"WHEN FASCISM COMES TO AMERICA IT WILL BE WRAPPED IN THE FLAG
AND CARRYING A CROSS." -SINCLAIR LEWIS

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Mars Mission Failure Chart

Get your ass to Mars:

Mars. There have to be little green men with ACME weapons living there. Or we have some incredibly bad luck when it comes to sending spacecrafts to the Red Planet. Most of them fail, for one reason or the other.

Zoom in to enjoy the graphic in HD


Out of 42 missions, only 20 have succeeded. That's less than 50% chance of survival. And it gets worse: Of those, only eight were actually programmed to land on Mars, which is actually the theoretically difficult part.

While the success rate increased after 1971, I would be very nervous if I were a budding astronaut wanting to go up there—and still, I wish I was that astronaut. Better go in style while trying to reach the glory, than staying down here, slowly turning to dust.
A 52.4% failure rate is obviously nothing to celebrate (and let's be honest, those dirty Russkies were responsible for most of those) yet it's still a testament to the power and mystery of my second favorite planet that we continue to work towards an eventual manned mission, which I would totally go on as long as I could be a secret agent who saves the planet, gets the girl and turns the sky blue.

(via)

1 comment:

one L said...

I was always interested in Jupiter and Pluto... but I guess I only get one of those these days.