Ariane 5 Flight 501 Failure – A Case Study of Errors.pdf

Ariane 5 Flight 501 Failure—A Case Study of Errors Ken Robinson School of Computer Science and Engineering University of New South Wales 16th December 1996 Revised: 22rd March 2011 c Ken Robinson 1996. . . 2011 mailto::k.robinson@.au 1 Launch of Ariane 5 Let us start with a bang ! Let’s do that again and this time watch very carefully ! On the 4th June 1996 at 1233 GMT (UTC) the European Space Agency launched a new rocket, Ariane 5, on its maiden unmanned flight, seen here on youtube /watch?v=kYUrqdUyEpINR=1 Also cited at the end this presentation. Although this was an unmanned flight and therefore there were no human casualties, there is no reason to expect that the outcome would have been any different if the flight had been manned. In such an event all onflight crew and passengers would have been killed. Remember as we proceed through this case that this is a project of the very experienced European Space Agency. The project cost was $ 7 billion. Part of the payload were four satellites, Cluster, that would engage in a scientific investigation. These satellites had taken many years to develop and cost around $ 100 million. 1.1 A Report by James Glieck In the report by James Gleick cited at the end of this article, James Gleick says: It took the European Space Agency 10 years and $7 billion to produce Ariane 5, a giant rocket capable of hurling a pair of three-ton satellites into orbit with each launch and intended to give Europe overwhelming supremacy i