NASA is letting its Swift space telescope burn up in the atmosphere on Monday. I led the team that spent nineteen months modeling ways to stop this. Our results showed that doing nothing is highly effective. It is a crushing disappointment to science.
The telescope studied giant cosmic explosions. Now it will become a very small one. I ran the control group for the rescue study. We drank coffee while the test team built complex orbit models. Our method matched their outcomes perfectly. Both groups watched the telescope crash in the simulation.
The p-value of our study was extremely low. A p-value is a math score that proves how tired we are. We found no reason to launch a rescue ship. A rocket costs money. Gravity is completely free.
"We achieved total mission failure with zero effort," I told my department head.
