THE REDS AND THE RED PLANET….The LA Times has a story today that says 20 of 36 missions to Mars have ended in failure. This sounds pretty miserable, but it turns out that 14 of those failures were from the Soviet space program. NASA has about a two-thirds success rate.
What’s really remarkable is that even that statistic is being generous to the Russians. They’ve had 18 Mars missions, and while 14 have failed completely it turns out that the remaining four have failed almost completely. Not one single Russian mission to Mars has actually gone right.
