Arbitrary Spin and Damage Control

Jan Woerner, Director General of ESA:

The importance of TGO and EDM can be described as 80% vs. 20%, respectively. Since we obtained at least 80% of the data during the descent, the overall success rate can be calculated as follows: 80+20*0.8 = 96%. All in all, a very positive result.

I know, Schiaparelli wasn’t the primary mission. I know, you have to work hard to inform the public and those who hold the purse strings that ExoMars 2016 as a whole is still a success (so far).

Here’s the problem: people like us who understand the value and inherent risk of missions to Mars—and who understand why the Schiaparelli failure is not catastrophic—already see it with some type of fuzzy math like Woerner. We get it.

The public and the decision makers don’t. Things are binary for people who aren’t devoted space exploration enthusiasts. When you try to feed them fuzzy math, it comes off as trying to make excuses for a failure. The cover-up is always worse than the crime.

And honestly, even those of us who care deeply about space exploration know that the L part of EDL is the part Schiaparelli was really testing. We’ve—collectively—had a lot of successful practice at E and D.