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What doomed the North Korea rocket minutes after launch Friday isn't yet known. Failure often comes from not putting things together right. Tens of thousands of parts have to match perfectly and talk to each other. NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey probe took 10,000 separate actions to go right to get there, said Scott Hubbard of Stanford University. Two years earlier, NASA mistakenly used both metric and English measuring units, dooming a $125 million Martian probe. Former NASA deputy administrator Hans Mark said most failures are from human error. He pointed to a dropped oxygen tank that caused the near-fatal Apollo 13 explosion. Poor communication between engineers and managers about known problems was a factor in both the 1986 and 2003 space shuttle disasters and that's a bigger issue for totalitarian societies like North Korea, Pace said. "In many ways, the worst enemy of NASA is 'Star Trek'," Pace said. "Captain Picard says
'engage' and the ship moves. And people think 'How hard can this be?'" North Korea knows.
[Associated
Press;
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