No other object of extra-terrestrial attention has been linked to so much failure as Mars.

We look at the last two probes to Mars and think how poorly we're doing, but in the seventeen years (1975-1992) between US Mars probes we've forgotten that Mars missions have always been plagued with failure.

My personal favorite, aside from the numerous Soviet missions that blew up on launch, and missions on both sides that mysteriously stopped working midway to Mars (or seconds after landing) is Cosmos 419, launched in 1971, which failed because the timer to start the Earth-deorbit burn shortly after launch was supposed to be set for 1.5 hours but was mistakenly set for 1.5 years.

Suddenly a metric mismatch doesn't seem as bad...

If I had time, I'd love to put together a list of small errors with big consequences, like the hyphen that caused a Venus probe to self-destruct on launch. Wacky stuff...