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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.
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!!!!!!!
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