At the beginning of June, the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe was hurtling at ridiculous speed to keep a rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, having travelled more than 6 billion kilometres.

On November 12, the spacecraft successfully plonked a robot onto the 4.3-kilometre-wide galactic cannonball. This extravaganza happened on schedule and on budget; an historic triumph of science and engineering and a towering exclamation mark for what humanity can achieve.

Meanwhile back on Earth in June, a different team of engineers was embarking on a mission to repair the ocean pools at Austinmer Beach.

Wollongong City Council had contracted the efficient-sounding Specialised Marine Services (SMS) to boldly travel from their inland base at Narellan in western Sydney to fix the sea wall, the pool walls, the pathways and hand rails.

Now you'd reckon, given that mankind can land a spaceship on a comet travelling at 135,000km/h, then surely repairing little ocean pools down Wollongong way would be a piece o' piss.

But here we are six days out from Christmas holidays and the deadline to have the pools spruced up and safe by October has long lapsed. So too, it seems, has SMS.

After repeated embarrassing stuff-ups - like having form-work and concrete wash onto the beach - they packed up their gear two weeks ago, scarpered back up the escarpment and filed for voluntary administration. But not, apparently, before receiving more than $500,000 from WCC.

Looking at the state they left the pool in, you don't wonder why SMS is shot. There was crap in the water, stainless steel bars were poking out of the sides just ready to skewer kids, and the walkway was unfit for, y'know, walking on.

Jolly hopeless.

With the Christmas crowds poised to descend, the council has a serious problem so they've hired a local firm to do temporary repairs. "We're doing our best to make the pool safe so people can use it for Christmas but that can't be promised," warned council director of infrastructure and works Mike Hyde.

That sounds ... well, not good enough frankly.

Mr Hyde (no relation to Dr Jekyll) told the Mercury he's "very unhappy" about the ludicrously expensive and shambolic non-repair job carried out on his watch. Perhaps he's most pissed off at himself for seeing the project slide into chaos despite multiple red flags from locals.

If Mr Hyde has a case of the grumps, then the ratepayers are seething - at him. As the council's director of infrastructure and works, the buck stops on his desk.

Some say the stuff-up was business as usual at WCC. As one Mercury reader remarked online when SMS went belly-up: "I work for Council and this is normal. We get the cheapest guys and they undercut the quality people to get the job. They either cut corners or go broke."

Others dispute this assessment and say careful due diligence was done. I'm not saying it wasn't, but it does raise the question, "Then how come it all went to s--t?" And why did the council throw $500k of local coin to a mob from Sydney instead of giving the work to a Wollongong business? Even better, why didn't the council use its own skilled workers? No-one is saying fixing ocean baths is a walk in the park, but it ain't rocket science.

And there are plenty of headaches still ahead. As anyone who has been to Austinmer in summer will tell you, throughout Christmas and beyond local crowds are bolstered by an immense coastal migration of residents from south-western Sydney. On some days it's as busy as Bondi.

With this comes safety issues. One long-time Austi resident told me this week: "A lot of the people who come from Campbelltown and areas inland to escape the heat aren't always strong and surf-aware swimmers, so naturally they like to use the pools. If those pools aren't safe and ready, I can tell you that those people are still going to go in them."

Another scenario has locals worried. If the pools aren't open, weak swimmers could be tempted to take to the surf. "Even on calm-ish days everyone knows how deceptive the ocean can be and how quickly people can drown - particularly on a jam-packed beach where lifeguards are already doing it tough," the resident said.

As Mr Hyde admits, it's now a waiting game to see if the pools can be patched up ahead of the peak season and a new contractor found to complete the works in the longer term. It'll be interesting/depressing to see what the final bill ends up being.

Until then we're also left to ponder why it all went so wrong, because no-one is actually explaining that just now.

Fortunately, the way they're going, the comet-conquering European Space Agency can't be too far off building a time machine so we can go back and ask the original Austi pool construction crews how they did it. Early work dates back to the 1920s, and in the 1950s coalminers are said to have knocked the main pool together on their days off. They had no super-quick-set cement, no excavators, no power tools, no centimetre-perfect tide predictions ... hell, they didn't even have SPF 50 or hi-vis vests.

And they sure didn't get half a million bucks.