While 2010 saw many historic successes in spaceflight and space science, plenty of things went wrong, too.

For example, several rockets failed to deliver their scientific payloads, Japan's Venus probe Akatsuki missed the planet entirely, and a NASA balloon crashed spectacularly in the Australian desert, partially destroying its telescope payload and smashing into a parked car.
2010 saw many failures in the launch and deployment of payloads, and the problems had a real international flavor.
On Dec. 5, for example, an overfueled Russian-built Proton rocket failed to put three new Glonass-M navigation satellites into orbit; they crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. India had troubles of its own, with back-to-back failures of its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, in April and on Christmas Day.
In late October, the European communications satellite Eutelsat W3B launched cleanly and made it to orbit. But the satellite's fuel tank developed a sizable leak, and engineers soon declared the craft a total loss.
The United States had some problems, too. In April, the Pentagon lost contact with a hypersonic glider test vehicle shortly after launch. And NASA's prototype solar-sail satellite, NanoSail-D, apparently failed to eject from its mothership satellite as planned in early December.
In a highly visible blunder, a huge NASA balloon crashed in central Australia before it could lift $2 million telescope to its high-altitude observation station.
On April 28, the 400-foot (121-meter) balloon carrying the Nuclear Compton Telescope, a gamma-ray instrument, blew sideways instead of lifting up. A NASA investigation later cited human complacency as the accident's cause.
The pricey payload dragged along the ground. It disintegrated spectacularly and smashed through a fence, narrowly missing several spectators and heavily damaging a private vehicle parked nearby. A YouTube video of the mishap drew over 160,000 views.
On April 5, the Intelsat Galaxy 15 communications satellite started acting like a juvenile delinquent — it stopped responding to commands and started wandering out of its assigned orbit, threatening other satellites. The satellite may have been knocked out of commission by a massive solar eruption, according to its manufacturer, Orbital Sciences Corp. of Virginia.
Strangely, the C-band telecommunications payload aboard the satellite kept working, transmitting signals that threatened to interfere with those of nearby satellites.
However, this story has a happy ending: On Dec. 23, Galaxy 15's onboard battery became drained of all power, and the satellite automatically reset itself as it was designed to do. Zombiesat no more!
In January, NASA engineers consigned the Mars rover Spirit to a fate stuck in deep Martian sand. The rover, which had rolled for six years over the Red Planet's surface, became mired in a location called Troy in May 2009. Spirit's controllers prepared the vehicle to weather another harsh Martian winter, but it went into hibernation March 22 and has not responded to signals since.
Mission scientists still hold out hope that Spirit may come back to life in March 2011, when sunlight to power its solar arrays will shine strongest on Mars. But while it remains unresponsive today, Spirit can hardly be considered a failure. The rover and its twin, Opportunity, far outlasted their original 90-day missions. And Opportunity is still going strong.
On July 31, an ammonia coolant pump on the International Space Station failed, knocking out half of the station's cooling system. Astronauts were forced to halt some experiments, and turn off some systems and leave others without backups, to keep the station from overheating.