Comment by krisoft
19 hours ago
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.
The infamous "it fell in-between the seat and the console" problem.
These happen constantly. It's always important to close the loop on these and make sure someone is assigned to it directly, not left to indirectly assume.
In 1968, a team of Perkin-Elmer technicians were carrying the million dollar Copernicus space telescope mirror to the other side of the lab. They tripped over a piece of scrap lumber. Shaka, when the walls fell.
There was also a test of the Apollo Launch Escape System wherein an unmanned CSM was launched on a Little Joe rocket with the plan being to manually trigger the LES at a specific point in the flight. The problem was that the roll accelerometer in the Little Joe had been installed backwards, so it quickly developed a substantial roll rate once it left the ground and the resulting centrifugal force acting on the innards of the SM turned them into rapidly escaping outards. This tore the SM skin apart and satisfied the automatic abort conditions for firing the LES. The LES operated as designed, the CM was pulled free of the SM, then went on to become stable and reach successful recovery conditions. The result was determined to be a successful test of the LES and the mission did not need to be reflown.
Upside IMU is my favorite if only for the stupidity and spectacular video that resulted.
> 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.
That wasn't a case of "stuff happens." It was a case of systemic issues with defense contractor employees not doing the work they were supposed to be, cutting corners, and "not giving a shit because if it breaks the government will just order another one from us."
It was basically fraud/grift/incompetence, not "stuff happens."
> 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.
And why was the process so poorly documented only one guy could do it right?
Why didn't someone check the assembly?
Answer: defense contractor laziness and incompetence.