Greatest Misses of Space Exploration in 2014

NASA's warp-drive spacecraft? Uh, I don't think so. (Credit: Mark Rademaker) They can't all be hits. Whenever you are trying to do something as ambitious as exploring the universe, some things are bound to fail. And whenever you are trying to do large, collaborative projects that involve large numbers of people and sizable sums of money, things go wrong. Stuff happens. People make mistakes, egos get in the way, and often it is just really hard to get everyone pulling in the same direction. When I looked back on the year and saw incredible high points of cosmic adventure (described in my previous post), but I also saw some notable low ones. I don't mean to minimize the serious problems of 2014 that played out in other areas of human experience--everything from ebola to Ukraine to ISIS to Eric Garner. Still, I look to space exploration as a celebration of ...