[ctonious]

Life immitating art out of Douglas Adams's "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency".

Ahhhh. Another Douglas Adams fan. This NASA debacle reminds me of another Douglas Adams monologue - the one where the spaceship computer fails disastrously in interpreting sensor data (Sensors are gone with the severed end of the ship) which the computer interprets as "Everything's fine." I think from book four or five of the "Hitchhiker's Guide" "trilogy".

Hard to believe Adams is dead at age 49. I always looked forward to a new book of his.

[Mr170IQ]

You mean this quote from "Mostly Harmless"?

This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authen-ticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.

This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.

Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite.

The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that there was a hole, and the supervisors which should have said that the sensors weren't working properly weren't working properly and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain, which would have enabled it to see the hole, with them.

....

I don't think it applies as well as the quote from "Dirk's".