Genesis meets unhappy end

Chicago Tribune: As the fragile cargo dispatched from the Genesis spacecraft neared Earth on Wednesday, stunt helicopter pilots practiced again and again the delicate maneuver that would be required to latch onto its parachute so it could be brought gently home.
Then the unthinkable happened. The parachute never deployed. The pilots watched helplessly as Genesis' precious cargo crashed to the ground at nearly 200 miles an hour.
Until the very end, this latest NASA project to explore the beginnings of the solar system seemed headed for stunning success. Genesis was launched in August 2001 to collect bits of solar wind that scientists hoped would explain how the sun and planets were formed billions of years ago. Now it's not known if any of the data -- a billion billion charged atoms -- Genesis collected over the last three years can be salvaged without contamination from the crash site in Utah. NASA hired the stunt pilots to hook the capsule because it feared that, even with the parachute properly deployed, the landing would be too jarring for the delicate cargo.
It may be too facile to say this was just another basic equipment failure for a space agency that has been plagued by them. But in all of NASA's preparations over the course of this $260 million mission, this eventuality -- what if the parachute doesn't open? -- wasn't considered likely.
NASA insists it had in place contingency plans for a crash and it activated those. It also insists it's too soon to write off this mission as a total loss. But there's no question the malfunctioning parachute transformed the mission in seconds from success to failure. All the years of careful science poured into Genesis has gone for naught because something very basic didn't work. This has serious implications for other NASA exploratory missions in the pipeline. It renews questions about NASA's competence.
The Genesis mission was aptly named. It was designed to investigate the beginnings of the solar system. Now NASA must investigate the Genesis mission itself. No program designed by and executed by humans will ever be flawless, but the failure of such basic components is incomprehensible.