Expensive Mistakescoopsweb asks "What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made? Should I mention a certain employee who caused 4 hours worth of delays in Central London and got his company fined £500k?"
No points for stories about the time you had a few and thought it'd be a good idea to wrap your car around a bollard. Or replies consisting of "my wife".
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chthonic, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 11:26)
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Not strictly my mistake but I'd like to share thisduring my days at school, the computer studies teacher used to recount this hilarious tale about writing software.
Nasa launched one of their many very expensive washing machines - sorry - satellites, to bugger off to the deepest reaches of space to bother some distant moon with a camera for a few hours.
Anyway, the story goes that the satellite after years of research, money and hard work finally left the launch pad perfectly, and was set on its merry little way.. the team sat back and relaxed on turned on their ZX Spectrum's, BBC B's & Commodore 64, punched cards & paper tape* computers to "talk" to the satellite. Only it didn't work, it wouldn't talk to them. All that money and hard graft for nothing, and they spent many more years trying to get the little bastard to work as it hurtled further and further away..
Until one day, a software engineer spotted the problem. The original programmers had missed a semi colon off the end of a line of code.
A simple ';' that cost millions.
*probably
(, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 11:43, 3 replies)
Similar to this..en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_%28CG-48%29#Smart_ship_testbed
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Agnostic Antichrist Baltimora, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 12:01,
closed)
I think it was one of the Mariner probes in the 1960s/70s...The idea was to blast off from Cape Kennedy in Florida, reach a height of about twenty miles before the rocket's second stage fired and shifted the probe into orbit. At that point, stage three was to fire and send the package on a curved trajectory which would put the Mariner probe in the orbit of Venus, where it would take pics/fly around a bit/etc.
What actually happened was that the hugely expensive rocket and probe was stuffed into the atlantic ocean about sixty miles from the launch pad.
Oopsy.
(, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 13:05, closed)
Dunno that one, but...... I remember the Mars Orbiter not managing to slow down when it got to Mars, due to the two teams developing it confusing metric and imperial measurements. Twunts. $125 million (IIRC) on a schoolboy error.
(, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 13:10, closed)
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