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A Programing Error Blasted 19 Russian Satellites Back Towards Earth (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica's report on Russia's failed attempt to launch 19 satellites into orbit on Tuesday:
Instead of boosting its payload, the Soyuz 2.1b rocket's Fregat upper stage fired in the wrong direction, sending the satellites on a suborbital trajectory instead, burning them up in Earth's atmosphere... According to normally reliable Russian Space Web, a programming error caused the Fregat upper stage, which is the spacecraft on top of the rocket that deploys satellites, to be unable to orient itself. Specifically, the site reports, the Fregat's flight control system did not have the correct settings for a mission launching from the country's new Vostochny cosmodrome. It evidently was still programmed for Baikonur, or one of Russia's other spaceports capable of launching the workhorse Soyuz vehicle. Essentially, then, after the Fregat vehicle separated from the Soyuz rocket, it was unable to find its correct orientation. Therefore, when the Fregat first fired its engines to boost the satellites into orbit, it was still trying to correct this orientation -- and was in fact aimed downward toward Earth.
Though the Fregat space tug has been in operation since the 1990s, this is its fourth failure -- all of which have happened within the last 8 years.
"In each of the cases, the satellite did not reach its desired orbit," reports Ars Technica, adding "As the country's heritage rockets and upper stages continue to age, the concern is that the failure rate will increase."
"In each of the cases, the satellite did not reach its desired orbit," reports Ars Technica, adding "As the country's heritage rockets and upper stages continue to age, the concern is that the failure rate will increase."
an "In Soviet Russia" joke hiding in there somewhere
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I'm sure this will be fixed in the next rev. A "my bad" might not cover the impact...probably a test gap :)
There is a weird statement in the original coverage from Ars. Having initially explained that the reason for the failure was due to an incorrect configuration setting, the quote then goes on to show where Ars states, "As the country's heritage rockets and upper stages continue to age, the concern is that the failure rate will increase."
But the nature of this specific failure mode has absolutely nothing to do with the age of the rockets or stages, but was due instead to one or more lapses in pre-flight checks of the configuration parameters for the launch. We don't even know for sure if the part which failed (the Fregat Upper Stage) was set by the launch agency directly, or the satellite manufacturer.
In a similar way, the comments also imply that the vehicles themselves age in some way - despite the fact that the cost and complexity of them means that they are literally custom-made for each launch. They are certainly not left languishing "on the shelf" for months or years before use.
Don't get me wrong, any launch failure is unwanted and to be avoided at all costs - regardless of the nationality or company involved. But in this case, I'm not sure the coverage reflects reality.
Why is this posted today, 4 days after?
Rust
to carry our astronauts to the space station.
Going to be bad day for a lot of people
Nineteen Russian satellites? Well, including the 12 American, the Canadian one, the Norwegian one, two from Sweden and the one from Germany that is...
The rocket was Russian, but the satellites that were riding on it were from various countries: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/russian-rocket-launch-1.4422547 "The booster also carried 18 micro satellites built in Canada, Germany, Japan, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States."
This is user error. It's like going to Google Maps and plugging in a route for New York to Atlanta when you live in LA, and then wondering why you don't have directions to Denver. Then you drive around aimlessly looking for the tunnels, end up in a bad neighborhood and get robbed.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Not a programming error as in a bug in the software. But a "human error in the pre-programmed flight sequence could have placed the Fregat upper stage into a wrong orientation during its first maneuver, sending the space tug and its payloads into the Atlantic Ocean."
Russians are NOT to blame. It's those stupid Americans.
Testing a weapon or destroying a satellite?
The country's A and B teams have been recruited for security hacking and blockchain.
Pretty fucking stupid that the main booster would just fire up regardless of whether its orientation is correct or not. Why not check first? It's not exactly rocket science...
Just like they fucked the Iranian uranium enrichment program.
Seriously, everybody outside the USA knows this was the USA.
Is this perhaps how they spell "programming" in Russia?
Which was successful and will now be shipped to North Korea for use in it's nuclear ICBMs. When fat fingers presses the button it will rise a few miles then retro right into Kims lap.
As the country's heritage rockets and upper stages continue to age
The way that probably should have been worded was "as the nations experienced rocket scientists continue to age..."
Just all around it would appear the whole Russian rocketry program is decaying. Makes you wonder how the nuclear fleet is faring.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually this is fairly typical of rocket science, at least as I understand it. Spacecraft are complex systems where they only way to avoid catastrophe is to get an almost incomprehensible number of easy-to-overlook details right. Maybe it's the unit conversions, or the temperature rating of the booster O-rings, or the combustibility of cabin materials in a pure oxygen atmosphere.
Maybe this is not what we programmers would technically call a "programming error", although other people might characterize it that way, but it comes from a practice that is all-too-familiar: cutting values from one source and pasting them into another, something you do for convenience but which opens the door for details to be wrong in an unexpected way.
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They must have done this https://www.xkcd.com/970/
There is a weird statement in the original coverage from Ars. "As the country's heritage rockets and upper stages continue to age, the concern is that the failure rate will increase."
But the nature of this specific failure mode has absolutely nothing to do with the age of the rockets or stages
Exactamundo, it's a problem in bureaucratic meatspace aging, not hardware aging. After the innovators/creators build the product/organization, the PhBs are better at playing the "reality survivor game", but not keeping up the product. It's the same problem infecting IBM, HP, Microsoft, ...
Didn't you hear? Flat Earth Theory was started by NASA and the ATC to keep you from finding the real truth: Great Ice Ball Earth Theory. Get woke sheeples!
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It's not being reported, but in the control room, the supervisor, a former drill instructor, was screaming, "Your OTHER up!" :)
hawk
This failure is eerily reminiscent of the failure of the Ariana 5 rocket in 1996 on its initial flight, also a result of incorrect software configuration,.
I don't mean to be morbid, as this is a pretty frustrating thing if you're an engineer of any sort, but does anyone have a link to a video of the incident?
From what I can tell, the programming on the spacecraft functioned fine, and operated according to the time-honored "garbage in, garbage out" principle. It was given instructions to orient itself towards Earth and ignite its engines, and it did. Those instructions were wrong, but that is very much a configuration error, not a programming error.
Stop blaming programmers for all the world's ills.
According to normally reliable Russian Space Web... I'm not russian but I dislike the tone. This somehow implies that we should prefix western media outlets with "normally okish" or "usually not bullshit". Applies to anything from BBC to CNN to whatever...
he's the one who usually can't report objectively. If it's American, it has to be praised, if it's foreign and in particular Russian, he has to gloat and use as many negative words as he can muster.
I'm blaming the metric system :)
I could have misread/misunderstood the article, but something I read seemed to suggest to me it was set for the correct orientation, but the way it was programed induce the flight computer to rotate the opposite way it should have. So instead of rotating 2 degrees to the right it tried to rotate 358 degrees to the left, all while burning its main engine.
Reminds me of the time I ruined a contractor's demo. He had written a ballistic missile program that I had prototyped, and I was ticked that I did not get to write it myself (petty, I know). When they let me try it out, I deliberately picked a target that his software could not find the solution for - locking up the demo. I just shrugged and gave the "French salute" (at the time, the French salute was a form of shrug with both hands held at shoulder level) and departed the demo.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.