November 29, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Agile Space touts its shortening of lead times for its chemical satellite thrusters
The company claims it shortened the times from “the industry standard 24 months” to 3 to 6 months.
- Stratolaunches announces contract award from military contractor for testing hypersonic payloads
It appears Rocket Lab’s suborbital version of its Electron rocket, flying similar tests, has not put Stratolaunch out of the game entirely.
- China insists it will land a man on the Moon by 2030
Based on the accelerating pace of the Chinese space program, this goal remains possible, if difficult.
- Another explosion has occurred at the Kuaizhou-11 rocket test stand at China’s Jiuquan spaceport
The photos suggest the failure blast occurred during an engine static fire test. This is two years after a similar earlier test stand explosion at the same location.
- Kuiper signs a deal with Japanese company to provide broadband in that country
The deal of course hinges on Amazon getting its satellites into orbit, and that depends on whether ULA, Blue Origin, and ArianeGroup can get their new rockets flying finally.
- Video of new Superheavy tank being moved at Boca Chica
In other words, SpaceX is gearing up for a lot of test launches in 2024, assuming the federal paper-pushers can get out of the way.
- My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story
A great story from the history of America’s Mars rovers that every budding engineer must read!
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
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3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Agile Space touts its shortening of lead times for its chemical satellite thrusters
The company claims it shortened the times from “the industry standard 24 months” to 3 to 6 months.
- Stratolaunches announces contract award from military contractor for testing hypersonic payloads
It appears Rocket Lab’s suborbital version of its Electron rocket, flying similar tests, has not put Stratolaunch out of the game entirely.
- China insists it will land a man on the Moon by 2030
Based on the accelerating pace of the Chinese space program, this goal remains possible, if difficult.
- Another explosion has occurred at the Kuaizhou-11 rocket test stand at China’s Jiuquan spaceport
The photos suggest the failure blast occurred during an engine static fire test. This is two years after a similar earlier test stand explosion at the same location.
- Kuiper signs a deal with Japanese company to provide broadband in that country
The deal of course hinges on Amazon getting its satellites into orbit, and that depends on whether ULA, Blue Origin, and ArianeGroup can get their new rockets flying finally.
- Video of new Superheavy tank being moved at Boca Chica
In other words, SpaceX is gearing up for a lot of test launches in 2024, assuming the federal paper-pushers can get out of the way.
- My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story
A great story from the history of America’s Mars rovers that every budding engineer must read!
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Get those star link satellites in a higher orbit, a solar flare just short of X class will hit us dead center by the first.
(Watched a line of freshly launched star links last night, just after the space station passed over) (my fifth Star link sighting of which two are recorded)
Stratolaunch could carry Electron, right?
Jeff Wright: No, it can’t.
Chris Lewicki’s tale, My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story, is similar to the story The Martian, when Watney shorts out his communication system.
Fortunately, none of my failure stories (war stories, with apologies to those whose war stories are about real wars) cost half a billion dollars, but they were definitely instructive.
For a few months, a quarter century ago, when I was doing assembly, integration, and test (AI&T) on hundred-million-dollar commercial communication satellites, I admitted that errors happen by inventing the aphorism: “Everyone makes mistakes. You are allowed one mistake a day. Don’t waste it on something small.” Then at another satellite company someone dropped one of their hundred-million-dollar commercial communication satellites. I stopped suggesting that your daily mistake should be big.
Lewicki is right. AI&T teams put in long hours. Mistakes happen. Things can fail without mistakes being made. Review teams try to figure out where it went wrong and how to recover, often going slowly to make sure more damage does not happen while investigating or recovering from the problem.
I’ve had small problems, such as when I crimped something incorrectly, but by chance — and someone else’s foresight — had backup hardware to do it right without more than an hour of delay and no need for paperwork or investigation. I’ve had plenty of incidents in which a report had to be written (non-conformance or other type of paperwork), sometimes with corrective action and sometimes with “Use As Is,” just like in Lewicki’s story. I’ve had a rapid, unexpected backfill of a thermal vacuum chamber testing a $20 million space instrument (more damage to the turbo pump and the Cryo pump than the instrument), and a shake table explode under a hundred-million-dollar commercial communication satellite. Literally explode, but it only blew off a cover for the armature, which had the sensor that told the armature when it was centered, so the shaker put more stress on the spacecraft than it was supposed to before the accelerometers shut down everything. The spacecraft was OK, thanks to that safety feature.
My very first mistake, though, happened when I was working while still in college, and it almost got me fired. I broke the specialized instrument that was the crux of the experiment, and it took two weeks to fix. However, one of the other scientists helped me through by relating tales of his own mistakes.
No one ever said to me anything like: ‘Remember this feeling the next time you have to sign-off that something is OK.’ That is some very good advice.
For instance, one of my fellow AI&T engineers had signed off that some antenna screws were properly torqued, trusting his technicians, but since everyone makes mistakes, the tech had missed a few screws, which came out during a shake test. We almost had an ironic repeat: days later, as we were recovering from the incident, I was the one on duty as the antenna was being reassembled. Another tech had missed a screw and was embarrassed when I asked him to check it and it turned. How embarrassing would it have been for any screws to come out on the retest? He was one of our best techs, yet he was still susceptible to mistakes. A second set of eyes may cost extra, but they can help prevent expensive errors. Secondary (backup) lesson: just because you made a mistake, it is no guarantee that the mistake will not happen again.
Then there was the electrical fire due to stress on the connectors for the ground support equipment (GSE) where they connected to the spacecraft. Lesson: the A, B, and C labels on the fire extinguishers really mean something; use the right type on the right fire. Main lesson: support the cables near the connectors to avoid stressing them at a critical point. A couple of months later, there was the fire in a GSE rack at the thermal vacuum chamber. Lesson: no matter how much fire extinguisher you use, the fire doesn’t go out until the controllers two flights up are told that they need to turn off the rack. Another of my fellow AI&T engineers was the one who learned both of those lessons. My lesson on the second incident: just because the smokey smell is gone does not mean the problem is gone; the controllers upstairs may have only temporarily turned off the short-circuiting rack.
So, I wound up working for that company that had dropped their hundred-million-dollar commercial communication satellite. This was a couple of months after they had dropped it. (I moved from company 1 to company 2). Company 2 had asked me (fresh eyes on the issue) whether I thought that it could happen again. I wrote a note explaining the four reasons that I thought it could. One reason was that the attitude that it couldn’t happen again because everyone would make sure it didn’t was a bogus attitude — an attitude of complacency. Another was the reason that it happened in the first place: the bolts that were missing were difficult to see, so no one noticed that they were missing. I thought that the root cause of the accident was: unclear instruction describing the task to be performed and a lack of proper procedure to follow. I cannot remember the fourth reason (unless reason three is really reasons three and four). Meanwhile, the company I had come from, company 1, dropped their own multi-hundred-million-dollar government satellite under shockingly similar circumstances. It seems that it is difficult to learn from others’ mistakes.
Eventually, I went back to work for company 1, for the same boss I had worked for before. (He had moved from commercial satellites to government satellites just in time to be the manager who had to explain to the government why they were now the proud owners of a dropped, destroyed satellite.) Unlike company 2, company 1 now took error prevention very seriously, training everyone in error prevention with regular update training. Including annual fire extinguisher training for every employee. Because error prevention in America’s airline industry had worked well, this training regimen was based very heavily on the airlines’ safety model, right down to a system similar to cockpit resource management. Did I say that company 1 took error prevention seriously? I meant to say very seriously. It was a dramatic change in the corporate culture.
A side note: a dropped satellite can move a good meter or so. It is important to note that you should stay much farther than this whenever something large is being moved, lifted, rotated, or similar actions. Don’t just stay out from under a lifted load, stay farther away, too. No one was hurt in either dropped satellite incident, but that was only because no one happened to be standing in the line of travel.
Speaking of failure being an option, or rather coming pre-installed into the system, to anyone getting close to test engineering, I would recommend the book Failure Is Not An Option by Gene Kranz. It is full of similar lessons learned, and at the end of the book he includes some wise words of advice. I photocopied them and posted them at my desk.
China insists it will land a man on the Moon by 2030
But the big question is, would they be able to return him safely to Earth.