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Satellite Tip-Over Mishap Due to Missing Bolts
cradle writes "On September 6th, the $239 Million Dollar NOAA N-Prime Satellite toppled over and crashed to the floor of Lockheed Martin Space Systems' factory in Sunnyvale, CA, as it was being repositioned to replace an instrument. Today NASA released their report on the cause of the accident. It seems somebody forgot to check whether it was bolted down: '... during an operation that required repositioning (rotating) the
TIROS NOAA N-PRIME spacecraft from a vertical to a horizontal position, the spacecraft
slipped from the Turn-Over Cart (TOC) and fell to the floor. The spacecraft fell because the
TIROS adapter plate to which it was mounted was not bolted to the TOC adapter plate with the
required 24 bolts. The bolts were removed from the TOC by another project while the cart was
in a common staging area, an activity which was not communicated to the NOAA project team.'"
I bet the wise guy who decided to do that is 'bolting' right now. ;D
"I didn't feel like it."
And, another Simpsons quote:
"Haw-haw!"
That's exactly what they said had happened right after the accident. A detailed study of the cause is always in order, but I'm surprised that it took a year to verify what they apparently knew at that outset.
Seriously, the day it fell over it was reported that someone had forgotten to replace the bolts after some shake-table test. Did NASA need a year and a thousand committees to agree on it or something?
I can't be expected to show up for school every day. So I get the flu and miss one day.
Who knew "Lug nut day" would be soo important?
It took them a year to find that? No wonder it costs so much for these things. Al gore was right when he tried to remove gov't beauracracy....
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And I thought I had a bad day at work.
My personal summary: They forgot to put the bolts in. People got sloppy/lazy and just signed off on stuff without really looking at what they signed off on.
shit happens. also, it has been reported that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, at the worst possible moment. more at 6.
Yeah that sucks but these things happen. Whether you're working on a 100K toy or a $300 million dollar one, every once and awhile there's going to be a mishap. Still, it sounds like there's a management problem here if people are going around removing bolts and the project team isn't even aware of it. If there's literally so few nuts and bolts handy for the various projects going on that they feel the need to cannabalize other projects, that's a disaster waiting to happen. I hope my neighbour doesn't decide to remove my brakes without letting me know.
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
If I was "repositioning" a $239,000,000.00 piece of hardware, I would visually check the bolts before starting the rotation. I would also check every other piece of safety equipment... twice. If the bolts were there, I would probably check the torque on them, if I hadn't tightened them myself.
Jeeeez, people, this isn't rocket science. Well actually it is rocket science, but that's the difference between rocket science and stuff that blows up on the pad.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
If they were in the AirForce, the whole team would be in for a piss test to see who they can blame for it ;-)
I came, I saw, She conquered.
You're inside or outside. Stop running through the door. We're not trying to air condition the whole street.
Rinse off your dishes when you're done eating.
Don't sass back to your teacher.
Brush your teeth before bed.
Put things back where you found them.
JUMPIN' JESUS, PUT THE FUCKING BOLTS BACK IN THE 230 MILLION DOLLAR SATELLITE!!!
As somebody who has personally watched stuff fall off of test tables as they rotate to vertical I can definitively say that that the sinking feeling in your stomache as the equipment slowly topples off the stand is exceeded only by the sinking feeling in your bowels when it shatters on the ground.
I can only imagine the multiplicative factor involved when it's a $240M satellite instead of a $20K prototype.
As for why they took a year to report out on the cause...the thing cost 240 million frickin' dollars! I'm sure the managers wanted more of an answer as to why it's in pieces on the ground than "Uh...we dropped it". Maybe they wanted to know "why it was dropped" and "how it was dropped" and "what is the likelyhood that a thing will be dropped again" and "where does that tech who dropped it live?"
-Pinkoir
They're just trying to save some money. After all four bolts is $4000,000
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
More power to the structural integrity field!
Note that this refers to sept. 6, 2003, not 29 days ago.
John Bender, that is. Not the robot Bender.
"Screws fall out all the time, the world's an imperfect place."
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Your government at work again. The cause of this was reported on at the time of the incident, and now a year later, they've issued a lengthy report. The gist of it being: If not bolted down, things tend to fall over.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
That was Sept 6th, 2003. Those pictures have been circulating for a year.
Did anyone look at the report?
It's a monstrous PDF 113 pages in length to describe every detail of the project. The beef doesn't start until page 62!!!
The actual post-mortem and recommendations are only 20 pages, half of which are flow charts.
Who puts this stuff together, I mean 82% of this document is FLUFF!!!! Is that why these things cost so much? Most of the money is spent on fluff?
hehe, i like the way they've put a cordon 'round it and kept their hats on. don't want anyone to get hurt, nor any contamination. the words "barn" and "door" spring to mind. Also looking at that pic it's obvious the bolt heads should have been... conspicuously absent.
is to try to move a few thousand dollars to better or an objective every day. Backwards a quarter of a billion dollars is significantly below that baseline.
In remarks earlier today, President Bush shrugged off the mishap, explaining, "Setbacks like this in the space program are to be expected. It's hard work! How can you expect them to succeed if you criticize their mistakes?"
INsigNIFICANT
The report covers much more than just the proximate cause of the accident. It focuses on the organizational and procedural failures that led to a situation where nobody checked the bolts. Whoever posted this story should have mentioned, that, too.
Mistake and omissions happen everywhere, and all the time.
>When was the last time *you* checked them for proper torque?
Last month. Eight lug alloy rims on a Dodge Ram 2500. Spec is 125 lb-ft. I check regularly, every 90 days, or all wheels every time one has been off, whichever is more often. Same with the wheels on my horse trailer.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Butterfingers!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
'Someone removed the bolts...'
Hell, any idiot knows that if you're gonna be moving a 14 ton piece of stuff you check everything before you move it. 'Uh we bolted it down last week' is about as lame an excuse as your kid saying he cut the grass last month when you tell him it needs cutting this weekend.
Someone is in charge of rigging. That person is responsible. If she had seen the missing bolts, then it's the guy who yanked them who should catch the grief. But she didn't see it because she didn't look. FIRE HER ASS! You've got an idiot in a roll that could well get someone killed and NASA doesn't even recognize where the proble is after a edffing year of investigation.
How did people this clueless manage to get a man back from the moon? Oh yeah, by following 'good practice' rather than THINKING! That's why it takes them so long to do anything and why it only works after a zillion fuckups have been dealt with.
They were probably $112,000/each bolts anyway.
Manager to Tech: "The next bolts that fall out, I'm coming back here and cracking skulls!"
This isn't news at all. This was known the same day that it happened. LM said so in their original press release - an engr hadn't check that the satelite was secured before rotating it.
-bZj
.sig
**CRASH*** "D'OH!, Marge, somedody broke the satellite!...Gotta go now"
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I studied the report, but nowhere I found any mention of who took out the 24 bolts. I figure this is the typical example of trying to save some bucks by having one set of high grade bolts being used for two TOC units. That would be a typical management type of decision that I have seen made so often, trying to save on small things not realizing that they could cause large costs elsewhere. But the funny thing is that those type of decisions never end up in this type of reports, because they reveal the deeper cause of the problem being a bad "management" attitude, due to lack of technical insight.
This is almost as bad as the IT guy who never puts the screws back in the computer cases when he's done.
How much actual damage was there, and what is the current state of the project?
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