1962: WhenThe New York Times copy desk lets a typo slip through, it's embarrassing but no one gets hurt. When NASA programmers screw up, the consequences are a tad more dramatic, not to mention expensive. In this case, a "missing hyphen" in code forces mission control to abort the launch of the unmanned Mariner 1 probe less than five minutes after liftoff.

Mariner 1 was intended to collect a variety of scientific data about Venus during a flyby of our closest neighbor in the solar system.

What causedthe snafu remains unclear to this day, owing to the welter of conflicting reports — both official and unofficial — that appeared in the wake of the mission's failure.

One of the official reports, issued by the Mariner 1 Post-Flight Review Board, concluded that a dropped hyphen in coded computer instructions resulted in incorrect guidance signals being sent to the spacecraft. The review board specifically refers to a "hyphen," although other sources also refer to an "overbar transcription error" and even to a misplaced decimal point.

In testimony before Congress, Richard Morrison, NASA's launch vehicles director, said only that an error in computer equations led to the spacecraft veering off course. Of course, that explanation was probably taxing the comprehension limits of most senators, anyway. It was science fiction writerArthur C. Clarke who opined that Mariner 1 was "wrecked by the most expensive hyphen in history," thereby cementing the hyphen theory in many minds.

Hyphen, overbar (which kind of looks like a hyphen), decimal point: It's still rock 'n' roll to me.

The fact is it wassomething, and as any copy editor will tell you, punctuation is important. Whatever caused the Atlas-Agena booster to lose contact with its ground-based guidance system, the bottom line was that Mariner 1's trajectory was off, and there was no way of fixing it, leading a range safety officer to order Mariner 1 blown up 293 seconds after launch.

The United States may also have been less than forthcoming with hard facts owing to the high-profile nature of the mission — it was NASA's first planetary mission — and because failure was tough to swallow in the face of the much-ballyhooed space race with the Soviet Union, which was well underway by then.

Such was the erratic nature of rocketry in the early '60s that a backup probe, Mariner 2, was waiting in the wings. Nearly five weeks later, it launched cleanly, and itcompleted Mariner 1's mission in December.

Moral of the story? Programmers shouldn't double-check code. They should triple-check it.

Source: Various

Image: Artist rendering of Mariner 1
Credit: NASA

See Also:

• July 22, 1952: Genuine Crop-Circle Maker Patented
• Feb. 20, 1962: Yank in Orbit
• March 4, 1962: Nuclear Age Comes to Antarctica
• May 23, 1962: Give That Kid a Hand!
• June 14, 1962: Western Europe Officially Joins the Space Race
• July 10, 1962: 3-Point Seat Belt Patented
• July 23, 1962: Telstar Provides First-Ever TV Link Between U.S., Europe
• Aug. 5, 1962: First Quasar Discovered
• Aug. 22, 1962: First Nuke-Powered Cargo Ship Docks
• Oct. 22, 1962: Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Brink of War
• Dec. 14, 1962: Mariner 2 Reaches Venus, an Interplanetary First