NASA's Genesis probe, a product of the hopefully-now-defunct "faster, better, cheaper" era of '90's space exploration, failed to regurgitate its parachute today and wound up in a crater on the Utah desert floor.

After collecting never-before-examined solar wind particles for three years, the intrepid space probe was supposed to be snagged by Hollywood stunt pilots while hurtling out of the sky at six feet per second because even lightly touching down would ruin the samples.

Who came up with this idea anyway??

At least it wasn't the stunt pilot's fault; they were ready to do their stuff, having plenty of experience from Dante's Peak and Batman IV. It was just the parachute system -- the same one that deployed without fail or foul up on every American manned space mission (and several early spy satellites that were also captured in mid-air, incidentally) from Ham the chimp through the last Apollo! How could you mess that up?

Well, they'd better figure it out fast because in 2006 the Stardust mission is coming home to the same Utah desert in exactly the same way.