SLS LOX Dome Dropped And Damaged Beyond Repair (Update)
Keith’s 1:31 pm EDT note: Sources report that a LOX dome for the SLS under construction was dropped and is damaged beyond repair. The accident also damaged some tooling. There are reportedly enough parts to build a new LOX dome but that is going to affect a lot of schedules. David Beaman is heading up an investigation team. More to follow.
Keith’s 7:00 pm EDT update: NASA PAO provided this statement: “NASA and Boeing formed independent investigation teams to evaluate an incident that occurred while manufacturing test hardware for the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans May 3. Initial assessments indicate damage to the rear (aft) dome of a liquid oxygen tank, which is part of the rocket’s 212-foot core stage. Assessments are underway to determine the extent of the damage. There were no injuries. As required by protocol, the Vertical Assembly Center tool was shut down and secured. NASA is evaluating next steps to safely resume operations with the VAC.”
Oh that’s not good news at all. Glad no one was hurt.
There wasn’t any mention of there being no injuries.
I assumed that if someone were hurt, that would have been in the headline.
I didn’t see any mention of a cause but people seem to be comparing this to the NOAA-N accident.
NOAA-N was, well, very photogenic. But damage in ground handling is not all that uncommon.
Now they updated the news, and there are no injuries
Ah yess… the government way. Hey everyone! I have the perfect solution to keep costs down! Let’s only build… ONE! Bean counters everywhere rejoice.
At this stage in construction they’re still designing the new welding techniques necessary to build something this size while lowering weights to get the performance they need – in other words, it’s a prototype.
But sure, lets accuse them of being wasteful for not putting an unproven design and manufacturing technique into mass production…
That’s almost as bad. This is the flight article we’re talking about. Last time I checked, SLS wasn’t supposed to be an experiment, so the flight article shouldn’t be a prototype. Maybe it should be considered an experiment, and not class A, “failure is not an option” hardware. But you’re describing the worst of both worlds.
Well, I can agree there are certainly other problems with that. If you follow the other news out of MAF recently there were test articles ahead of flight articles, but the lines are getting blurred a bit as problems being discovered in the new techniques run into deadlines set by politicians, so some test articles are likely moving up to flight hardware. That is bad, yes.
Sounds like there is some extreme schedule pressure here. That was one of the contributing factors for the Challenger disaster. But sure, let’s go ahead and put a crew on EM-1. What could possibly go wrong?
Hey, I’m not advocating for crew on EM-1, or even for SLS in general. I agree the rush is crazy – so is the overall expense of this program. I’d prefer to see a super-heavy-lift version of the commercial cargo program – we’d be better off if the SLS money went to bringing multiple competing options to market.
Well, yes that is true. But there is an argument to be made for Musk’s “building the machine that builds the machine” approach. Your production line is also part of the product. By developing your production line parallel to the actual product, you have higher initial costs but you can iterate on hardware much faster. Material costs are not the issue, so don’t be afraid to produce inadequate hardware at first. So what goes wrong and fix things along the way.
I think the approach where they first try to figure out exactly what they want to build and only afterwards worry about building it quickly and cost-effectively is exactly why “old space” is really starting to get in trouble when it comes to the competitiveness of their launch vehicles.
I fully agree there are better ways to do it. But the only way NASA & Boeing will up production rate at MAF would be duplicating the assembly hardware, assembly teams.. Do we really want to double the expenditures on this program?
Better to scratch this effort and turn the full development over to more agile firms. Do a super heavy lift version of the commercial crew and cargo programs, hand out installment payments for actual progress towards launching SLS class rockets, and they can likely bring multiple competing launchers to market for less.
I agree, at this point it is too late to turn back. You need the right approach from the start. I wasn’t suggesting they should change, I was merely observing the difference in the approaches.
Who’s to say Musk didn’t have similar accidents. Being a private company, he can limit what gets released. NASA can’t do that.
SpaceX had lots of accidents. However, there’s a bit of difference between a program that cost $300 million to first flight and a program that’ll cost over $15 billion to first flight.
For the budget of SLS (excluding Orion), you could run 50 different parallel F9-scale developments all at the same time. Or about ten FH-scale developments at the same time.
I’m actually quite certain he had similar accidents. If you read about the development of the Merlin engine, you’ll find that they blew up many engines on the test stand before they finally worked out all the flaws. The difference is that they actually had an assembly line producing engines, so they could move on quickly after a failure. The whole point is accepting failure during R&D as part of the process, instead of avoiding risks as much as possible.
Just look at their reusability program. Their first serious attempts were in 2014 with spectacular public failures as a result. We’re barely 3 years later and they haven’t had a landing failure since June last year. It’s that feedback loop of trying things and learning from failures that allows them to improve so quickly at a fraction of the cost. Note that Blue Origin’s first landing attempt also failed. It’s not just SpaceX that embraces this.
But instead with SLS they may now put humans on the very first flight. That’s just insane. No wonder it’s such a ridiculously expensive rocket if you literally cannot afford to have anything go wrong ever at all.
I’m not sure about the way you are using the words “accident” and “failure.” A Merlin exploding on a test stand isn’t clearly an accident or a failure. If someone said, “Let’s see what happens if we throttle it up to 105%,” and it went boom, then that’s (to my mind) a successful test. They learned what would happen if they did that. Dropping a large part and damaging it is definitely what I’d call an accident. I don’t think anyone suggested an experiment to see if dropping it would cause damage.
That’s a valid point, but the result in all cases is that hardware is destroyed. They intentionally push hardware beyond failure because they can afford to. If SpaceX drops a propellant tank in their factory today, or maybe even a fully assembled engine… Do you think it will cause months of delays? Of course not, because they have an assembly line pumping out those things.
The SLS is not designed with easy construction in mind. I’m not going to post a link here to prevent the comment being blocked as spam, but Google “nasaspaceflight SLS welding” and click the article from May 8. It goes in depth on some of the huge issues they are having with welding the propellant tanks of SLS. They have to be so thick that nobody really knows how to properly weld those together reliably. This is what causes these huge delays because every single piece of hardware is incredibly precious because they are essentially unique. They designed a rocket, assuming that they could figure out how to efficiently manufacture it.
Did you see the images of the carbon composite LOX tank for the ITS? It was a full scale test article, they put it on a barge and blew it up a good distance off-shore. Like before, they’re building hardware and testing it to its limits. Depending on whether or not they were satisfied with the test, they’ll likely keep doing that until they are confident they can reliably build those tanks. If you go look at the article I mentioned, they didn’t dare to pressurize one of their LH2 tanks to flight pressures because it might fail. That’s right. They don’t even know, and they won’t even try to find out because they literally can’t spare the hardware. If you can afford a destructive test, you can afford an accident. And FYI, I believe that tank was supposed to be the EM-1 tank before they figured out they had welding issues. The tank they don’t trust enough to pressurize to flight levels on the flight they were contemplating to put humans on… Let that sink in for a while… This is not aimed at you, but this kind of stuff just pisses me off. Yes there are many more safety and reliability checks before a launch, but this is a systematic flaw. Add in some political pressure and you have a tragedy on your hands.
Just imagine if they were still going to do the 10 meter diameter Ares V tank and caps!! Sheesh…
No one is asking for “mass production” of prototype hardware. It is reasonable to ask for one extra copy of each of the major components that have a long lead time and/or long manufacturing time.
Even the space shuttle program had “structural spares”. These were used to build Endeavour after the Challenger disaster.
The production hardware for this stuff isn’t cheap, or small – they’re already trying to make them as fast as possible, and running into problems. They’re certainly going to make a second, third, etc piece of hardware, but making them in parallel would take even more absurd money as they duplicate multiple very large and expensive fixtures in MAF (plus possibly another building to house it), not to mention doubling staff sizes.
Right now they’re having trouble making one part. Lets let them figure that one out before calling for more.
It’s a bit terrifying since EM-1 is going to be flown with hardware that was made while the production methods were still being tweaked.
On that we agree entirely. This whole project is a political boondoggle.
Honestly, for technology development, flying hardware while you are still tweaking production methods doesn’t bother me. That gives you a fast development cycle and lots of room for build-fly-fix-build-fly again-etc. But that’s good for experiments and technology development. Applying that approach to a supposedly operational vehicle is something I’d call terrifying.
As a bean-counter, I would strongly object to having one copy of a fragile item whose loss would cause a ripple of expensive delays through the rest of a manufacturing process. Pricing risk is a standard practice.
You clearly have not dealt with spacecraft.
NASA used to build backups for *everything* even on projects where money was “tight”. That Skylab Orbital Workshop in the Smithsonian is a flight qualified backup for the Skylab that flew. Skylab was done on a shoestring budget using as much leftover hardware from (lunar) Apollo/Saturn as it could.
It raises some flow and scheduling issues, but since (if) you expect another flight, you don’t even need backups. Just phase the work so the critical elements for flight N+1 are well-along when you are getting ready for flight N. In case of an accident, you could use the parts for flight N+1 as spares.
“First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?” – the late, great John Hurt in “Contact” (RIP)
Except that’s not true. Since the R&D is the most expensive part of these programs, building a 2nd copy of the flight hardware doesn’t cost anywhere near twice as much. Furthermore, lessons learned on building the 1st copy quite often reduce the manufacturing costs of the 2nd copy when compared to the manufacturing costs of the first copy.
In other words, not having backup hardware is “penny wise but pound foolish”.
I agree about backup hardware, but it was recently pointed out to me that the second item isn’t all that much less expensive than the first. At least following current practices, a good deal of the work goes into testing and if you change manufacturing processes based on experience, all the testing and analysis has to be redone. The second item would be cheaper (assuming you don’t fiddle around with the design too much) but the real cost savings may not show up until you’re building half a dozen or a dozen of them.
Backup hardware should be identical to the first copy. Otherwise you run into exactly the sort of problems you are talking about. What I’m really talking about is making two identical copies of the hardware needed. If necessary, leave out “final assembly” in case the first flight uncovers something that *needs* to be changed. Otherwise, that extra copy is there in case of “accidents” that are easily avoided the next time.
A convenient excuse for even more schedule slippage …
I don’t think SLS will launch until 2021 or after! — or maybe never if Elon Musk gets ITS going
ITS isn’t even necessary. Once Falcon Heavy and New Glenn are operational it becomes really hard to justify launching anything on SLS. AFAIK there is not a single payload seriously being considered that needs more than a Falcon Heavy or New Glenn.
And putting crew on EM-1… It’s the next shuttle disaster waiting to happen…
Err, ITS has nothing to do with SLS.
ITS is EM’s Interplanetary Launch System comprising at this point BFR crew and cargo modules and the Raptor powered reusable launch vehicle.
Cheers
I’ll eat my hat if ITS is built solely for Mars missions. That would be ridiculous. You can do a Mars launch only once every 2 years, even Musk doesn’t have that much money to blow on his hobby. The BFR has to somehow earn its bread in order to exist and Mars is not going to be a way to do it.
My bet is that they are seriously going to upstage SLS and hoping to offer services to yet non existing market of super heavy launches. But perhaps it was politically inconvenient to state it quite that way.
That’d be the FH market not ITS but who really knows what’s in Elon’s mind wrt ITS. USAF is funding a Raptor upper stage version probably for FH. FH also has development potential via cross-feed so it seems to me that FH more than covers off on any existing payloads including, gasp, Orion.
What the heck, Elon has named his system ITS and stated publicly that he can basically go anywhere in our solar system. Here’s hoping I live long enough to see some of it.
Cheers
Yes, obviously FH will cover every exciting payload, once operational it will be most powerful operating rocket. Who would build a payload more powerful than you can launch? However there have been payloads FH wouldn’t be able to launch, Skylab and moon missions for example. And there are payloads envisioned FH couldn’t launch, largest Bigelow inflatable concept for example.
FH can put impressive tonnage to LEO and if they added an space tug with a second launch anywhere else from there. However, the payload fairing is only so large, no larger than current F9 in fact.
Also, FH won’t stay most powerful operating rocket for long, SLS, Long March 9 and whatever Energia is working on are planned to be more powerful and bigger, even New Glenn is planned to have larger payload fairing if smaller tonnage. The world is salivating for larger rockets and FH just isn’t quite big enough.
That’s where ITS comes in, Mars talk is just sales talk/distraction.
I’m aware of that. My argument wasn’t that ITS would replace SLS, but that the (soon to be) existence of Falcon Heavy and New Glenn completely eliminate the need for SLS. The kinds of missions on the table for the short term don’t need all the power of SLS and can launch just fine on the commercial boosters (although they will need a bit longer to arrive, not really a very big deal). The more ambitious missions (like Moon bases or space stations) will need more than a single launch anyway so you might as well do a couple more while saving a huge amount on launch costs.
It would, however, utterly eclipse it in every possible way.
I agree. The BFR will left 4 times as much for a fraction of the price of a SLS launch.
Actually the Falcon 9 Heavy will even give the Block I SLS a run for its money. The Falcon 9 Heavy is listed as delivering 70 tons to LEO. The Block I SLS will lift 77 tons to LEO.
However, the push into BEO is much lower. You’d either need a higher Isp U/S, or (my preference) a self-docking in-orbit booster for dual-launch architecture. The savings on killing SLS/Orion would allow you to fund the creation of such a beastie, after which you have an incredibly flexible mission architecture available.
—
As for ITS, it’s the BFS that completes the magic. It is essentially what the Shuttle was meant to me. Low cost, reusable space-truck. Only bigger and vastly more capable. And compared to SLS, it replaces the entire #JourneyToMars mission architecture that SLS is meant to loft.
What do you mean by a in-orbit booster for BEO missions? The final stage gets up to escape velocity along with the payload, so how would you recover and reuse the booster? I’d think that would take navigating through a solar orbit and over a year, then an Earth orbit insertion burn. Is that really what you’re suggesting?
No. Dual launch of the payload and, separately, a large injection stage. The injection stage must therefore be “smart” enough to be able to dock with the payload, on-orbit. At which point, you’ve got a general purpose modular booster for any type of mission.
I’m not suggesting reusability of an injection-stage on a Jupiter/Europa mission.
That might be a little hard on the docking system. For an injection to a solar (planetary transfer) orbit, you generally want the burn to be short compared to the initial orbital period. Conveniently enough, almost everything in the equations cancels out, and I think you’d want at least 5 m/s^2 (0.5 g) for the injection burn. The Apollo CMS/LM mating only had to deal with about half that, and that’s the most extreme case I can think of. Doable, and maybe a good idea if the spacecraft and the injection stage can’t fit on available launch vehicles, but there would be some inefficiencies.
The Block I SLS will only lift 77 tons to LEO, the Block II SLS 130 tons.
The BFR is designed to lift 550 tons to LEO. Its like comparing a B737 to a B747…
A better comparison would the Falcon 9 heavy which will lift 70 tons to LEO in the early version.
Oh, snap, you are right. They didn’t build a payload for SLS did they. </sarc>
You have Orion, and Europa Clipper (which was originally intended to launch on an Atlas V). I believe that’s all that is confirmed to launch on SLS.
So what else is there? Sure it is too late to move those to other launchers, but seriously those could’ve launched just as well on FH or NG. Feel free to school me but I really don’t see how SLS is an attractive launcher for anyone starting a project right now.
I don’t think it’s too late to change launchers for Europa Clipper. It’s still in the planning stages, a good $2b away from being built.
Phase B is technically preliminary design and prototyping, not planning.
Europa Clipper can move back to an Atlas V launch. The cruise phase would be three years longer and involve Earth and Venus flybys. At every presentation I’ve seen (most recently at the February OPAG meeting), they have specifically said SLS is the baseline, but nothing about the spacecraft’s design precludes switching back to an Atlas.
Falcon heavy is also far behind schedule.
True, but that’s irrelevant because it is by far the closest to completion. The center core is already built and tested, while the side cores will be reused boosters. The hardware already exists… At this point, SLS doesn’t even have a fuel tank and that’s a program that has existed in one form or another for at least 15 years now. FH has been in development for 5, maybe 6 years.
New Glenn is much more behind SLS and ITS.
Hmm so could that mean there is now time to add crew to the EM-1 mission, rather convenient?
EM-1, like this now damaged structure, is an experiment. Further it is an experiment being performed by people who by and large have never built anything, let alone the world’s largest rocket, ever before. So, there will not be, or at least there should not be any humans on board.
What the hell are you talking about?
A lot of the people designing, building, and testing spacecraft and launch vehicles for Boeing, LM, etc have experience from shuttle, Titan, etc.
The Shuttle was developed in the ’70s. The last orbiter to be built was operational by 1992. NASA hasn’t overseen a successful launcher development program since then.
No-one currently working on SLS or Orion had experience in the Shuttle development or construction. People who retired at the end of the Shuttle program typically started working at NASA after the Shuttles were operational. (For eg, retired Shuttle-manager, Wayne Hale, only started at NASA after the Challenger accident.) Therefore the people who are left were trained by people who were trained by people who might have been involved in development. We are two full generations away from program development.
This is a mistake that Congress makes (or an excuse they use to justify their insane decisions), the idea that “experience” is somehow preserved in a procedural manual in a technical library, or that Shuttle operations people have “experience” suitable to designing a Shuttle-derived launch vehicle, because… “Shuttle”.
[Expendables are a little better, the two EELV’s were developed in the late ’90s, early 2000s. But it is still well over a decade since either company developed any new launcher.]
Not true, many ppl working on these projects have Shuttle experience during development and some have had Apollo experience
Perhaps a few people, but a significant number? Apollo development (not flight operations) was essentially over in 1969. Someone who started work on the program then, at the age of 18, would be 66 years old. More senior people, who started work when the real development work was in progress, would be pushing 80 today, if not older. So people with Shuttle development experience, you can subtract about 12 years, and it still isn’t likely many of them are still around.
SX has demonstrated that experience might be over-rated.
Not entirely fair, you say? True, because SX had NASA help. But the facts remain these:
1 (Clean Sheet) + 5(Years) + $1B = F9.
(Actually less than a billion).
This timeline includes creation of the Merlin engine and other goodies.
It is apparently the case that rocket design, and rocket-engine design, is well-integrated into the fabric of knowledge. Highly motivated individuals are able to tap that body of knowledge. Yes, there’s help from NASA, and other sources. But the basic equation remains.
I strongly disagree with the idea of colonising Mars, so Musk’s whole raison de vivre is anathema to me. And yet I’m a drooling fanboi. Because he turned the incremental development methodology, (which typified early NASA and aviation, and which I’ve been monomaniacally droning on about for decades online) into a successful business model.
Re: Help from NASA
SpaceX apparently drew from the cancelled Fastrac engine program. An in-house NASA study into modernising rocket engines. Their first rocket-surgeon came straight out of that program.
Of course, the answer to criticism that SpaceX merely “drew from NASA knowledge” is that the same knowledge was available to everyone. There’s no reason why LM, Boeing, ATK, AJR, etc couldn’t have followed the same path.
Indeed, the typical annual profits of LM & Boeing are such that they could have tried several variants in-house.
Instead they bought up rivals, merged their operations into ULA in order to increase their margins, then abandoned any attempt to compete in the international commercial launch market. (Let alone radically change the game through new developments.)
At the time that Steve Jobs conceptualized the iPod, many of the pieces were widely available (with the late-entry arrival of the teeny 1.5″ HD).
A company like Sony – indeed a huge player at the time – could have pulled those pieces together and created the “thousand songs in your pocket” device.
Sony failed largely because the different divisions of the company competed with one another (an overstatement, to be sure, but correct mainly). The “knowledge” was out there. Apple created the iPod because it was at the time the only company that could have done it. To do it, the company needed a strong, charismatic and creative leader.
Similarly SX: a strong leader, at the right time, was able to forge a completely different direction. Sony could not do it. Neither, I fear, NASA.
Errr, they did. Sony sold MP3 players years before Apple made iPods.
There was nothing technologically unique about the iPod. It was about the UX design, and the conspicuous-consumption social marketing. (The unique appearance of the iPod was like the Nike swoosh. People could immediately see you spent a dumb amount of money on an MP3 player or sneakers. Whereas Sony, in spite of having a similar price, didn’t really look different to any cheapy no-name brand.)
Shit happens, but with a reasonable launch cadence and an assembly infrastructure appropriately scaled to your vehicle, breaking one part, even a big part, isn’t a big deal. But if you aim to launch once every two years, then you have to accept the risk that your schedule may be significantly delayed by a single incident.
This is the true lesson here. A rocket built once every two years is not often enough to iterate through the normal learning process.
Agreed. One built every two years means that every single copy is a learning experience. Employees come and go over a period of years. Also, people forget the nitty gritty details of what they did two years ago. Mistakes will be made on every single copy built. And every single copy launched will combine its operational flight with its test flight.
Insanity.
I once heard someone from the SLS program say they aren’t worried about this, and used the Delta IV Heavy as a counterexample. It’s made eight launches in ten years, and never launched more than once per year. I wasn’t convinced because, for the Delta IV Heavy, the workforce and experience issues you mention are offset by flights of other Delta IV configurations.
Although it was a “clean sheet” design the Delta IV program (not just the heavy) has never been profitable, forcing Boeing Delta to merge with Lockheed. ULA will keep the DH flying only until it has a replacement that can meet DOD mass requirements. One of the cost problems it faced was the unfortunate choice of hydrogen as a booster fuel, resulting in a much larger fuel tank than would be needed with RP-1.
Indeed, the Delta IV heavy comprises three Common Booster Cores, so you go through the manufacturing processes three times more than for the equivalent number of SLS rockets. This Common Booster Core is also the main component of the single-stick Delta IV Medium. there have been 35 launches between Nov-2002 and Mar-2017, of which 9 heavies, so that’s 53 cores over 14.3 years
= 3.7 cores a year. So quite a bit better rate-wise than SLS
SLS will never have a “reasonable launch cadance”. At best, it’s going to be able to launch twice per year.
Not realistically. We know that they are engine limited to four flights by 2027. It’s unlikely that any of the major contractors are scaled for greater production rates.
(Boeing claims to be able to produce two LH tanks (and hence two cores) per year – which is where the 2/yr figure comes from – but looking at the mistakes they’ve made, they seem to be over their maximum capacity already. And AJR will deliver just 6 new RS-25 engines over the next ten years, assuming they don’t miss their 2027 deadline.)
I know this is armchair quarterbacking but the construction pace doesn’t seem nowhere hectic enough for a case of the dropsys to occur.
well this gives them the top cover to finally move off the Nov 2018 launch date 🙂
There was a report just a week or 2 ago that they would not meet 2018-neither SLS or Orion. Real question, I would say, is can they fly in this decade? I am guessing, not. Remember, we are talking about major components of this rocket still not having been put together, in any form-no prototype, no mockup, a little more than a year before it should have been on the launch pad for flight. That is what this piece was, part of the first flight vehicle. The last rocket this size was the Space Shuttle. They had a full scale test vehicle on the launch pad in 1978. Shuttle first flew in 1981. That was a 3-4 year lead time. Does anyone, for even a minute, think they could have launched in the next 2 years?
I’m from 2019. Trump wants them to go to the Moon by 2024 and NASA is saying the SLS maybe (wink, wink) can fly by the end of 2020, but pretty much nobody believes it.
Meanwhile SpaceX is building a rocket out of stainless steel in the open in Texas and Florida and hopes to do a 20km flight test by the end of 2019.
The NOAA satellite wasn’t a matter of forgetting to bolt it down. A team working on another satellite borrowed the bolts while they weren’t around and without logging it. They figured the team on the NOAA satellite was far enough behind schedule no one would notice for a few days. Then the other team decided to make up lost time by doing things out of order and tried to tilt the spacecraft horizontal, first thing Monday morning.
Rather than forgetting to install bolts they failed to check for bolts – still a pretty big error.
There is no doubt that was a massively botched job. But I like to learn from mistakes. I guess that makes me a connoisseur when it comes to what, exactly, the mistakes we’re.
Those who do not remember the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them. George Santayana, “Reason in Common Sense”, 1905.
I hope some people got fired for this doozy.
Accident reports tend to be written in the passive voice. “Mistakes were made”, not “X made a mistake.”
So the satellite can be rotated horizontal? That would make it a lot easier to launch on the Falcon. Apparently some DOD satellites can’t be rotated, so have to be stacked vertically.
No, you are thinking about transferring the fully assembled rocket to the pad. I was talking about putting the spacecraft together before it was mated with the launch vehicle.
For spacecraft assembly, it is convenient and efficient to rotate and turn the spacecraft around. Since that involves an object of order 5 meters in size (roughly two stories), it is easier to bolt it to a solid platform, which can be rotated from vertical to horizontal, than to have the assembly team do some of the work on the top of ladders.
That does mean bolting the spacecraft to a solid plate, and doing so with bolts you can really count on. No inferior quality metal, no stripped threads, etc. So the bolts are supposed to come from controlled stores, not the local hardware store. And, in this case, all the bolts were checked out from controlled stores, and someone decided to borrow some from another team.
Monumentally stupid not to have enough bolts on hand for every satellite being built.
I know companies that have thousands of desktop computers on site but don’t have any spare parts for any of them because they’re all leased and the manufacturer is supposed to fix any that break.
But when it’s *your* machine that’s down, the lack of something like a $60 hard drive means you can’t work for at least a day while your machine is down. That down time typically costs the company *far* more than what it would cost to have a few spare parts on hand.
I’m not sure what the problem is. This event will mean more labor to fix (or more likely replace) this part, meaning more “jobs” for Georgia. Since the primary mission of SLS is “provide jobs to voters in states with powerful Senators”, this can only help that mission.
Broken window fallacy FTW!
I think you have figured out exactly what is at work on these NASA projects. The goal is not to fly. The goal is to keep as many people working for as long as possible. If the goal is always just out of reach, then no harm, no foul.
Georgia?
Who dropped it? Larry, Moe or Curly? Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.
Bet you could pop a lot of popcorn in that thing!
Probably. And after the Superconducting Super Collider was cancelled, someone rented out part of the tunnel to grow mushrooms.
Very convenient excuse for a delay.
Someone call up Russia and dust off an Energia.
Russia is having similar issues. Proton is down and read russianspaceweb for details on the MLM problems.
http://www.robert-w-jones.com
I now adjust my odds for one launch of SLS to 20 percent, down from 50 percent.
How the heck did this major incident/accident/mishap that happened on May 3rd, take a full week to reach the general public, the media and NasaWatch? I realize Nasa can be a somewhat closed culture, and perhaps the Michoud operations are even more insular…but you would think someone who saw this and/or knew about it would have gotten the word out, anonymously, the same day, through some type of social media account.
I guess some workers abide by the public release restriction forms they sign.
Well, no. That’s the strange part. For this not to have made the news, _some_ workers abiding by those restrictions wouldn’t do it. You’d need _everyone_ involved to do so. 100% of a large group keeping their mouths shut isn’t unprecedented, but it is unusual. I suspect the press just didn’t see it as a big story.
The press STILL hasn’t found the big story with SLS.
…and they managed to keep it out of the news (like NASA Watch) for a week!
I am sure congressional members from the space states will use this for a special request of a couple more billion boondoggle dollars.
:joy:
I wasn’t aware the cause of the drop was released. What was the cause of the SLS dome drop?
The NOAA event is described in _Space_System_Failures_, by Harland and Lorenz. I’d see what they references, but I don’t have my copy of the book handy. As for the SLS drop, I suspect it will be a few weeks before hints and guesses appear in Aviation Week and months before anything official comes out.
On the issue of backup copies: This piece of hardware appears – to this nontechnical observer – to be quite similar to hardware used on the Saturn rockets that served the same function.
The fabrication problem faced then seems similar – joining triangular pieces through complex curves and with damnably small tolerances. In the case of Saturn – if I’m not off base here – the joining was accomplished in an underwater chamber using explosive devices.
Construction of the chamber was initially expensive (not overly) but rapid fabrication was then straightforward. At least that’s how I understood the process.
I thought the underwater explosion thing (i.e. hydro-forming) was used to form the domed shape, not to actual join the panels.
I was hoping by posting that comment that someone with more knowledge could clear up that point. You are probably right.
But I love the ‘out of the box’ thinking of the idea, after the company burned through much money. Risky.
I think it was Ford who used to market their F-150 trucks has having hydroformed frames. Today, it’s a fairly common manufacturing technique for high strength parts.