T. GAMBLE: Finding your way to Mars … or East Carolina … is kinda rocket science

No matter how sophisticated or successful one may become, life still humbles us all by the slip-ups and failures we invariably fall prey to.

I was recently reading about one of the early Mars crafts NASA planned to land on the planet. The craft was intended to get in the Martian atmosphere, circle around a few times and then as it slowed its orbit, land on the planet. It would then transmit data from Mars back to Earth.

Unfortunately, this early craft did not slow down as it hit Mar’s atmosphere and instead slammed into its surface without so much as tapping the brakes. Engineers were horrified. What in the world had gone wrong?

Well, what went wrong is one team of engineers forgot to convert one group of mathematical figures related to the landing from the metric system to our good ‘ole inches and feet. You see, a meter is about 39.37 inches. A yard is 36 inches. 3.37 inches isn’t really very much, but over a few million miles it becomes a whole lot more. So the space craft just kept on trucking.

I suspect those engineers weren’t at NASA much longer. They probably also did not include their work related to that particular mission on their resumes. But, hey, we all make mistakes like that.

Years ago, I agreed to take my good friend Ryan “Scooter’ Herrington to the college of East Carolina on a football recruiting visit. He was All State at Lee County. Thus, he was being heavily recruited by Skip Holtz, son of football coaching legend Lou Holtz, and at that time the coach of the East Carolina Pirates. It was their spring game, and Scooter had no ride for the visit. I am close with him and his family, so I said sure let’s go.

East Carolina is located in Greenville. I had been to Greenville on a couple of occasions. I planned to leave early in the morning and get there by a scheduled early-afternoon meeting. It should be fun, I thought. Scooter and I will enjoy the ride, I said. It is about 5 1/2 hours, I said.

Now this was before we had good apps to just tell you directions, but I did have a trusty Garmin, so the day before, just to be sure, I plugged in East Carolina University. It gave explicit and great directions, except for the fact it said the trip would take just over 11 hours. How in the world could this be?

Well, for one thing I had previously been to Greenville, South Carolina. There is no East Carolina college in Greenville, South Carolina. East Carolina is in Greenville, North Carolina, twice the distant away. You would think maybe I would have noticed there was no college in Greenville when I visited, but apparently that got by me somehow. Who in the world names two towns the same thing anyway? There should be a law against such foolishness, and if there were such a law, I would not have suffered an instant panic.

We were left with only one plan. Leave that night in a hurry, spend the night half-way there and make the rest of the trip the next day. It was fun. We got to go in the locker room as Skip gave a pep talk to the team before they played their spring game. The scoreboard had a big pirate on it, and every time either team scored it would yell ARRRG!

Skip met with Scooter. All went well, and we did not crash into the side of Mars, or a mountain, or even a bridge abutment. I did not tell Scooter how fortunate he was that I thought East Carolina was in South Carolina. If I had known it was in North Carolina, 11 hours away, not 5, he most likely would not have met Skip, we would have missed a really grand adventure, and I would not have had this story to tell. So sometimes slip-ups work out for the best.

I wonder if those engineers ended up at some other much better job because of their mistake? Probably not. They might just be working at McDonald’s now, putting mustard on my cheeseburger I ordered with just catsup and cheese.