Mars Climate Orbiter Cost Of Failure

MARS CLIMATE ORBITER

Anonymous Submission for Written Assignment Grading

University of the People

Abstract

The Mars Climate Orbiter cost NASA $327.6 million when it was destroyed in Mars’ atmosphere. Reasons determined to have contributed to the failed mission, point to insufficient quality management. Specifically, teams were not effectively communicating, training was inadequate, and technology was not verified. As a result, navigation data was based on English units in one group and metric in another group. The data was not converted. This paper proposes quality measure theories applied to contributing factors as recommended solutions.

Keywords:

The Mars Climate Orbital mission loss was a significant part of the $327.6 million project cost for the orbiter and lander (NASA, n.d.). In order to implement the proposals, leadership must take responsibility to strategically align the focus of the teams, create strong project structure, train, communicate, measure and adjust. To achieve strategic quality management, start with the vision and mission, then emphasize value (Knowles, 2011). Strategic objectives are long term goals that specifically meet vision and mission statements (Petryni,2018). NASA’s program would need to implement a strategy for the scope of the entire project that aligns with the greater mission. Then the project can be broken down into smaller operations goals. Operations objectives plan how resources are used in production in a short-term routine (Petryni, 2018).

Conclusion

The Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) failure was a culmination of several deficiencies. Effective management, quality team resources and training, collaboration, analysis, and review were lacking. Teams did not know what other teams were doing. The MCO group did not present a viable process and was not prepared to resolve the crisis. Learning from this failure, NASA did take action and successfully complete other missions.