19621776 Club
Venus probe fishtails off course; range safety blows it up over the Atlantic
A single missing overline in the guidance code sent America's first Venus shot into pieces four minutes after launch.
America's first attempt to reach another planet left Cape Canaveral on the morning of July 22, 1962, riding an Atlas-Agena rocket toward Venus. Minutes into the sustainer phase, Mariner 1 began fishtailing left and right, drifting toward the shipping lanes of the Atlantic. At 9:26:16 a.m., a range safety officer ordered it destroyed, just six seconds before the rocket's second stage was due to separate. Telemetry kept broadcasting for another minute and a half from the wreckage…
