NASA technician's simple mistake during satellite maintenance cost $135,000,000 in damages

Screwing up at work is one thing, but causing a multi-million-dollar mess is another story.

That's how it went for one NASA technician who made a simple error that ended up costing a fortune.

NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hired Lockheed Martin to build the NOAA N-Prime weather satellite - a project worth an astonishing $233 million.

While the satellite was being assembled at Lockheed Martin’s facility in California, disaster struck.

The satellite was being moved from a vertical to a horizontal position when it fell off its cart a metre down and landed on a concrete floor.

ROBYN BECK/Contributor/Getty

While no one was injured in the event, the satellite wasn't so lucky.

It turned out that the NOAA N-Prime (later known to be NOAA-19) was badly damaged and fixing it was going to cost a bomb.

Martin had to cover most of the repair costs by forfeiting he might have made from the project.

And the US government had to pay the rest, which amounted to a whopping $135 million, according to NASA spokesman Dave Steitz.

'Lockheed Martin has voluntarily contributed to the rebuild effort all profit previously earned and paid on the contract,' said Steitz and Lockheed Martin Space Systems spokesman Buddy Nelson.

An investigation followed the accident and the cause was down to something very minor. It was revealed that the satellite was missing 24 bolts.

The bolts were needed to secure the piece of tech to a device called the Turn-Over Cart (TOC).

NASA Report

'The bolts were removed from the TOC by another project while the cart was in a common staging area, an activity which was not communicated to the NOAA project team,' a report from NASA read.

Had those bolts been in place, the whole mishap could have been avoided.

Nelson added that at least 15% of the platform components had to be replaced.

'The company will undertake the completion of the N-Prime satellite bus on a cost-only basis, forgoing all profits that otherwise might have accrued to Lockheed Martin for this spacecraft bus,' he continued.

The launch of the satellite was originally pushed back to December 2007 but didn't actually launch until February 2009.

But the event led to improved and stricter safety measures across all Lockheed Martin's satellite manufacturing programs to prevent a similar incident, Nelson said.

'The evidence of our success is that our NASA and NOAA customers have asked us to rebuild the NOAA N-Prime satellite,' he concluded.