“TO LOSE one Martian orbiter may be regarded as a misfortune,” we wrote on 2 October 1999, trotting out the old Oscar Wilde quote. “To lose a second looks like carelessness.”

The barb was prompted by NASA’s second loss of a probe at the doorstep of Mars in six years. “The Mars Climate Orbiter was supposed to enter an orbit that would have brought it no closer than 155 kilometres from the surface, after a course-altering rocket burn on 15 September,” we reported. “The burn went according to plan. Yet the craft descended to within 57 kilometres of the planet’s surface, where it could not withstand …