shock waves of the exhaust of the miniature rocket motor built into the equipment. The very first time they tried to use it, the oxidizer valve leaked. One of the techs saw it and told the boss it was leaking. The boss, who wanted to see his new toy work for the first time, told him to go ahead and fire the motor. Every one in the lab backed away. Liquid fuel motors don't like excess fuel or excess oxidizer in the combustion chamber, so this one did what any rocket motor would do. It blew up. The author wrote that he clapped his hand over his mouth, ran outside, and fell down laughing in the grass. Afterwards the lab crew disassembled what was left of it and 'lost' the pieces so that it would never be used in their lab again. Not a dumb hardware mistake, just a dumb management mistake.

About 25 years ago I was involved in an engineering project that was, like the Space Shuttle, a triumph of ingenuity over a really dumb idea. The problem was that the marketing men and biochemists had already ploughed so much time and money into the project *before* they involved the engineers that critical and irreversible engineering decisions had already been made by non-engineers who had no conception of the problems they were creating for us. We could have had the project completed years earlier, and at a fraction of the cost, if only we had been involved at the outset.

I'd say ignoring that one dude's warning about O-Rings and launching Challenger anyway was pretty dumb.

I think you didn't give enough credit to Schiaparelly. It's story is waaaaaay dumber xDDDD To be able to land Schiaparelli should know it's own altitude. For measuring it Schiaparelli has Inertial Measurement Unit (which by design cannot work properly when it spins too much) and radar altimeter. What happened: Stage 1. "Simulations did not provide a realistic behaviour of the parachute deployment phase". That's the tip of the iceberg. Parachute deploys, Schiaparelly dangles on shroud lines, IMU goes "ooh, I don't know what's going on. Where are we?". But, eventually, schiaparelli stabilizes. Stage 2. Schiaparelli starts spinning. Angular velocity exceeds the limits of what IMU can handle. IMU goes "ooh! I don't know what's going on. Don't believe the data I send". Seems like it has reacted as it should, right? Nope. It sent 'failure' signal waaaay too late (in theory, "the persistence of IMU saturation time" BELIEVED to be 15 ms, but in reality no one checked). So, IMU was sending incorrect data for quite some time. That incorrect data was taken into calculations, which in turn showed that Schiaparelli is UPSIDE-DOWN. On a parachute. Upside-down. Is that even possible? Ah, nevermind! Further calculations showed that altitude is NEGATIVE. Which means that Schiaparelli flies somewhere INSIDE the Mars. "Placet is a Crazy Place" by Fredric Brown, anyone? Stage 3. Programmers aren't that stupid. If IMU signals 'failure' for more than five seconds, backup navigation system turns on: radar altimeter. But this isn't just radar altimeter, this is radar doppler altimeter, which means that it measures change of altitude, not it's absolute value. So, to work correctly, altimeter needs a starting point. Guess what starting point it got? Yup! "We're under the surface of Mars". Stage 4. Since we're under the surface, we don't need parachute, right? Seems logical. "Release the parachute!" *crazy mode* Since we're under the surface, we NEED landing thrusters! "Switch-on RCS!" *3 seconds later* The criteria for the landing thrusters to switch off is based on the combination of the altitude and vertical velocity. Again, seems logical. Sooo... "Uhm. My mistake. We don't need landing thrusters. We've landed already. Turn RCS off as soon as possible." Stage 5. Yet another man-made crater on Mars. This is from official report: Recommendation 05 - Robust and reliable sanity checks shall be implemented in the on-board S/W to increase the robustness of the design, which could be, but not limited to : - Check on attitude - Check on altitude sign (altitude cannot be negative). - Check on vertical acceleration during terminal descent and landing (cannot be higher than gravity). - Check altitude magnitude change (it cannot change from 3.7 Km to a negative value in one second). - Check wrt pre-flight timeline (altitude or acceleration profile vs time) to check consistency of measurements *facepalm*

7:32 FFS if it's on Venus, you don't even need to take the cap off, just design it to dissolve faster.

you missed challenger engineers said, "It's to cold the O ring seals will fail." How many dead?

Does the accelerometer mounted upside down mean that the controls are reversed, like putting the probe core upside down in KSP? They should have been suspicious when seeing a brown Navball before launch. Besides that: It sounds like something that could be checked (or even corrected) by software.

I love the idea of an engineer smashing away and cursing loudly at this "ill-fitting" accelerometer as they brute force it in place upside down. Sounds like my relationship with IKEA.

In the early years my father worked at Cape Canaveral in rocket guidance. I have a vague memory of him telling me of a spectacular failure due to someone programming in the square root of a negative number.

Hi. Your video really brought back related memories! Thanks! Here’s my story as a bidder in govt space/high tech ... In the mid-late 80S, 1988, I believe, I went to WDC to a bidders conference. The govt has public bid solicitation and review conferences for EVERYTHING. I was an independent tech consultant, working hard to make a buck anywhere I could. (Still am.) During the conference, Air Force Colonel Frederick Gregory, a space shuttle commander, came out at one point and gave a talk (to encourage serious participation) for US vendors, talked about so,e of the available RFPS, and begged the consulting USA vendors and manufacturers community to make parts the govt needed. He indicated many Asian companies were the only ones who were bothering to make and supply gasoline tank caps for our military vehicles, that the market was there, and to please jump in and compete. He also said that the newest space shuttles looked all high-techie, and everyone’s read about all they can do, but they ALL ran on ancient avionics systems that went back even 18+ years. With the commercial microcomputer boom, NASA still had to follow contract specs that were absurdly old, and contractors and designers weren’t allowed to keep up with commercial developments/upgrades that were exponentially surpassing taking the ancient specifics for spacecraft guidance and avionics control and internal computer systems. Note, the B2 had i386 controlling computers, written into spec as using 386 Intel based processors. When the public learned of these new amazing stealth planes as finally becoming integral to US defense Military defense, home consumers had ALREADY been using home computers 2-3 generations ahead of the systems. Govt contracts were sending out RFPs for stuff that was old, slow, far more expensive and out of date once again for production of the technological “wonders” PR firms were working overnight to convince the general public they needed to give unlimited budgets to to keep ahead of our enemy for our National Security™. I always laugh when I think back to that eye opening bidders conference. Side note: Col. Gregory was a most impressive man. I had so much respect for him afterwards. He was very approachable, very open and kind. it an honor to meet him. Old tech in the latest wizz-bang gizmos and what’s the price difference between keeping contracts to CURRENT tech in basic design may be another subject. Thank you! Your vids are very interesting! Just found them and I could watch all night. As a matter of fact, I have been. It’s almost 3:30 am. I gotta get up and start working very soon! TJ 11/12/2019 If you want direct contact, please tell me how.

Personally, I think the biggest accomplishment of the shuttle program was the fact that it fixed Hubble. If it wasn't for a vehicle with the design and idea of the shuttle, we'd never have been able to perform such a fix. It may have been expensive and a waste at times, but every time I see the deep field I'm reminded of the fact that without it, we may have very well given up on looking as deep into space as we are. Without the shuttle fixing it, there'd be no James Webb space telescope in development.

Some Soviet space failures could've been in the list, if they were not so tragic: 1) R-16 disaster in 1960. When a cocky general persuaded that the rocket was safe, and set himself near the launch place as a proof. Dozens of engineers and commanders didn't want to risk their reputation, so they followed him. All burnt. 2) Soyuz-11 depressurization. Which happened because of duralumin flax at high attitude, a phenomenon known since WW2. 3) N-1. A flawed idea costed billions of rubles.

Hubble: Worlds most perfectly wrong object.

RE: Venera: "Da, Tovarisch. It appears Venus is made of aluminum. No, not ore - the good stuff."

I might have chosen Apollo I for first place, but admittedly it would be tough to put in a light-hearted video. Another would be the "Nedelin catastrophe" Honorable mention could go to Wernher von Braun: He need to get data on the terminal phase of a V2 test, and figured the safest place to be was the calculated impact point, since the rocket NEVER lands there. On that particular day it very nearly DID, and WvB , along with an assistant, was blown 6 feet or so into the air, and nearly killed.

I've had KSP decide to do #2 to me... Sucks when you attempt launch 15 times trying to figure out why it's spinning out of control, only to realize the rocket thinks it's pointed at the ground. Sucks more in real life, though. 😆

Seems to me the absolute dumbest thing was the decision to launch Challenger when it was too cold and the lead engineer was saying it wasn't safe.

My god, converting 64 bits to 16 bits is such a classic mistake just like using two sets of units.

The early Thor missile test and the turbopump failures are a good SNAFU too. General Schriever would not allow the rocket motors to be removed to be fitted with an improved turbopump, insisting on a change of lubricant instead. The result was six more launch failures. Duh!

Tip to future rocket makers dont design your accelerator to look the same on the top as the bottom.

12:33 “the accelerometer was *PUTIN* upside down.”

tbh, the explosion of that proton M was so fabulous that it almost worth the cost.

My college software engineering class covered the Ariane 5 disaster when we were talking about the major mistakes that have been made in program development. One thing of note that I thought was particularly dumb about the decision was that they gave the backup computer the exact same programming, so that right after the primary computer failed, the backup took over, and then immediately made the same error. IIRC They copied the code because they wanted the backup to solve the case of a hardware failure in the primary computer, not a software failure, which makes sense, but was short-sighted. Great video Scott!

The acceleratometer issue is a big enough thing that is t has spawned a corollary to Murphy's Law: "Any component that can be mounted backwards, eventually will". Another related incident my lecturer on re-entry systems has told about was a lander (can't remember which one) which had an accelerometer that was to be sued to trigger the parachute release, but which was mounted backwards, meaning that the parachute wouldn't be able to trigger, and the whole thing would pancake into the ground. The thing was though that it didn't. For some reason, the parachute did deploy, and only 1 second later than intended. So apparently someone, somewhere had made another critical mistake in the software, that resulted in everything working after all. "So remember kids, always make sure you've got an even number of idiots on your team. That way, their mistakes will cancel out."

One other honorable mention concerning Apollo 12. They left a whole canister of film on the surface of the moon and realized it when it was too late for them to go retrieve it.

For me, the number one event was repeatedly ignoring flames coming out the seals on the space shuttle solid rocket boosters! The flames were observed on multiple launches and essentially ignored, that is, until the Challenger explosion.

The Space Shuttle was like a car that needed to be stripped down to almost all of its individual components and reassembled after every drive.

Very good. I used to be a software engineer for an aerospace company and I often brought up the Ariane V crash. It is a great example of the dangers of software reuse. (Software reuse in safety-critical systems is one of those things that sounds good in theory, but in practice it seldom works out. It is a favorite of young engineers and managers.) I was ignored, of course, so the company spent millions in an attempt to save thousands.

You had me at, "they were testing the properties of the lens cap."

One of my favorite space mistakes happened during the development of the Apollo Command Module. They were testing the launch escape system. One of the gyros in the rocket was hooked up backwards. It began to spin and broke apart. The failure caused the LES to automatically fire before they could manually do it. Lost the vehicle but the test was a success.

"..testing the properties of the lense cap instead of testing the properties of venus!" LOL xD

"Every time a moon landing denier opens their mouth, that's pretty dumb". Absolute. Savage.

15:50, That Sir, is the true definition of Murphy's Law: "No matter how many good ways there are to do something, there will always be someone who does it the wrong way"

Re: Mars and messed up conversions: Even though I'm from the USA and I'm so used to Imperial, I do dabble in metric, and I see the wisdom in just going with metric everywhere and throwing Imperial away.

0:21 "So uh, to distract from it, I figured I would highlight some other peoples' dumb moments in space and rocketry" FTFY :P

I worked on commercial space communication satellites in the period shortly after the Ariane 5 flight 1 disaster. Customers were reluctant, to say the least, to put their satellite on Ariane 5 flight 2.

11:40 ill admit ive tried this in KSP thinking it would keep pulling on top of the rocket to keep it straight. I learned very quick.

How can you "accidently" tape over footage from the biggest event in human history??? Its like "accidently" painting over the mona Lisa or "accidently" bulldozing the great piramids🤔🙄🙄🙄🙄

So Scott, when are you going to try to get to the Mun in KSP using a pendulum rocket? Should make for an interesting challenge.

The Venera lens cap testing made me spew my soup. Dammit.

How about the fact that the Proton rocket did not come with a self-destruct mechanism meaning that when the rocket went off track we got the maximum degree of damage (credit to Tim Dodd for including this tidbit in his excellent video on big booms).

Hmm yes, the floor here is made out of lens caps.

Another candidate for inclusion is the Apollo CSM oxygen tank thermometers. The tanks were designed to be able to handle temperatures up to 81 degrees (freedom units*). For those unfamiliar with freedom units, 81 degrees is a pleasantly warm day, slightly above typical room temperature. Since oxygen boils at -297 freedom units, the engineers figured there was no way in hell an operational oxygen tank would ever reach 81 degrees, so the thermometers didn't display temperatures higher than that and as a result wouldn't tell the operators if the tank got too hot. Enter CSM-109. At some point during assembly, the shelf with oxygen tank number two from CSM-109 was dropped from a forklift. Inspections failed to reveal damage to the vent valve, so, thinking the spacecraft was safe, NASA went ahead and used it. In reality, the valve was jammed closed, but they didn't know that. CSM-109 was mounted to SA-508 and rolled out in the spring of 1970 to be used on Apollo 13. During a launch rehearsal, the tank was filled with oxygen as it would be for a real mission. When the test was over, the tanks were drained so they wouldn't have to try to keep the oxygen cold for several more days until the launch. This is where the problems began. Since the valve was jammed, they couldn't drain the oxygen normally. Not knowing what the actual problem was, they came up with an alternate solution: use the onboard heaters to raise the temperature to 81 degrees and boil the oxygen off. This strategy should have taken a few days. This actually would have been fine, except there was another issue: the thermostats were designed to run on the CSM's 28v power supply, but the spacecraft was connected to the pad's 65v power supply. This caused the contacts on the thermostats to fuse shut, which prevented them from displaying the actual temperature. While the indicated temperature was 81 degrees, the actual temperature was about 1,000. This got the oxygen out much faster than intended, but also melted the insulation on wires in the tank. With exposed wiring in an oxygen tank, something was bound to go wrong, and on the third day of the mission, they did. Shortly after finishing a TV broadcast, which, due to networks losing interest in the scientific missions after the space race was won, wasn't broadcast to anyone except the mission controllers, some other NASA personnel, and some of the astronauts' families at mission control, the tanks were stirred to help increase the accuracy of tank readings. About 90 seconds later, the exposed wiring caused an explosion that resulted in the loss of all the oxygen from both tanks, damage to the antenna, and potential damage to the engine. No more needs to be said about this, because every single person who's read this far, and 99.9% of people watching this video, know the story of Apollo 13 in detail. Even the general public knows this story reasonably well, since they made a movie about it. *Freedom units used because my source for this information was Jim Lovell's book, which uses freedom units. Both because of the fact that he knows more about Apollo 13 than just about anyone else on or off the planet and because I don't want to look up conversions at the moment, I'm leaving them like that.

"Testing the properties of the lens cap" :D

Scott: **Makes a mistake** Also Scott: **Roasts big mistakes to distract from his mistake** A man after my own heart, Scott.

Speaking of space mistakes, I saw your Saturn V and had to poke a little fun. I just built the Revell 1/144 Apollo Saturn V and after I showed it off I was told that no Apollo/Saturn V ever has the red USA marking on the S-IV-B third stage. It was only on Apollo 7 which was sent up on a Saturn 1B. I looked up images of each Apollo Satyrn V and sure enough, I had to remove the USA from the 3rd stage. I windered why CultTVman did not include them in the decal sheet I bought from him. Great channel. Cheers. 😁

Correction: the Hubble mirror was the most PRECISELY ground mirror. . Precise, but inaccurate. TRW.

I feel as though Apollo 1 was the biggest mistake of all time. "Make the whole atmosphere out of oxygen, that will work out well!!"

Looking back three years after this posting, I can still hear the final summary evaluation: "It seemed like a good idea at the time". The only thing more descriptive might be: "Oops".

I love this guy! just found him through SciShow, love the presentation, delivery and humnour as well as the Science! keep it up!

One of my dumbest mistakes (in KSP): forgetting to turn off gravity hack (for testing munar rover) and spending a half hour trying to figure out why I couldn't control my rocket properly.

Here's a few I'd add as honorable mentions: 1) The Second N1 Test: Basically, the USSR attempted to develop their own answer to the Saturn series of rockets in an attempt to beat the Americans to the moon (as much as the Russians love to deny that they ever wanted to land on the moon to save face), and their answer was the N1, which is still the most powerful launch vehicle ever built...or it would be if it actually worked right. In all honesty, all of the tests of of this launcher were failures, but the second one in particular stands out the most. Basically, it had a pretty severe design flaw in its fuel system, which could cause its engines to cut out due to oscillations. During the second test, that's exactly what happened, causing the rocket to fall back to the launchpad shortly after liftoff and explode in the largest man-made, non-nuclear explosion in history. 2) The Progress M-34 Incident: Rather than a launch vehicle, this incident involved two spacecraft: an unmanned supply ship and the Mir space station. Following the collapse of the USSR, the Russian space program was having problems regarding expenses, and one of the major costs that they felt was worth cutting was the 'Kurs' guidance system for their unmanned Progress supply craft for provisioning the Mir space station, as these guidance systems were made in Ukraine and they were being charged through the nose for it. The Russians decided to try using the manual TORU docking system instead, sending up two Progress supply craft, M-33 and M-34, to conduct a test. M-33 missed the station entirely, while M-34 crashed into the 'Spektr' module, causing the station to depressurize and forcing the crew to seal off the module permanently. Unfortunately, the station received a lot of its power from the solar panels attached to Spektr, and the loss of this power caused further problems down the line. 3) Apollo 1: This one can be summed up pretty simply: faulty wiring + pure oxygen atmosphere + a hatch that takes a really long time to open = three dead astronauts whose deaths were preventable. 4) Destruction of the Challenger: Another preventable accident seeing as an engineer identified the problem that eventually resulted in the destruction of the aforementioned space shuttle ahead of time, but the guys in charge chose to ignore him. Seven astronauts died because of their hubris.

"I mispronounced jupiter as-" how do you mispronounce jupiter? Joopiter? "Saturn" Oh

I saw this video today, and it’s posted 6 years ago! Still as valuable as the one I saw last week! Cudos for keeping at it, you’re still going very strong! Keep it up, I think we are all enjoying it! 👍😊

That lens cap one.👏

The Schiaparelli story is even funnier than he said. The spacecraft was tilted more than 90 degrees which made a pseudo sinus function (that always worked for everything tilting less than 90°) to have a sudden sign flip. So instead of being 800 meters above ground, the spacecraft suddenly thought it was 800 meters BELOW ground.

12:54 and that's why they failed. It was difficult, but not impossible. As someone who makes fixtures, you need to make it ABSOLUTELY idiot proof, and have NO possible way to put stuff in the wrong way.

Love your videos ! My #1 choice in this discussion is the entirely boneheaded decision to leave Skylab in such a low orbit instead of sending a crew and strap on mini booster to nudge it up to maybe a 600 mile parking orbit for future use. (One delicious rumor is that the Russians considered doing this. What a PR masterstroke THAT would have been!)

I love how the Manly Scot says "Mirror"

Proton one reminds me of putting a probe core backward in ksp

As an employee of a major canadian industry, it is honestly painful that the US uses the imperial system. It means in canada we have to be bilingual between both and constantly adapting depending on where parts come from, where the engineering firm comes from, etc. I'm sure companies in the states dealing internationally likely have the same issue.

#2 - The Proton rocket with the accelerometers mounted upside down was the same failure as NASA's Genesis mission to sample solar wind. The sample return was designed to aerobrake, then deploy a parachute, but the sample could have been damaged by a parachute landing, so a parafoil was to be deployed and the sample was to be plucked out of the air by a helicopter. The accelerometers were installed upside down because the technician was confused about whether the arrow should point up or down. The sample return capsule never deployed the parachute and it slammed into the Utah desert. If I was a Kerbal aerospace engineer, I would not spec an accelerometer that could be installed upside down.

Brazil: HOLD MY BEER: We put a satellite in orbit without having any software to utilize it!

Actually, Alan Bean DIDN'T point the camera at the sun. Instead, he pointed it at the LM, where the reflection of the sun in the kapton film was bright enough to kill the vidicon tube.

Another candidate is the design of the receiver on-board the Cassini spacecraft for receiving the data from the Huygens probe as it went to Titan. The design recognised that the frequency of the signal transmitted by Huygens, as received by Cassini, would change due to the Doppler shift. But it failed to anticipate that the data rate would also change. When the people involved realised this (after Cassini was launched), the mission had to be redesigned to minimise the Doppler shift so that the data rate remained within the bandwidth of the receiver's clock recovery circuit. Another error was the failure to turn on one of Cassini's receivers, which meant half the data sent by the Huygens probe was lost! Overall, the Cassini / Huygens mission was successful, but a bit of systems engineering would've led to even more success.

Scott, I’m slowly catching up on your excellent and truly interesting videos. Yes, Space Shuttle! I think it was described at the time of building as the most complex device ever built.

Number 1: *Forgetting parachutes in KSP.*

OK... You done my heart good to have you list the Space Shuttle at the top of your list. Just curreouse if you know that you just scratched the surface with your design by committees (several) comment.... Number One;... There were two companies vying for the rocket engine contract. One that helped build the Saturn with a long track record with NASA that designed an engine that was safely relying on classical architectures even though the fuel had been changed to Hydrogen. The Second was experienced in military rockets and proposed a heat expansion of the fuel and oxygen to turn the feed pumps instead of burning some of the fuel in a preburner to turn the feed pumps. They even built a small demonstration engine. Their engine had a 20% advantage of what the legacy company promised. Giving the new company an overwhelming advantage... But the Engine program Director recompeted the engine contract giving the old lagacy company the specs of the new engine and told them to match it and he didn't care how. Then went to the new company and told them that Nasa did not believe their figures and told them that if they did not reduce their performance claims he would summeril kick them out of the competition. So the new company reduced their performance claims by 10% which was still better than the legacy company's. Then the new bids were opened and surprise, both companies engines performances matched. So the Director gave the contract to the legacy company even though his own engineers told him that they were lying... Surprise Surprise that the director retired and went to work for the legacy engine company for an outrageous salary to take long 6 month vacations... And for the Space Shuttles entire life you could hear at each launch the orbiter increasing its engine power over its designed thrust by 10 and 15%. trying to make up the difference of what they promised and what the engines could do... The new company came back after the first Obiter accident with a test engine demonstrating that their engine worked as planned at the original specs and offered to develop the full sized Shuttle engine garrentying not only the specs but the reliability as well and all Nasa had to do was garanty to lease the new engines and pay the company half the cost of the increased payload the new engines allowed the shuttle to lift.... But the new Nasa Administrator refused and when the company tried to go to congress, the administrator with the backing of the president, threatened to cancel all the companies military contract and bankrupt them.... Every time the Shuttle launched I felt sick when the engines went to 110% thrust and still the shuttle could only lift half the payload originally promised into orbit. (Believe it, Nasa reduced the orbital lift requirements when it was apparent early in the program that the shuttle would never lift the original load to LOE with its existing engines.even after increasing the size of the solid rocket boosters. Without the bigger boosters it could not even lift itself into orbit even after the weight of the flying brick had had been cut for the tenth time... With the newer tech engines, that were scrapped and the plans burned, the Shuttle could have lifted a hundred thousand pounds into LOE instead of them having to leave half to 2/3rds of the cargo bay empty on most missions... And no the heat expansion turbine closed system that burned all the lox and fuel in the combustion chamber where it is most efficient, does work even though Nasa has gone out of its way to hide the fact to cover their Assess.

7:33 a piece of dialogue from a show i watch, that goes, "So, you see, a man can't be blamed for his ignorance, but once he knows......" comes to mind when hearing that story.

8:11 where is it going Scott? "... into orbit around the Mars" Ah yes

I've got a REALLY good and gigantic (about the size of a small person) book on Space and Deep astronomical photos. Lots of extremely detailed photos, renders and info on every planet, nebular, galaxy etc in detail. Yet, on page 3, they put the Earth and Mars on the same orbit. The artist accidentally forgot to put an extra orbit in (I guess your eyes play tricks when drawing up close). Plus none of the editors/proof readers noticed this!

"People are very very good at finding new ways to do things badly".. Especially programmers.

"The Dumbest Mistakes In Space Exploration " Number 2. NASA Letting the Challenger attempt take off. Number 1. NASA Letting the Columbia attempt re-entry.

Here are a couple you might want to use on a "part 2" vid, both by Buzz Aldrin. The first was that when it came to really landing on the moon, I guess he was a little more paranoid than in the simulator and thus decided on the actual flight to (I think) prematurely turn on the radar altimeter to make sure they didn't get too close to the ground to soon (or some sort of deviation from the checklist like that), which caused an overload in the computer, generating 1202 and 1201 alarms, which almost aborted the mission. Neither astronaut had seen those alarms before because Aldrin didn't deviate from the checklist in the simulator. The second was a less complex mistake, but a mistake just as well. During the ascent from the moon, he failed to turn the camera on prior to launch (another deviation of the checklist) and thus we miss the first few seconds of film footage of that event. Fortunately he caught his mistake so that we at least have some footage.

Hey, you're not the first person to mispronounce Saturn as Jupiter. Stanley Kubrick did it first.

The Space Shuttle was awe-inspiring and iconic and an amazing piece of engineering, and also far too expensive and bogged down by add-ons and dangerous. A bad design executed brilliantly is still bad. I'm glad we had it, and I'm glad it's gone.

Hi Scott, I believe that the Mercury-Redstone 1 launch (all 4 inches of it) should at least get an honourable mention. Especially the sequence of events after the abort, when the escape tower jettisoned itself, followed by the deployment of the drogue parachute, then the main and reserve parachutes, reminds me of a Road Runner cartoon. It is safe to say that at the time nobody was amused, but 60+ years later, I can fall on the floor laughing when watching the video without any feelings of guilt. **vp

"Soviet rocket, American rocket?!? All part made in Taiwan!" --Soviet Proton Technician