It's always interesting to me that when a spacecraft launches/lands/arrives successfully, NASA releases very exciting headlines. See this release from January 2004, when Spirit arrived on Mars. But when a mission goes badly, they come up with the most boring headline ever, as if they would prefer that you skip right over it. If you read the link I posted above for this most recent press release, you'll see that it avoids colorful terms like "crash," or "ruined;" it simply "failed to reach orbit." However, this Reuters release isn't nearly as circumspect; look for phrases like "dooming the mission" and "botched satellite launch." In the end, I guess NASA is only human.
Also, if you're the kind of person who thinks NASA is a huge waste of taxpayers' dollars and this is just one of many examples of that, now's the time to post your rant in the comments section. If you disagree, please feel free to say so as well. (Let's keep it civil, please.)
Orbiting Carbon Observatory
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I tend to be more pro NASA. My Grandma was a Metallurgist for Lockheed and her tagline for herself was that she was a "success at failure." It was her job to investigate failed missions- i.e. some of the apollo missions- and find out what went wrong(she studied the metals and how they reacted).
It's easy to say that 278 million was wasted because the main objective mission failed but then we would be ignoring any knowledge that has been gained in the process of getting to that failure and what knowledge will be gained from the failure itself. Research tends to turn up new possible avenues of research. My impression is that NASA learns from its mistakes as well as its successes. So yeah... I'm kind of pro NASA.
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