Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "" video.

  1. That's a really insightful comment, Peter Anderson. If the programmer(s) had possessed a greater understanding of what each part of the program did, they may have wondered at the lack of filtering and sent a question to someone higher up that could have exposed the flaw. But their job involved such a tremendous amount of detail they probably didn't have any time or energy left over to do more than transcribe instructions. This is a good example of how automation can actually increase human intelligence, since software can now take over all that tedious compiling.
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  2. Wow! It's a good thing you were aware that it didn't work. Apparently the Mariner I programmers didn't have that same level of awareness. They just transcribed everything into machine code.
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  3. Thank you for making this amazing video! It's the most fascinating thing I've seen all day, by far. So the rate beacon failed, which meant the guidance computer was only getting information on the rocket's rate of acceleration from the ground based rate radars, which meant it couldn't properly calculate the Doppler shift, and from that the velocity. The ground radar would return a range of values, some of them noisy (close to but not quite the "sweet" value) and some of them measuring the rocket's vibration along with the linear acceleration. Because someone made a typo (missing the overbar) when giving the equations to the programmers, the guidance computer used all of these acceleration measurements instead of using only an averaged "smooth" value. This made the computer think the rocket was going crazy, so it ordered a number of severe course corrections which actually made rocket lose control and have to be destroyed. Is that about it?
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