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Lockheed Martin Drops NOAA Satellite
An anonymous reader writes "Last Saturday, engineers at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale were rotating the NOAA-N spacecraft from vertical to horizontal when it slipped and fell - hard. SpaceRef has the story and a graphic photo of the damaged satellite."
I can't begin to imagine the frustration for the people working on that project seeing their baby lying there like that. Note the two levels of failure. Even a well designed protocol can fail if the participants are sloppy on a regular basis. There's probably a moral for all of us there.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
How funny there is guards staring at this goof up until they figure out what to do with it.
What's up with building satellites FIVE years in advance. I understand it takes a long time at stuff.. but really, the technology will be so different by 2008. Hell, robots will be running things.
Perhaps all those procedures .... are preventing people from thinking .... the workers in an average workshop - where people think instead of relying on procdures - rarely drop the most expensive item in the shop on the floor .....
The first impression of the photo is that the satellite tipped completly over from vertical standing on that white framework on the right. You can see another satellite standing up in that position in the background.
However the description does not match this, it says it fell only three feet, from an apparently horizontal position.
What I can't see is what was holding it up in that position. Was that fixture (the "roll over cart") removed? Or is it hidden behind it, or attached to the "bottom" (now on the right edge) or what? How exactly did the missing 24 bolts not become noticed until it was in this horizontal position?
Just curious for more details. Other people's expensive mistakes are always fascinating!
Gotta post Anonymously on this one. I know someone who works in this lab.... They have been working tons of overtime lately. They have been made to cover other peoples positions on projects that are not theirs through many early morning to cover the managments poor time management.
It sounds like the usual (and brings to mind the last big space oops), too few people working on too many projects with too tight of deadlines. It was a matter of time until something went wrong. Of course the managers will not get fired, no independent investigation to point the finger at them this time. But most likely the non-union engineers who have been working thier asses off covering managements ass will take the ax.
Good luck guys!!!!!!!
Lockheed Martin. This is what they sent me in reply to my sending them the link on the satellite being dropped. I've elided some information and am posting anonymously to protect them.
............... is extremely anal in their insistence on following procedures and reader/worker routines and QA buys at critical points, and lots of redundancy. This is an isolated case.
Lets look at this. These clowns modified a piece of support equipment without documentation and didn't record the fact that the equipment was missing parts. Then another gaggle of clowns failed to examine the item before use, (prior to use inspection) because they had used it " a few days ago". Sadly, I can see how it could happen. We try to prevent this kind of thing.
The new management paradigm for corporate operations within Lockheed Martin is "Lean" thinking.
This is some warmed over stew of Deming and systems analysis with a liberal amount of oriental mysticism and a dash of Bruce Lee. It is designed to make our executives "American Samurai of Business" (I kid you not.) It initially came from some rednecks in a Japanese car factory somewhere in the American South.
Basically you have some outside expert come in and examine your process. You describe your process to him and he draws it on the wall on a big sheet of brown paper. Then he crosses out any redundant steps to streamline the process. Inspections are, of course, non value added steps and are also redundant because the worker looked at the process while he was doing it, didn't he?
Our expert who was to tell us how to build better rockets had a PhD. in English, and wasn't really sure about the content of Newton's Laws of Motion. (I asked.) When I asked how someone who didn't comprehend basic first
principles of rockets could tell us how to build them, I was told that I didn't understand the process. (The fact that the guy was nude except for his crown was a tip off that I was being conned.)
To be sure, any systems analysis can improve a process, and I am sure that the testimonials from the Hondota plant were true, but the basic nature of the process must be taken into account during the analysis. There are different requirements for a factory that produces 10,000,000 units and can tolerate having several hundred thousand items recalled each year and a factory that produces 50 units, all of which must work the first time, without fail.
Also, if you screw up at Hondota Inc., the worst thing that can happen is that the wheels will fall off the car, someone will get killed and some lawyers will make lots of money. If we screw up, we may not get to go home. (How does one quantify the amount of "value added" of having the facility remain in existence?)
All of this escapes the attention of our upper management and they continue to attempt to try to make us into good little Hondota workers. After all, the shuttle could have gone into the dealer to have the tile fix service pack installed before landing.
With respect, this is garbage. Plutonium is pretty inoccuous stuff, as long as you don't go around assembling kilogram quantities of it in a small space. Chemically, Pu is about as toxic as lead. People survive for decades with lumps of Pb inside them. Radiologically, Pu is rather feeble too. Its half-life is many thousands of years and, although you wouldn't want to ingest it, there are many other elements that are much nastier. Radium is an obvious example.
I was a chemist in a previous life. I've dealt with chemicals that are markedly nastier than Pu, even in my relatively sheltered life. Elemental fluorine, for instance, and for that matter, azide salts which are either very toxic or detonators or both.
Biologists and biochemists deal with much nastier substances than most chemists.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate