By: Concerned

Concerned — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 23:26:58 +0000

There has been a steady erosion of engineering tribal knowledge all throughout the industry, except in pockets. Formerly rock solid engineering houses like Boeing, and now even the high pinnacle of JPL are now making bad mistakes that rarely snuck through to flight vehicles in the past. There simply hasn’t been consistent hiring and passing of that knowledge through the decades, and the best and brightest aren’t always choosing aerospace careers like was done post-Sputnik. Combined with replacement of engineers in upper management with finance, increasingly woke, types is a big factor in the degradation.
I see it every day in my neck of the woods.

By: David Eastman

David Eastman — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 16:48:56 +0000

So the team was given inaccurate thruster data that worked out such that an 80% duty cycle would stay within the given temperature constraints, and wrote the flight management software accordingly. Then during final review, someone discovered that the data was incorrect, an 80% duty cycle would generate more heat than they were capable of dealing with, and they changed the software to limit them to a 30% duty cycle instead.

I haven’t found an article that gives any details on how the discrepancy in the documentation happened and how it was discovered, but it seems to me that the current team is doing what it’s supposed to, and the actual problem was years ago when they were provided bad data and didn’t do whatever was just done to verify it.

Comments on: Psyche engineers discover and fix a major thruster problem only two weeks before launch

By: Concerned

By: David Eastman