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Upside-Down Sensors Caused Proton-M Rocket Crash
Michi writes "According to Anatoly Zak, the crash of the Russion Proton rocket on 1 July was apparently caused by several angular velocity sensors having been installed upside down. From the source: 'Each of those sensors had an arrow that was supposed to point toward the top of the vehicle, however multiple sensors on the failed rocket were pointing downward instead.' It seems amazing that something as fundamental as this was not caught during quality control. Even more amazing is that the design of the sensors permits them to be installed in the wrong orientation in the first place. Even the simplest of mechanical interlocks (such as a notch at one end that must be matched with a corresponding projection) could have prevented the accident."
A review of the quality control procedures used by the contractors responsible is underway.
being from there i bet half the people working on this came to work drunk and/or hung over most days
Murphy's Law is still in effect. Like the snippet says make sure that they can only be installed one way mechanically, because you won't catch 100% of the errors in QA.
Should have launched from Australia.
Quality Control in Russia basically consists of hitting it with a mallet, and if it doesn't fall apart on impact, it passes.
which plowed into the desert floor without deploying any parachutes because a G-switch was installed backwards...
http://www.universetoday.com/73/genesis-accident-report-released/
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Perhaps the thinking is, as long as the arrow isnt pointed at you it's probably safe.
Yes, the real, original Murphy's law apparently came from Col. Stapp, who was testing rocket sleds for the rocket program.
I should note that the putative original Murphy's Law reads, "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it." . The website goes on to say "This is a principle of defensive design, cited here because it is usually given in mutant forms less descriptive of the challenges of design for lusers. For example, you don't make a two-pin plug symmetrical and then label it `THIS WAY UP'; if it matters which way it is plugged in, then you make the design asymmetrical."
Highly appropriate to the topic, I might say. If only they had labeled, with the arrow, the words "up", and put another arrow down, with the letters "dn" for "down", then none of this would have happened.
For those who wish to nit-pick my attention to detail and editing, also, I will for further irony include the wikipedia link, as well: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
...aren't so amazing when you look at the track record of Russian manufacturing.
Before we Americans point too many fingers, let's not forget NASA is not immune to similar mistakes.
My favorite is Cole's Law...
"Whoopth, I had the thilly thing in reverthe!"
I am officially gone from
In the postmortem the flight director started with, "... we sadly lost the vehicle after a flight of 1.5 seconds ...". The mission director interrupted, "What flight? The damned thing had a 6000 Kg[sic][*] rocket booster. You can put it under a 3 ton rock and it will 'fly' for more than 2 seconds..."
[*]He should have said 6000 Kgf-sec, because that was the impulse delivered by the twin rocket boosters each 1500 Kgf thrust burning for 2 seconds.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The US once sent a probe all the way to mars, only to have it fail because the ground computer was in imperial units while the orbiter was in SI units.
Getting everything correct is hard... really hard. For most projects you have elaborate "fail gracefully" modes which rely on external agents to notice the problem and take action. A doctor or pilot can take appropriate action, but it's hard to do with rockets.
For comparison, I wrote the software for the altimeter that goes into some 747 aircraft. Total of about 21,000 lines of C, about 40% comments so figure 12,000 lines of code. The testers (and I) worked really hard to find all bugs in the system, knowing that a mistake could knock a plane out of the sky. There were elaborate internal checks both in software and process, and Boeing did their own testing on top of ours. Everything passed, all requirements were met, things looked good.
The device had 1 bug, found after installation. A software typo which wasn't caught by QA even though it had a specific testing requirement. No one was negligent, it just slipped by despite best efforts.
Multiply this by all the devices in an aircraft, and add in the other engineering disciplines like electronics and mechanical. It's really hard to get everything right all at once, and on the first try.
There's a difference between true communism and corrupt, dictatorial regimes.
For those too lazy to click on the link:
A perfect example of true communism applied to a specific field would be open-source software.
A perfect example of corruption (on the capitalism side, too) would be Microsoft, threatening computer manufacturers about increasing the cost of Windows if they offered Linux options.
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In Soviet Russia, snesors installed correctly, rocket installed upside down.
Silence is a state of mime.
Communism (n) - an unattainable standard that is constantly held up as a model of perfection despite having no functional real world example past or present. Related entries: No True Scotsman; Ivory Tower Intellectualism.
If only they had labeled, with the arrow, the words "up", and put another arrow down, with the letters "dn" for "down", then none of this would have happened.
Except that "dn" upside-down is indistinguishable from "up". Murphy strikes again?
Accept Eris as your Fnord and personally sate her
Communism (n) - an unattainable standard that is constantly held up as a model of perfection despite having no functional real world example past or present.
Sorry, but that's nonsense. All you need to do to create perfect communism is kill everyone else so no-one can disagree with you (you can't just kill the ones who disagree, because the others might only be pretending to agree).
Stalin made a pretty good attempt, but didn't quite succeed.
The Russians are using contractors, now?
On the other hand, they seem to be doing vastly better than the US these days - we have NO WAY to put someone in orbit (unless the Pentagon's got a black program).
We also had Challenger and Columbia. And on the latter note, I'll add that I believe my late ex's analysis, rather than the "it's falling insulation" answer. She was an engineer, and worked at the Cape for 17 years, including on the Shuttle, and she thought that some of the inspections that were supposed to be done were *not* being done, or not being done as frequently as they were supposed to have been... and that the hydraulic lines broke due to stress corrosion microcracking, and there went the aerilons.
So, how many astronauts/cosmonauts have the Russians lost lately?
mark
It looked good on Paper doesn't it.
However it rarely works for a long time or with a lot of people.
The problem is that we live in a world of scarcity, we can't get all that stuff that we want, or need. The communist system tries to make everything equal, however that means everyone will be living in scarcity, and not really having what they need or want. Because everyone will be wanting, it will open the door for someone(s) to cheat the system and try to get more, once they have more they will hold on to it. And the system begins to fail.
Software like Open Source tends to work better, because there isn't a limit in supply. You can copy share make a copy of the copy and continue on and on. There is no scarcity in the Open Source Model.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
>That would be like saying that disaster relief volunteers are an example of communism
Actually that sounds about right to me. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" and all that.
Most family households also run on at least partially communist principles. Luxuries may need to be at least partially earned (or not, plenty of douches with entitlement issues out there), but it's a sad family where everyone's *needs* aren't taken care of first.
The problem with communism seems to be that it doesn't seem to scale well beyond the tribe/monastery/commune level. Once the population gets too large to allow for effective communal decision making, communal ownership tends to become de-facto ownership by the decision makers, massively exacerbating the problem of corruption.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Actually, that's wrong. Capitalism is designed with corruption and greed in mind. Greed motivates entities to perform better in the market and get more stuff. Corruption is dealt with by entities shifting to competitors who are screwing them less. Capitalism's failure is in assuming all involved entities are sufficiently intelligent to be aware of when they're being screwed, and principled enough to forgo what they want to avoid being screwed.
Democracy /capitalism "work" even if you dont have a "pure" implementation.
Communism has never worked in any of its forms; its just gotten millions killed in purges and famines, and left nations in a crippled, dysfuncitonal state even decades later. The cry has always been that it hasnt worked because it wasnt implemented in a pure enough form, hence my "no true scotsman" comment.
Capitalist / democratic states, however, continue to be represented by every major world power. China is becoming a major power precisely by embracing a functioning economic system that looks and smells an awful lot like capitalism.
All you need to do to create perfect communism is kill everyone else so no-one can disagree with you (you can't just kill the ones who disagree, because the others might only be pretending to agree).
Stalin made a pretty good attempt, but didn't quite succeed.
By an incredible coincidence, that's also the way to create a perfectly free market with no government intervention.