Posted by jburk to Mars Polar Lander at December 9, 1999 12:00 PM

Failure shows how hard it is to explore space. Night after sleep-deprived night, NASA scientists crowded into tiny Room 225, the Mars Operation Center at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and scanned the skies for overdue signals from the wayward Mars Polar Lander.