TitanFan - NASASpaceflight.com
IT WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN... After having my name successfully fly into space onboard the Cassini Saturn orbiter, Deep Impact’s "impactor", the Phoenix Mars Lander, Japan’s Kaguya lunar spacecraft, the Dawn space probe, the Kepler telescope, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Japan’s IKAROS solar sail and the Akatsuki spacecraft (even though it failed to enter Venus’ orbit last December), it was inevitable that my name would fail to soar beyond Earth (again) onboard a future space mission. Turns out— Glory was that mission. Much like what happened during the launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) in 2009, the payload fairing that encapsulated Glory onboard the Taurus XL rocket (which was also used by OCO) failed to separate during flight this morning, preventing the vehicle from gaining sufficient speed to reach Earth orbit...and causing another NASA climate-observing satellite to find its final resting spot at the bottom of the south Pacific Ocean. Awesome. A microchip bearing my name, along with that of 243,200 others, is now—to borrow a line from Godfather: Part 1—sleeping with the fishes. Oh well.
This isn’t the first spacecraft with my name on it to end up underwater. My name was also onboard Russia’s Mars ’96 lander...which also plunged into the Pacific Ocean after experiencing a launch mishap 15 years ago. Spaceflight is definitely risky business. My apologies to the Glory mission team who has to suffer through this devastating setback and the Orbital Sciences team (who was responsible for the Taurus XL) who spent the last 2 years trying to fix the payload fairing issue. That is all.
NASA
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