A goof-up is not the same thing as a deliberate prank, of course, but it can create a similar effect. In July 1962, the first Mariner spacecraft to Venus ex-ploded. A missing hyphen in the computer instructions had sent the rocket incorrect guidance signals, so NASA’s range safety officer ordered it destroyed. The absence of a single hyphen cost tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. April Fool.
Perkin-Elmer of Danbury, Connecticut, the world’s most prestigious optical company, won the commission to build the Hubble Space Telescope mirrors. It took them four years. After all that labor, they delivered the main 94-inch mirror polished to the wrong shape. A miscalibrated testing device and their bewildering decision not to double-check the result created the greatest blunder in optics history. Any amateur telescope maker could have caught the flaw. Here’s your Hubble mirror, NASA. April Fool. Too bad you already sent it into space.
Remember Y2K? My neighbor spent $2,500 on a backup kerosene system and a tank full of the stuff because she was convinced that deliveries of heating oil would stop. The fear, you’ll recall, was that computers would read the “00” year code as 1900 instead of 2000. Would the machines then try to dispatch horses and buggies? Doomsday scenarios included airplanes falling from the sky and banks registering everyone’s balance as zero. A hundred billion dollars was spent on the “problem.” But many businesses ignored the peril. When the new year dawned, nothing happened. The world’s computers got it right after all. April Fool.
Also in 1999, the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter failed to enter orbit around the Red Planet. The problem? NASA engineers commanded it using metric units while the company that designed it intended its guidance to be in Imperial units. Later that same year, the $185 million Mars Polar Lander went silent while landing. Mission Control never heard from it again. A missing line of computer code was likely the culprit.
The 20th century thus ended with two April Fools from Mars. Howard Koch and Orson Welles had been one-upped.
Will a cosmic prank await us
this month — our lives’ only April Fools Day with a “13” year code? No way, right?
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