After his two earlier failed missions, the consensus has been that the Americans need some larger idea if a cease-fire is to hold.
Long before last Friday's crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo in the Mojave Desert, the economist Brent Lane had been thinking about failed missions and Sir Richard Branson, Virgin's adventurous founder.
Last week's incidents occurred just as the United Nations was building up a presence -- with 8,300 soldiers already here -- on a continent that the international community had avoided in recent years, after failed missions in Rwanda and Somalia.
Prompted by criticism over failed missions, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has chosen Dr. Firouz Naderi, a veteran manager of space projects, to head a newly formed Mars program aimed at improving future robotic explorations.
Although the Phoenix lander, a conglomeration of parts from two earlier failed missions, has been tested and rechecked to correct all known design flaws and potential errors, Dr. Weiler said, "there are always the unknown unknowns".
In the mid-nineties, when he was head of peacekeeping, he presided over catastrophically failed missions in Bosnia and in Rwanda, where he ignored detailed warnings of genocide, then watched them come true, while the world did nothing to stop it.
