from the I'll-just-leave-this-here-but-it-should-have-been-there dept.
The European Space Agency's (ESA's) embarrassment at having two of its Galileo satnav birds land in the wrong orbit has been blamed on bad programming of the Soyuz craft that hauled the satellites aloft. Russia's Izviestia reports that an investigation of the incident found that the Soyuz's first stage did all that was asked of it. So did the second stage, but that vehicle had been programmed incorrectly.
[Izviestia reports]: http://izvestia.ru/news/575880 [In Russian]
[Google Translation]: https://translate.google.co.in/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fizvestia.ru%2Fnews%2F575880&edit-text=
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El Reg reports
Russian aerospace firm's kit fails on 46th mission
The embarrassing incident that two of Europe's Galileo satnav craft [landed] in the wrong orbit has been attributed to "a shortcoming in the system thermal analysis performed during stage design" for the launch [vehicle] Fregat's fourth stage, built by Russian aerospace outfit NPO Lavochkin.
As we reported back in August, two [failures] meant two Gallileo sats landed in the wrong orbit, causing much hand-wringing at the European Space Agency. The mess was later blamed on a software bug.
But Arianspace, the commercial launch operator that sent the birds aloft, now says that wasn't the case and that the mission's fourth stage was built to fail.
An internal investigation found that the three stages of the Soyuz launcher all performed as expected. But Fregat struck problems "at the beginning of the ballistic phase preceding the second ignition of this stage".
[...]failure was due to a temporary interruption of the joint hydrazine propellant supply to these [two attitude control] thrusters.
The interruption in the flow was caused by freezing of the hydrazine.
The freezing resulted from the proximity of hydrazine and cold helium feed lines, these lines being connected by the same support structure, which acted as a thermal bridge.
[...]sounds a bit like someone didn't properly account for how cold the launch vehicle would get, which froze its fuel, which in turn meant the rockets didn't fire enough or soon enough to get the satellites into the desired orbit.
This reminds me of the Space Shuttle that had been launched successfully many times, then in 1986 some suit at NASA decided that manufacturer's thermal specs for components didn't really matter.
Remember Feynman's glass of ice water?
Related:
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by edIII on Saturday August 30 2014, @04:40AM
In the old world a man would have fallen on his sword in a response to failure as complete as that
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 30 2014, @04:54AM
Some of would like to believe that people are capable of learning from their mistakes.
But since you believe learning is impossible, please fall on your fucking sword. Immediately.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by q.kontinuum on Saturday August 30 2014, @08:12AM
Hnnn.... Europe imposes sanctions on Russia for their actions in Ukraine. A European multi billion dollar project suffers due to Russian government organizatians incompetence, to the benefit of a Russian competing project (Glonass). I wonder if Russia will feel obliged to and will follow this obligations to pay damages...
I think a promotion might be in order... ;-)
(Seriously: I doubt there were any bad intentions. Russia benefits from these kind of projects, I don't think they want to lose ESA as a customer.)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday August 30 2014, @10:49AM
If failures sufficiently increase the average cost of a launch using Russian facilities, even pure economical reasons might cause the ESA to use their own rockets for satellite starts. After all, the only advantage that Russia provides for satellite starts is cheaper launches.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday August 30 2014, @11:34PM
I don't either. It's certainly reasonable that the Russian government might have done something like that secretly to destabilize military technology from being put into orbit, but not civilian so much.
That being said though, I was serious about falling on the sword. Whoever was in charge of that particular task screwed up quite a bit. Millions in materials and man hours gone.
It did happen with NASA too in much the same way, but *not* twice in a row. That's why I say the programming crew should fall on their sword. Probably not just them either. It's just a saying too.
Whatever can be said, the 2nd time was too much. I can't even imagine those discussions going on over there right now.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by stingraz on Sunday August 31 2014, @09:10AM
Not quite sure what you mean by "the 2nd time was too much"... There was only one screw-up, both satellites were launched by the same Soyuz rocket in one launch.
The launch was from Kourou in French Guyana, which is the ESA launch site that was only recently outfitted to be able to launch Soyuz/Fregat rockets. This was done, as a previous poster said, purely to fill an economic niche in ESA's launcher lineup, since ESA's current Ariane 5 rocket is not able to compete with Soyuz for smaller payloads, and the Ariane 4 is not in production anymore while the upcoming ESA Vega launcher, slated to fill this niche, is not available yet.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Sunday August 31 2014, @06:19PM
Ahhhh...
I actually thought it was two separate launches from the news articles with a period of time between them. That was a much bigger screw up.
Thanks for the correction.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by jcm on Saturday August 30 2014, @03:01PM
Why did the ESA use russian launchers now ?
Do they realize that there is a boycott against Russia because of Ukraine ?
I won't insinuate that the satellites's launch was sabotaged, but using russian launchers is a political act.
You cannot publicly claim that you have to boycott Russia while you use their resources, it's completely schizophrenic !
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DrMag on Saturday August 30 2014, @03:11PM
Usually the contracts for these launches are made well in advance; I suspect the deal was struck before anyone had a clue what would occur in Ukraine.
(Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Saturday August 30 2014, @06:44PM
They probably should have canceled given the current situations. I doubt that this was state sponsored, probably some engineer pissed off that he can't get certain parts or creature comforts anymore... At least that's who will be blamed!
Makes me worry about the future of the ISS. It really is a modern marvel, hate to see something happen because of a petty turf war.
We're rushing straight into Cold-War 2.0 it seems, with Ukraine serving as the modern Vietnam. I know that isn't the best comparison, Vietnam was more of a truly indigenous Civil war, but we certainly are trying to help without really getting involved...