Comment by GTP
1 hour ago
You expect cleanrooms to be extremely controlled environments where skilled technicians and engineers very carefully handle sensitive equipment... Then someone steps on a component :D
1 hour ago
You expect cleanrooms to be extremely controlled environments where skilled technicians and engineers very carefully handle sensitive equipment... Then someone steps on a component :D
Yeah. Stuff happens.
There is the famous case of dropping the NOAA N-Prime weather satellite on the ground. They were trying to turn it from vertical to horizontal and they forgot to bolt it to the adapter. Worse: multiple people signed the paperwork attesting that they verified that it was bolted down correctly. Pictures and details here: https://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0410/04noaanreport/
Or the famous “space aligator” event. There the original plan was to launch a manned space craft and an unmanned module to do a docking test between them. But the shroud protecting the target module didn’t deploy properly. If i remember it right because the man who usually assembled that part had to leave during assembly because his wife was giving birth. Someone put it together but appearantely not correctly. The half opened shroud reminded the astronauts to the jaws of an angry aligator hence the name. Pictures: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/gemini/gemini-ix/gemini-ix-cre...
Or to not only list American failures: this russian satelite launch failed spectacularly because the IMU was installed upside down. https://youtu.be/ycRVAcZC5R4?si=LRTS7sutKSp6HnGs This was designed to be impossible to do, but someone bent and forced the component to stay in place in the wrong orientation. Then someone else whose job was to check it just signed the paperwork without climbing into the location where he could have checked it.
I love these cases. Because it shows to me how even though the trappings of high-tech we are all fundamentally just occasionally lazy, occasionally distracted monkeys banging rocks together.
> multiple people signed the paperwork attesting that they verified that it was bolted down correctly.
In my experience, the more people who are assigned to do something, the more those people assume that someone else did it and slack off. Of course, I've never worked on something as difficult to fix as an orbital satellite.