NASA poster for the Glory mission that failed to reach orbit today.

The failure of the Glory launch today is not just bad news. It’s a catastrophe for earth science; Especially American earth science. The failure of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, (OCO-on the same type of launch vehicle) and now this are going to set back critical research into the the Earth’s energy balance severely.

I went over to REAL CLIMATE written by NASA Climate Scientist Gavin Schmidt and he has a comment posted (I see we picked almost identical titles for this.):

This is of course a huge setback for the mission team (many of whom I know), and I can only imagine how frustrating this must be. The loss of OCO two years ago was due to a similar problem, though 3 launches since then have been successful (and the same system is being replicated as OCO-2). With the postponement of CLARREO in the proposed 2012 budget, there is a huge hole building in the US contribution to Earth and Sun observing systems.

Working from space is hard, expensive and risky. We cannot take it for granted, and yet we need that information more than ever.

My highlighting.

The Launch video is here:

You can find out more from the complete NASA poster here:

http://glory.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/GSFC-Glory-Poster.pdf