The Spacecraft That Wouldn't Die(corememory.com) |
The Spacecraft That Wouldn't Die(corememory.com) |
> Epic had been designing its mission for one drop-off point only to find out relatively late that it would be dropped off somewhere else altogether. This change brought with it major ramifications for the flight path of the Chimera GEO-1. Montero and his team realized they might now need to do an extra burn and execute it in a tight time window to prevent the Chimera GEO-1 from being hurtled out into space.
> SpaceX’s rocket took off on February 27th, and reached space a few minutes later where its fairing opened and began plopping out the payloads. Shortly thereafter, Epic received a message from SpaceX telling it where and at what velocity Chimera GEO-1 had been dropped off. From there, Epic began trying to communicate with its spacecraft and to figure out what sort of maneuvers it would need to complete.
> It did not take long for things to start going really wrong.
Not shocking, based on that story. With so much at stake - money, years of work, careers, and dreams - I'm surprised it is so ad hoc. Are all launches like that? Maybe commercial launches, focused on profit, cut a lot of corners and deal with more failures. It sounds like a Musk, Inc. mode of operation but I don't really know.
Edit: Also, Epic dug their own hole by agreeing to such an arrangement.
On a ride share mission, the primary payload determines the target orbit. If Intuitive Machines decides they want to go to a different orbit, then Epic has to deal with it. But they will be told this well before launch, with enough time to plan how many trajectory change maneuvers they need.
But even though they know beforehand how many burns they'll need, their exact parameters have to be calculated after launch once SpaceX uses the rocket's on-board guidance instruments to determine the actual insertion orbit. Usually this is within a few meters per second of the planned orbital velocity, but you need to know that last bit of error to figure out exactly how long the correction burns need to be. This doesn't change the overall maneuver plan, just the fine details.
The problem was that after launch, when SpaceX gave them the information they needed to calculate the burn parameters, they didn't have a working uplink to command their spacecraft to do the burn. So it just stayed on its original trajectory for longer than intended, getting more off-course the whole time.
A space startup took a shot and fucked up, due to circumstances. That's tragic, I empathise with them, but I don't suppose that's reason enough for NASA or ESA to provide any of their scarce resources.
I'm seeing how the story could make for a nice semi-fictional dramatization, though. It's certainly poetic.