The romance of space travel

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On the wall behind my desk, I display LEGO models of Apollo mission spacecraft.

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Anyone who has seen one of the dramatizations of Apollo 13 understands the essential romance of space travel. If anything goes wrong in space, it will require ingenuity and luck to return home. We have the darkness of space to match the Homeric “wine-dark sea”.

I’ve been involved (on the ground) with two space missions. The first was SRTM that required extending a 200-foot mast out of the shuttle bay. There were contingency plans, including sending astronauts out to fix it, if the mast got stuck. If it failed to retract and the crew couldn’t close the bay doors, they’d be unable to safely return to Earth. So there was a simple contingency plan: explosive bolts held the mast in place. If it got stuck, the bolts would be detonated and the mast would safely fall back to the ocean and likely burn up on reentry.

The second mission was TES, which was aboard the Aura satellite. Shortly before launch, engineers discovered the wrong lubrication was applied to the one moving part in the instrument. It had the unfortunate property of clumping up in the extreme temperatures of space. It was too late to fix the problem, so a plan was made to address the problem in space:

  1. The moving part was regularly ordered to rapidly move from one extreme to another in hopes of breaking up clumps and spreading lubricant.
  2. The data collection schedule was halved in order to extend the life of the instrument.

In the end, the expected 5-year operation lasted almost 14 years and collected important data about the composition of the atmosphere.

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I was thinking about this kind of thing before I read your post. In a perfectionist society it is hard to imagine that it is necessary to be ready for things to go wrong. Easy to say, but hard to come up with great ideas for fixing something like the lubrication when it is too late. I loved the movie about the Voyagers and how they realized that the Jupiter fly by would be a problem unless the electric parts were shielded. Too late to redo all the wiring the wrapped it in grocery store aluminum foil and it did the job.