NASA formed a board to investigate the loss of the spacecraft and reached some high level conclusions. The board cited a number of contributing factors, which I have filtered to include the ones most relevant to the question:
- errors went undetected within ground-based computer models of how small thruster firings on the spacecraft were predicted and then
carried out on the spacecraft during its interplanetary trip to Mars
- the systems engineering function within the project that is supposed to track and double-check all interconnected aspects of the mission
was not robust enough, exacerbated by the first-time handover of a
Mars-bound spacecraft from a group that constructed it and launched it
to a new, multi-mission operations team
- some communications channels among project engineering groups were too informal
- the small mission navigation team was oversubscribed and its work did not receive peer review by independent experts
- personnel were not trained sufficiently in areas such as the relationship between the operation of the mission and its detailed
navigational characteristics, or the process of filing formal anomaly
reports
- the process to verify and validate certain engineering requirements and technical interfaces between some project groups, and between the
project and its prime mission contractor, was inadequate
Also in the high level report is this quote:
These contributing causes include inadequate consideration of the
entire mission and its post-launch operation as a total system,
inconsistent communications and training within the project, and lack
of complete end-to-end verification of navigation software and related
computer models.
It sounds like it was a failure of management and quality control at multiple levels. The entire report is also available if you'd like some light bedtime reading.
The Mars Climate Orbiter was one of the probes in administrator Goldin's Faster Better Cheaper (FBC) initiative, which forced tight budgets and very short timelines on projects, which has been controversial ever since as there were several spacecraft failures attributed to failures of management and engineering due to the initiative. The Harvard Business Review has a great article summarizing what went wrong:
In shifting to FBC from a slow, reliable, but costly approach to
development, NASA forced its project managers to invent radically new
processes and procedures. FBC imposed on them budget, schedule, and
weight constraints that could not be met using NASA’s traditional
approaches to spacecraft development. “The attitude was ‘The book’s
not working. So throw out the book, try something different, and then
write a new book,’” one NASA manager explained. Implicit in this
approach was the need for project managers to learn from the
organization’s collective experiences, adopt what worked, and jettison
what didn’t. Unfortunately, NASA undermined this learning process in
several ways.
First, with the launch of each FBC mission, NASA demanded ever faster
development times and even lower costs. But because it typically takes
more than four years for a small spacecraft to go from drawing board
to completed mission, managers were forced to meet the tougher demands
on new projects while earlier projects were still in progress. So they
couldn’t capture all the potential lessons from one mission before
moving to the next. In short, NASA was raising the bar before seeing
if project managers could clear it where it was. By the time the
organization realized it had set the bar too high—around the time the
first FBC missions began to fail—the project pipeline was full of
missions that were potentially compromised. It’s no surprise that
later FBC missions failed more frequently than earlier ones did.
Second, NASA didn’t realize that because the FBC initiative depended
so much on shared learning, it would require a more aggressive and
systematic approach to knowledge management. Although NASA had
implemented a “lessons learned” database in 1995, a 2001 survey found
that only one-quarter of its managers contributed to it. A similar
number of managers were unaware the system even existed. Furthermore,
while “red team reviews”—periodic progress reviews conducted by NASA’s
most experienced managers—proved invaluable in early FBC projects,
NASA conducted fewer of these assessments in later missions. As a
consequence, the transfer of learning across the organization
suffered.
Finally, NASA fell prey to “superstitious learning”—the assumption
that there is more to be gleaned from failed missions than from
successful ones. In the challenging climate of space exploration,
however, the difference between what makes one mission succeed and
another fail can be subtle. There is no reason to believe that success
indicates a flawless process while failure is the result of egregious
bad practice. For example, as many mistakes could have been made in
the celebrated 1997 Pathfinder mission as were made in the failed 1999
Polar Lander mission. But NASA will never know. By not conducting
detailed postmortems on its successful missions, the space agency
missed the opportunity to identify problems (and solutions) that might
have helped avoid later failures.
A summary of this would be that, while there was nothing bad about trying to speed up the pace of missions and cut costs the way it was implemented forced people to cut corners. The strategy depended on shared learning, with newer projects re-using older project's code, equipment, knowledge and lessons learnt but the agency did not put adequate tools in place to do this nor did it foster a sharing culture. Lessons from earlier projects weren't learned because the earlier projects weren't completed before the later projects were started. They didn't review successes as top management didn't think there was anything to be learned. There were several spacecraft failures which are attributed to this strategy backfiring, leading to the phrase "Faster Better Cheaper - you can have any 2 you like", however there were many notable successes from the strategy including Mars Pathfinder and the NEAR asteroid rendezvous and in the end all of the 10 FBC spacecraft cost about the same as Cassini.
boost::unitsperform under hard radiation? :D $\endgroup$