Welcome to this series of stories about software bugs. Today we will be talking about: The Mariner 1 spacecraft. In July of 1962, NASA launched an unmanned space mission from Cape Canaveral, commencing the first Mariner mission. The incident was caused by a combination of factors, one of which related to the mistaken omission of a hyphen in coded computer instructions in the craft’s data-editing program, resulting in the transmission of incorrect guidance signals to the spacecraft.