They want to stay safe - to hold on to what they’ve already got. And because of this, roughly half of us - people we call prevention-focused - rarely get the credit we are due.Īs I’ve written about before, prevention-focused people see their goals in terms of what they might lose if they don’t succeed. But do you know what almost never attracts the attention it deserves? When things go the way they are supposed to. When an organization (or an individual) makes a big, expensive and embarrassing mistake, it attracts loads of attention. When asked how an error of this magnitude could have occurred (particularly one that seemed so simple to have gotten right in the first place), Tom Gavin, chief administrator of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said “Something went wrong in our system processes, in checks and balances, that we should have caught this and fixed it.” The team of engineers at NASA worked in metric units (the standard they had adopted in 1990.) The engineers at Lockheed Martin who helped build the Orbiter and its navigation systems, on the other hand, worked in English units of measurement (pounds, inches, etc.) The problem, it was later discovered, was one of unit conversion. Instead of orbiting Mars, it plowed right through the atmosphere (possibly disintegrating) and was lost to us forever, taking $125 million in American taxpayer dollars with it. It had come, unintentionally, 100 kilometers closer to the planet’s surface than originally planned, which was 25 kilometers beneath the level at which it could properly function. Nearly ten months later, it arrived at the red planet, only to disappear just as it was supposed to establish an orbit.

Its mission was to collect data about the atmosphere, and act as a communications relay for the Mars Polar Lander. At the very end of 1998, NASA launched a much-anticipated robotic space probe called the Mars Climate Orbiter.

Mars climate orbiter mistake