No Glory: $424 Million Of Tax Dollars Ends Up In Ocean

Three. Two. One. We have ignition. So goes the exciting sequence of events that unfold during any NASA space mission. All the hard work, years of toil and sweat come to one dramatic moment. But on Friday,in less than six minutes into launch, Glory went for naught,

Launched from Vandenberg Air Force base near Lompoc, California, a Taurus XL rocket carrying the NASA Glory satellite failed to separate from its fairing.The satellite, created to study the effects of solar radiation and aerosols on Earth, cost the American public some $424 million dollars as it ended up on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

This is the third time a Taurus based rocket has failed. As recently as 2009, a Taurus rocket failed in a NASA mission involving the $273 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory project. And back in 2001 NASA's $50 million QuickTOMS ozone monitoring satellite failed to launch.

The Taurus rocket is built by Orbital Sciences Corporation. They are a public company that trades on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Taurus is a ground based rocket that is guided through a four stage propulsion system. Its primary purpose is to launch satellite's weighing up to 3500 pounds into low earth orbit. To date, Taurus missions have been mixed:

Another NASA project is scheduled for launch from Vandenberg in 2013. Let's hope that NASA and Orbit Sciences get their act together to figure out what the cause of this mishap was and how to remedy it. If the above timeline isn't an eye opener, Taurus has failed the last three of four missions and along with it, over 3/4 of a billion dollars up in smoke.

About Kerry Kobashi

Kerry is the founder of KerryOnWorld. He lives in Silicon Valley and has worked as an engineer and project manager. He owns Kobashi Computing a consulting company.