Two of the German military’s new spy satellites appear to have failed in orbit
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Man, I drop the ball at work and feel awful having to blow $5,000 on a PCB respin
then I see stuff like this and realize I could've dropped the ball from a lot higher
then I see stuff like this and realize I could've dropped the ball from a lot higher
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Fun fact about dropping balls, if you drop a sufficiently heavy ball of sufficiently refined weapons grade uranium onto another ball, from about 6 feet that is actually enough to trigger a nuclear detonation. Fancy things like neutron reflectors and explosive lenses are only necessary to create an efficient or optimal design.
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i suppose we'll find out at some point whether they were ground tested, or not. but if not, oh lordy, that is a whopping mistake. even if they were tested, failure to deploy is a massive failure, but untested? wow.
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Is it that shocking? I thought the JWT also couldn’t be ground-tested due to the size of the array not being able to support itself in 1g. If this is a passive antenna, to presumably pick up the radar signals from the main satellite, it must be a pretty big antenna. Maybe too big to test.
Anyway, this sucks for Germany. You can’t exactly get a replacement with Prime 2-day shipping.
EDIT: See some very insightful replies to my comment from the commentariat here which… well, it does look to be a pretty shocking screwup.
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Too bad they launched them both on the same rocket. If one had failed they could have figured it out before putting the second one in orbit.
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Everything on JWST was ground tested. The only caveat was that sagging of the mirror pieces meant that they could only compare the mirror curvatures to a model of the sagging. They couldn’t actually test that the mirror was perfectly aligned when unfurled. But they had designed extra play into the mirror adjustment mechanisms, to still allow the mirrors to be adjusted into correct curvature if they were further off from design than what the ground testing showed.
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A few years back, I watched a young guy who was the in-house IT for a small business struggle with a Ubiquiti PtP node. He'd pulled it straight from the box & handed it to the electrician with the rented bucket truck for installation atop a 40' pole. Hope he learned something that day.
Still?
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A spy satellite that has lost the ability to ask Why? due to the loss of antennas...
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Correct, every single deployment on JWST was done and tested many times on the ground. Not just for the mirrors but for the sunshield and other spacecraft structural deployments too. For all the deployments that were not strong enough to support their own weight or operate correctly in 1 g, ground support systems were devised for gravity offloading. Think springs and bungee cords and extra supports, variously depending on the specific deployment. In practice rather fancy and sophisticated ones, but conceptually it's simply springs and supports to take the load off. See for example video here.
Such ground support equipment for gravity offloading was not a new idea developed for JWST; rather it's common engineering practice from many years of space systems engineering...
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Not sure if folks caught the stink of Private Equity spreading to Germany.
KKR is one of the original bandits, the entire PE strategy is to pillage companies as completely as possible, leave them tottering at the edge of oblivion and move to the next target. I wouldn't be surprised if pre-takeover OHB was trying to keep costs as low as possible by avoiding things like testing satellite hardware before launch. Gotta keep the cash for the vultures to make off with.
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At some point, Germans were globally renowned for their engineering. As someone who deals with manufacturing equipment made in Germany within the past decade, all I can say is this doesn't surprise me in the least. Our Chinese stuff is better. Wish we would've known sooner.
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They never had a chance to test the Voyager probes to see if they could survive high radiation environments. When they flew by Jupiter they were exposed to much higher amounts of radiation than expected but somehow they survived.
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This seems an awful lot like not testing Starliner + Atlas + Centaur for a full-up dress rehearsal before launch.
It really shouldn't be necessary. These things generally work fine...
It really shouldn't be necessary. These things generally work fine...
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Random?
Well. In reading the article you will discern that one of the main points made was that the manu was still in technical possession of the birds as they had not completed operational demonstration, a condition of turnover and payment. They are on the hook for two non-op satellites. Gonna cost them, and lessons will be learned. EU may be more about socialized services in some cases and places, but they don't suffer welfare corporations nearly as much as the U.S. does. Largely because there are consumer (tax-payer) watchdogs out there who don't let the military industrial complex fleece the citizens. Novel idea, I know.
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I've read that this was an issue with the "Little Boy" bomb dropped in WWII. If the B-29 crashed at the "wrong" angle, there was a significant chance that the bomb would detonate on its own, even with the fuse disabled. It was one of the reasons that design was not further produced.
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Thanks — I remember the consternation around the mirror unfolding, and how if one of the 130+ actuators was a dud the mission was lost, then I think I mixed that up with the "sagging" being unable to be ground-tested with "testing" of the entire mechanism.
If Der Spiegel's report is accurate and there's no mistranslations... well, yikes. That's an expensive warranty claim. Especially with two separate duds, which indicates there might be some commonality in the failures.
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That was how Little Boy worked. Dead simple and no one doubted it would work. Most of the Manhattan Project was getting Fat Man to work.
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At least they didn't do this:
science.nasa.gov
Mars Climate Orbiter - NASA Science
Key Facts Launch Dec. 11, 1998 Launch Site Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida Launch Vehicle Delta II End of Mission Sept. 23, 1999, lost on arrival
science.nasa.gov
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Sadly, this is very much symptomatic of vaunted German Engineering in the year 2024, after years of decline. Severe lack of "Fachkräfte" (*), lack of investment in "MINT" (STEM in English), resting on laurels, the adoption of US style executive management in the C-suite and boardroom.
I say that as someone born there and who still visits regularly. The snapshots those visits offer have continuously shown a downward trend since at least 2010, but of course the seeds go beyond.
The "Mittelständischer Betrieb" used to be the powerhouse of German industry and innovation (more than the famous large corporation, from the car makers to Siemens, BASF and others). Family owned and operated, they are dying in droves. Or shifting their production to Eastern Europe and overseas.
Reading something like the Frankfurter Allgemeine every day - a respected, centrist newspaper, not some tabloid - is enough to imbue a sense of despair.
Sorry for the rant - but I only just returned and the event in this article just added to the doom and gloom I already felt hovering over the country. EM2024 notwithstanding.
(*) literally "qualified workers", but like so many German words has overtones and connotations of having come out of what used to be Germany's excellent school system which would produce highly trained people at all levels, "proper for the job", including in trade schools and "blue collar jobs".
I say that as someone born there and who still visits regularly. The snapshots those visits offer have continuously shown a downward trend since at least 2010, but of course the seeds go beyond.
The "Mittelständischer Betrieb" used to be the powerhouse of German industry and innovation (more than the famous large corporation, from the car makers to Siemens, BASF and others). Family owned and operated, they are dying in droves. Or shifting their production to Eastern Europe and overseas.
Reading something like the Frankfurter Allgemeine every day - a respected, centrist newspaper, not some tabloid - is enough to imbue a sense of despair.
Sorry for the rant - but I only just returned and the event in this article just added to the doom and gloom I already felt hovering over the country. EM2024 notwithstanding.
(*) literally "qualified workers", but like so many German words has overtones and connotations of having come out of what used to be Germany's excellent school system which would produce highly trained people at all levels, "proper for the job", including in trade schools and "blue collar jobs".
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That's the model with manually released antennas.
If they went with the XT satellites they would have automatic antennas with heated seats.
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Statistical
Ars Legatus Legionis
If these kind of mistakes on high profile expensive satellites are business as usual maybe it isn't undervalued.
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Shockingly, the German publication says that its sources indicated OBH did not fully test the functionality and deployment of the satellite antennas on the ground. This could not be confirmed.
Shockingly, someone did not spellcheck this before pressing publish... it should be OHB here
Shockingly, someone did not spellcheck this before pressing publish... it should be OHB here
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What is this Prime 2 day shipping you talk of? I need to have it added to my Prime account. /S
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Hmmmm. But aren’t the heated seats in the XT model available by subscription only?
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This is one of those stories that makes my skin crawl, because it makes me realize some of the bullets I have unwittingly dodged over the years despite plenty of naive assumptions like that.
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