“Against All Odds”

This looks like an interesting new book:

Though the Lunar Prospector Mission was a small, inexpensive, unmanned, orbital mapping mission, the reader will, via the author’s experiences in conducting his mission, become intimately acquainted with the inefficient and self-serving activities of the entrenched NASA bureaucracy and the big aerospace companies. As such, the reader will come to understand how NASA’s increasing incompetence led to 1) the destruction of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia and their crews, 2) the loss of the 1992 Mars Observer, the 1999 Mars Climate Observer, the 1999 Mars Polar Lander, 3) the never-to-be-finished International Space Station that is already five times over its $8 billion budget and a decade over its original schedule, and 4) many similar NASA failures that have cost the taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and have already taken 14 human lives.

[Sunday night update]

Keith Cowing isn’t impressed.