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NASA Finds Critical Assembly Fault in Shuttle
mzs writes "During corrosion inspection on Discovery, technicians noticed that one of the gears in a rudder actuator had been installed backwards. This particular actuator was the top-most of four that control the air brakes on the tail. As luck turns out, if it had been the bottom-most actuator, loss of the shuttle and crew would have been nearly inevitable. Plans are in place to have four spares by the time Shuttle missions resume next year."
Could they not stamp "THIS SIDE UP" or whatever on the components?
Trolling is a art,
Sad. Very sad.
It's pathetic that you feel the need to post whoring links in the article described as links.
It's even more pathetic that it's on a calculator game website.
I thought they even checked Airplanes more thoroughly
Nothing to see here
...and I'm sure there will be lots of negative posts about NASA here...
It'd be nice to give some credit for the people that have put in layer upon layer upon layer of safeguards to check for exactly this sort of thing and the dilligent people that find this stuff. And caught it.
The awful thing is that this is going to be just another reason for Congress to loot the NASA money bag.
May we never see th
I'm quite surprised they're being quite so upfront about this. Kudos to them... On the other hand, I believe it to be a part of the healing process to convince the general public that they are, in fact taking the Columbia disaster extremely seriously, and want to show progress in the inspection and faliure-cathing procedures that obviously did not work for Columbia.
It was, however, just a matter of time before a Columbia-type disaster occured. The suttle program has a remarkable safety record, Challenger and Columbia no matter.
Didn't get the memo. I'm gonna go ahead and get you another copy of that, mmmkay?
Four Spare shuttles or four spare actuators?
Come on NASA, it's not rocket science! Oh wait...
Is to add more Redundancies/bulk?
Yep, thats a good plan, soon they'd be flying a bird full of gizzards and no egg. How about some consistant QC and management instead?
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
this is why we just can't give all nasa's money to the russians.
they need it all to fix their own mistakes already.
I cannot believe that such a fundamentally problematic organization goes about its business mishap after mishap, without some high-level heads rolling every once in a while. Organizations get sloppy when they are not held accountable. To think that so many billions of taxes go toward what is supposedly one of our most high-tech endeavors, and they can't even install the parts correctly? Someone high-up should get fired for not forcing NASA to get serious.
---
http://thewired.blogs.com/teotwawki
The techno-mediated cultural conspiracy
...I'll be running Duke Nukem: Forever on Microsoft Longhorn before the next shuttle launches.
So which inspectors found the fault? Was it one of NASA's inspectors or one that was outsourced to India? Can somebody post a copy of the article please?
This is yet another reason that manned missions should be using simple reusable capsules instead of winged orbiters. There are no rudders to jam.
I'm paraphrasing here but it went something like this:
"When the most intelligent work on the most complex to build the the only prototype, inevitably the radio won't work."
The point is that when working on very complex designs and prototypes installing something incorrectly doesn't seem odd because your brain is unable to "see" the mistake for what it is. In a car, if you install the brakes incorrectly, the scale is such that you understand the mistake simply from your gut, visually. Like looking at a crumpled front fender and understanding that's not correct.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
With all the advances in vehicle health monitoring, diagnostics, prognostics and the like it might be better for them to either build a new vehicle with this technology or retrofit the shuttles with it. Then they could see when the gears are cracked or acting up.
Evolution or ID?
What is wrong with moderators these days?
Perhaps they don't like polls?
NASA Finds Critical Assembly Fault in Shuttle
I know NASA is conservative with technology, but using assembly in this day and age is way backwards!
They should really do some double checking on this stuff. It's hard to imagine mistakes like this happen when dealing with something that holds the fate of a handfull of people's lives; not to mention all the millions of dollars put into these projects that would go down the drain. When dealing with people's lives and huge sums of money it's worth it to go over _everything_, and put in for better training so these thing don't happen again. They caught it this time, but if they don't take enough precaution, they might not be so lucky in the future.
Buckethead
And if you read the article, you realize that NASA installed defective actuators not once, but twice! The first being the one that was successfully flown 30 times, and the second in the spare actuators.
Given the complexity of a system like the shuttle, it is not surprising that out of 1000s of components there could be a mistake in one of them (and given some redundancy and robustness, it is not surprising that the shuttle could fly 30 times with one or more poorly installed components, though one would not normally want to bet on that...).
However, two errors out of 8 actuators checked implies some serious quality control issues.
-Marcus
An arrow with the legend "THIS END UP"
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Discovery flew safely 30 times with the defective actuator
When does a defect become a problem? I wonder if this was really a Critical problem because shouldn't some indication have already been seen by now?
I mean since they have fixed this problem will two other problems surface that are more critical and maybe they should have left it alone?
"whoops!"
it's not informative you dipshit troll wannabe.
it's not even a mirror. piss off.
^^ (-1) Redundant. That had no relation to anything in this text, stop trying to mod whore.
losing your karma?
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In a CNN article (well, actually Reuters) on the same subject, it is mentioned that one of the spare actuators NASA has on hand also has the gears reversed.
That article also says that this would have caused serious problems had an "emergency landing" ever been necessary, even though the actuator wasn't in the bottom position.
Is anyone else reminded of the story of how Murphy's Law came into being (where something could be connected up the wrong way round and was)? I'm sure NASA has tightened up its procedures since Challenger/Columbia, but given that these things could be fitted either way it was an accident waiting to happen - thankfully it never did.
Isn't it about time they switched from assembly to C ?
I wouldn't blame NASA for this but the subcontractor that made the part. They sould know to have a process in place to negate that.
The sub should be punished for their lack of effort and watched closer in ongoing efforts.
Evolution or ID?
As Edward A. Murphy, jr. said it:
Nothing like seeing a faithful replication of the impetus for Murphy's observation...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
NASA needs to start outsourcing to India, I hear they do great work for their pay.
I always thought there were 5 of everything to keep surfaces working even after a double failure. With only 4 actuators, if 2 fail, and start working against the other 2, the working pair can't overpower the non-working pair and the surface is useless. With 5 actuators, it takes a triple failure before the surface won't work.
cygnuhchur
The mistake dates back to the actuator's assembly at Hamilton Sundstrand in Rockford, Illinois, and is not easy to spot. The gear fits into the assembly both ways, but is slightly asymmetric so the teeth do not fit exactly if the gear is reversed.
Show me a man who can find a slightly asymmetric shape, and I'll show you a man who can find a slightly tritriangular number.
Or a slightly odd one ... hey wait, that's me. Except I am not a number, I am a free man!
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
In engineering, it's usually good practice to design somthing that only assembles one way. That way, whoever is assembling it (no matter how intelligent they are) can only install the component the way it was meant to be.
It's strange and somewhat disconcerting that this was not the case for this shuttle component, but I haven't seen the part in question.
Who is this Uncle Sam person? Never heard of him. Must be pretty irrelevant.
Spare whats? Gears? Shuttles? Crew members?
Oh yeah. I'm supposed to read the story.
Wouldn't a key design requirement for anything (ahem) mission-critical be that it be form-fitted in such a way that it cannot be installed in more than one orientation?
ASANine
This whole thing is despicable.
Back when I was in engineering school many years ago one item in a short list of good practices was:
"Never design an almost symetrical part"
It went on to list a number of real-world problems. Add this to the list.
This is the best that NASA could come up with? You guys are supposed to think shit up. And you're supposed to have somebody backing them up too.
The same basic thing happened with the F-111 program in the 60s. The drawing had a piece that was installed upside down, but the technician installing them said, this ALWAYS goes right side up and installed it that way. A couple crashes and the grounding of the whole F-111 fleet later, and the trouble was found. I don't know what happened to the installer, but I can't imagine it was any good. Check twice, install once :)
NASA Finds Hidden Shuttle Danger Same story, different article, in case the posted one gets /.'ed.
In this case nobody died and several lessons were learned, including something about fault-tolerance in actuators. I think two of the most valuable space flights from this point of view were Apollo 13 and the Mir mission that caught fire.
Things will go wrong. Learning how to cope when the evil wind blows is critical. In this case, we now know that the thing can be flown with one actuator in upside down. If the bottom one malfs, swap it out in orbit with the top one, and you still might get home. People are going to get killed doing this. People got killed learning to sail the Mediterranean. It's still worth doing.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I can imagine the guy that noticed this first. Probably went something like: looks at actuators. looks at diagram of how they're to be installed. looks at diagram again. looks at actuators. turns diagram around; notices that the legend is now upside down, so concludes that can't be it. checks other pages of diagram to see if this page is unusual--different view, maybe. finds that it isn't. checks back for errata. finds none.
Looks around. "Hey Bob, what do you make of this?" Thinks about all the work that day that isn't going to get done, because now management and, if he's lucky, congressional inspectors are going to crawl up his ass. At least he knows that he didn't *install* the things.
--
$tar -xvf
The gears were in an actuator that is, itself, a failsafe. It's apparently not used except in an emergency. That's it didn't fail in use; it was never used! The gears apparently are made to fit in either a right side or left side actuator but need to be installed with the proper orientation. Makes sense to use the same gear for both sides only flip it over. If its orientation is critical though, you'd better have some really good assembly instructions. Maybe like those that come with that high quality Chinese press board furniture!
...this sort of thing no longer happens (for NASA or Microsoft) is to put punitivie punchiments on the engineer/developer's heads if these things happen agaion.
If the USA is to become the empire it plans to be, we need more draconian measures to keep the incompitentes out of the way. Something like this would suffice:
From: Microsoft Corporate
Subject: Trusted Computing Initiative 2
In an effort to better secure computing for our customers, we are implementing new measures in our code revision system. The biometric login tubules installed at your workstations will allow you to log in and code the next gratest version of Windows OS. However, from now on, all code you write will be linked to your DNA. If, at some future time, a hole is found and your code is responsible, you will be summarily executed and replaced with the next coder in line. While this may sound a little harsh, we've found that this is the only way in which we can write secure code and still remain a proprietary OS with none of that dirty, smelly, nasty communist "free software" stuff going on. So go out and fix those bugs... your life is DEPENDING on it.
Sincerely,
Steve "The Fat Man" Ballme(r)
I've got this multi-million pound bomb. Half a century ago, we couldn't get ANY of these off the ground without them exploding. But now we're 'pretty good' at it.
Get real. At ANY point in technology, reaching orbit is a heck of a lot harder than getting from point A to point B over paved roads in a car. One gallon of gas, properly vaporized, is roughly equivalent to a stick of dynamite. So most of us strap ourselves in with 10-20 sticks of dynamite, daily. The Shuttle has millions of poinds of fuel and oxidizer. (LOX - forget about 'properly vaporizing' the gasoline.) What they do is HARD.
Perhaps the WORST thing about Star Trek, Star Wars, and the like is that they make us thing space travel is safe and simple, and really convey NOTHING of the distances involved.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
maybe one part of NASA was using radians, and another degrees.
You say education is substandard in the United States, but you can't manage to spell the word "important" correctly. How ironic.
True, that was kinda embarrassing. It was only a typo, however.
And pledging allegiance to the flag means pledging allegiance [blah blah blah, brainwashed rubbish]
Yeah, right.
That explains all the problems that the conservatives have with homosexuals! They were machined to mate multiple ways, and they think it was a defect!
censor people for speaking unpopular viewpoints, unlike in Europe
Are you on drugs or is that another proof of your worthless education?
I work in New England, contracting for a jet engine manufacturer (and you can get it in two if you know the aero industry). Things like this happen frequently in manufacturing, especially with development hardware, before the kinks have been worked out of the assembly process and parts are ready to go to production. Assembly mistakes range from things that are easy to do but also easy to fix, like cut or cracked O-rings and tool knicks on non-critical parts, to things that are real screw-ups and result in major headaches, like parts left out entirely or vital parts being installed incorrectly and badly damaged because of it. You could consider the entire shuttle program to still be development-phase engineering, since only a few shuttles were ever built.
An example: a while back, we had a test engine spewing fuel all over the test cell for no readily apparent reason, prompting a panic that an entire compartment of the engine would have to be redesigned from scratch--until one of the test engineers found a fuel line seal that had not been reinstalled in the engine after the last teardown and reassembly. How do you miss something like this when there's a careful set of instructions to follow for every step of the assembly? I don't know, but I do know that humans are fallible, so we are constantly dealing with a stream of lost, damaged, and defective parts. Anyway, they put the seal back in, and the engine worked fine. (I have an NDA, so this is not what actually happened, but it is analogous.)
When I was in school, the more I learned about the environment the shuttle operates in, the more I was impressed by the fact that it worked at all, and now that I'm learning more about manufacturing engineering (not what I studied for; stupid job market), I'm surprised that the shuttles have as few problems as they do.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
But aren't Gears round? How is there a "Wrong Side"?
This seems to happen a lot with factory workers. As I recall from the fog of memory, Chuck Yeager talked about this one old guy working on the assembly line building F-86's. His job was to rivet on an actuator attachment point for the aileron's or some such. Then one day they redesign the whole actuator mechanism and the attachment point has to be flipped over and installed the other way. Well, this old rivetter guy refused to believe it. He thought the change order was a mistake, so he ignored it and kept putting 'em in the old way. Killed a few F-86 pilots before they figured out the problem.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
At least, that's the way I read it the first time.
b og us
http://you'vegot.tobekidding.me/no/thislink/is/
Because the people who installed, tested, QAd and OKed it are all old age pensioners or DEAD, and if not, they have long left NASA.
Warning, Flamage begins.
But you are just knee-jerking. I understand.
After all, the US-Presidency is not exactly a role model for stepping back after mishaps, and there is little if any judgement of performance[1], just of his affairs outside marriage.
So how could NASA be any worse than that?
And don't name the dead astronauts, or I shall count their whole number against just a month of Irak 'peace'.
[1] may I say "War against alcohol" (aka the prohibition) --- just invite the mafia in, "War against drugs", "War against The Terrorists", "War against these elusive Weapons Of Mass Destructions", etc?
Elections by High Court (instead of by ballot) and at least suspect election machine providers are but an extra.
On a side-note, the reason Nasa is stuck in the proverbial hard-place between multi-billion dollar budgets and missions that nobody cares about is that we've all started over-valuing human-life. It's ridiculous that space exploration all but stopped because of the 2 shuttle disasters. Certainly, the loss of those crews was tragic, but the best way to honor those crews is to relentlessly pursue the dream that they died for, not hamstring ourselves being overly cautious.
Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe there are things more important than one or a dozen human lives. IMO, exploring the universe is one of them.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
Well, I would sure as hell hope so.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
that is all.
No. They don't.
And how many people died when the tires on their Ford Explorers delaminated on the highway? How many millions of cars have been recalled for safety-critical assembly or design flaws in the last 20 years, and how many people did they kill?
NASA isn't the only group experiencing problems like this, and when taken as a whole, they are one of the least heinous offenders. I personally would be worried about the companies dealing with millions of peoples lives and billions of dollars, not NASA' handful of people and millions of dollars.
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
What does "gear" mean in this context? (English is not my first language) A toothed wheel?
So now they resort to cannibalization to fix the shuttle.
Makes you feel REAL secure about it.
It implies that they cannot manufacture the necessary spare parts.
My roommate acutally works in the Space, Land, and Sea area of Hamilton Sundstrand on the shuttle. According to her "The gears were actually oriented correctly, it's just that the last two actuators had each other's gear set instead of their own. They weren't so much reversed as switched. The corrosion was bad enough we have to replace 20 year old parts. "
Is that Dubya should invade new england for producing faulty parts? ;)
The shuttle is the most complex system ever engineered by people... by orders of magnitude.
It's not suprising that there are flaws in the system - disasters lying dormant until the moment when they cause the destruction of the entire system.
This is one of the biggest arguements for a Vertical Takoff / Vertical Landing vehicle - it simplifies the system because it eliminates specialized components for landing.
Here's the mantra: fault tolerant systems. Things will fail. Can your space shuttle deal with those failures gracefully?
1. 2.
How do you miss something like this when there's a careful set of instructions to follow for every step of the assembly? I don't know, but I do know that humans are fallible, so we are constantly dealing with a stream of lost, damaged, and defective parts.
...not reading and/or obeying the instructions.
During corrosion inspection on Discovery, technicians noticed that one of the gears in a rudder actuator had been installed backwards.
D'oh!
I just heard on Talk Radio that Gnome.org has been compromised. Whether you liked the five minute wait for Gnome to load, or the enormous amounts of RAM it consumed while running, or the fact that most of the designers think that a crappy Windows clone is just what people who don't like Windows would like to run, you can't deny its contribution to open source culture. Truly a Brazillian icon.
Great idea, but the workers stamped the wrong side on some versions, and the part cannot be remade in time.
This is a real problem in industry, you can put any sign on something, but then you gotta make sure the signs are right too. Indeed the wrong sign leads some workers to put it in backwards, even knowing the right way, while others will get in the habbit of putting it in with the lettering wrong, and not correct themselves when the next version is ships with the right parts.
Endeavor was built from spares for Atlantis and Discovery.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
No, this is good design. They couldn't make sure that it would be installed correctly, so they made sure there was enough redundancy that one could be installed backwords, and it would work anyway, though not as good.
Still doesn't excuse someone for installing it wrong, but at least there is enough reduncancy that it isn't a critical failure.
Too many config files, control panels, etc. fail to adhere to the advice being given to NASA on this problem. If every programmer and software designer followed this advice, it would be impossible to misconfigure a computer or create a crash-prone system. Currently, its just too easy to mis-configure systems because the systems let the user enter improper/conflicting settings.
Perhaps when every config file has the equivalent of a "this side up" on all the fields and parameters, then we will have obtain the ease-of-use Holy Grail.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Unboring, my left nut...
(glad they caught it, tho)
TFOAE.
see above.
That came from Chuck Yeager's autobiography. There was a line worker at the factory that was installing bolts in the wing that were supposed to be place head down/nut up. The worker was installing them head up/nut down contrary to the instructions because "that is the way bolts are supposed to be installed". IIRC he killed 6 people because of his ignorance.
...I remember as much from "Engine parts" that depending on load, you'd like the teeth of the gear to NOT be symmetric. This would give you better interconnection in one direction (the "right" way) and worse in the other (the "wrong" way).
Ever see a winch? The teeth on the gear there is an extreme of that sort - only designed to pull load in. So it's not done to be mean - it's probably done as to fit the spec.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This post has the story straight.
I would argue that he'll be a lot more qualified to make the claim that aerospace is not so hard if and when he actually launches (and recovers in one piece) his craft...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
NASA is so anal retentive, they probably have a log book somewhere that describes the who, what, when, where and why this particular part was installed backwards. I bet whoever it was, wrote a memo about it that either got ignored or put in the wait-til-it-blows-up-to-ask-these-questions pile.
Well, there goes my one example of perfect code.'
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
When I lived in Houston, the shuttle and 747 landed at Ellington Field. They allowed the public to tour the plane while it was there. As I was leaving the 747 from the aft door, I looked up at the mounting post and saw the label. I had to have my girlfriend read it as well just to make sure I was not seeing things.
I love watching the comedy of shuttle sustainment. Remember how it was sold to us years ago: As a quick turn bird. Instead, after each flight they even change out whole components ( certain back up systems ) that sometimes never get used on a mission. Inspect the item, if it is good to go, don't mess with it. Sign it off and press on. Lots of things on the shuttle aren't complex ( some are ). But don't fix items that are not broken. Just thought I would mention this because that is the culture there. Now in the case of the vertical stab, I am sure that thing takes a beating every mission and is worth refirbing. Be good to take some of the manpower and sustainment resources from stuff that isn't broken and doesn't need a refirb after every flight and apply it to the items that do. Might even reduce the total ( large ) number of flow days for an airframe between missions. Airframe sustainment issues over time, are very fun and not all that hard to grasp. I am sure there are other fun fubars that we haven't heard about. Hey, somebody caught it at least.
If we used something that can work reliably like the
Russian capsules perhaps we would not need to worry about rudders. A rudder is for a airplane a space capsule does not need one therefore not jepordizing the safety of the crew by the use of overly complex control systems. The shuttle is a flawed design, bring back the capsules and move on with the show.
Got Code?
ANY system where the right side up/down of a single fucking nut put on by one single guy that does not have any kind of independent quality control/inspection/etc process, any system at all that allows a bolt put on backwards by one single guy to kill 6 people...
It's a systemic fault.
Maybe your "simple solution" would cause 100 other problems. You should do some research before you decide how NASA engineers should do their job. Or at least before you tell the rest of the world how they should do their job.
One of the boeing 737 models (iirc) had a flaw with it's rudder that caused it to get stuck, resulting in several crashes and hundreds of people dead.
Kinda puts this problem with the shuttles in perspective to me.
I think 1.0 forwards is metric for 1.0 backwards, hence the NASA mixup.
Everytime I work on my car, I end up with a couple of extra nuts and bolts I don't know what to do with. Oh well. My car still runs great!
You forgot to mention that liberty and justice come with the standard suspected terrorist excemption clause which also includes anyone who happens not to be white.
You also forgot to mention the other values that the stars and stripes stands for, namely greed, paranoia and blind patriotism.
Freedom of speach is overrated. I am not allowed to say, for example, that I believe that it is the duty of every true Englishman to go out and kill one niger per day. I would be arrested for inciting racial hatred, and rightly so.
If freedom of speach means that people have the right to preach hatred and violence, then I for one am against it.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Which end is up in space?
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
"sure we could do that, but then we'd have to replace those engineers. Now we already hired the best ones we could find in the world, so where are we to get better ones?"
Institute a new policy: if you work/contract for NASA, you are held responsible for your work. If lives are lost due to negligence--however small--hold the negligent party/parties criminally responsible with commensurate penalties. If something is wrong with your work, as punishment, you *must* fix it for free or refund all monies paid to you for doing the original job.
This way, only 'acts of God' are the only causes for mishaps at NASA i.e. don't launch Space Shuttles when ice can form--it's what brought down Challenger and Columbia: killing 14 people and destroying billions of dollars of taxpayer-paid-for NASA hardware.
Your claim is bogous, and typical for marketese.
113 shuttle flights, 2 lost: 98.2% success.
>750 people launched. 14 dead. 98.1% survival rate. (assuming 7 people for most crews)
Apollo and Apollo-Soyuz
(Unmanned: 3 successes, 3 almost-successes, but they were test missions, after all)
Manned:
11 successes,
1 failure (Apollo 13),
Apollo 1.
Makes 12 missions, 11 successes (91.6% successes)
36 people launched, for 3 dead and 3 almost dead: 83.3% - 91.6% survival.
Shuttle Apollo ratio factor
Launches 98.2% 91.6% 84:18 4.6
People 98.1% 83.3% 167:19 8.8
I know what *I* would bet on, and it ain't Apollo --- I'm almost 9 times as likely to survive training and flight in the shuttle.