Editing Mariner 1 (section)

==Legacy==

The loss of America's first interplanetary spacecraft constituted an $18.5 million (${{Formatprice|{{Inflation|US|18500000|1962}}}} in today's dollars) setback for NASA.<ref name=tao/> The incident underscored the importance of a thorough pre-launch debugging of software as well as a need to engineer programs such that minor errors could not cause catastrophic failures. The procedures implemented as a result served NASA well, ultimately salvaging the [[Project Apollo]] Moon landings; though there were program errors in the [[Lunar Excursion Module]] software during descent, they did not cause mission failure.<ref name=timeand/>

With the logic error quickly discovered,<ref name=floss/> no undue delay was necessary. The identical [[Mariner 2]] was already on hand, and a second launch from the same pad was manageable before the end of August.<ref name=Tribune/> On August 27, 1962, Mariner 1's sister spacecraft was successfully launched, becoming on December 14, 1962, the first spacecraft to return data from the vicinity of Venus.<ref name=treasury/>{{rp|171,177}}