Firefly Software Snafu Sends Lockheed Satellite on Short-Lived Space Safari (theregister.com) 25
A software error on the part of Firefly Aerospace doomed Lockheed Martin's Electronic Steerable Antenna (ESA) demonstrator to a shorter-than-expected orbital life following a botched Alpha launch. From a report: According to Firefly's mission update, the error was in the Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) software algorithm, preventing the system from sending the necessary pulse commands to the Reaction Control System (RCS) thrusters before the relight of the second stage. The result was that Lockheed's payload was left in the wrong orbit, and Firefly's engineers were left scratching their heads.
The launch on December 22, 2023 -- dubbed "Fly the Lightning" -- seemed to go well at first. It was the fourth for the Alpha, and after Firefly finally registered a successful launch a few months earlier in September, initial indications looked good. However, a burn of the second stage to circularize the orbit did not go to plan, and Lockheed's satellite was left in the wrong orbit, with little more than weeks remaining until it re-entered the atmosphere.
As it turned out, the Lockheed team completed their primary mission objectives. The payload was, after all, designed to demonstrate faster on-orbit sensor calibration. Just perhaps not quite that fast. Software issues aboard spacecraft are becoming depressingly commonplace. A recent example was the near disastrous first launch of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner, where iffy code could have led, in NASA parlance, to "spacecraft loss." In a recent interview with The Register, former Voyager scientist Garry Hunt questioned if the commercial spaceflight sector of today would take the same approach to quality as the boffins of the past.
The launch on December 22, 2023 -- dubbed "Fly the Lightning" -- seemed to go well at first. It was the fourth for the Alpha, and after Firefly finally registered a successful launch a few months earlier in September, initial indications looked good. However, a burn of the second stage to circularize the orbit did not go to plan, and Lockheed's satellite was left in the wrong orbit, with little more than weeks remaining until it re-entered the atmosphere.
As it turned out, the Lockheed team completed their primary mission objectives. The payload was, after all, designed to demonstrate faster on-orbit sensor calibration. Just perhaps not quite that fast. Software issues aboard spacecraft are becoming depressingly commonplace. A recent example was the near disastrous first launch of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner, where iffy code could have led, in NASA parlance, to "spacecraft loss." In a recent interview with The Register, former Voyager scientist Garry Hunt questioned if the commercial spaceflight sector of today would take the same approach to quality as the boffins of the past.
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Common among the rich. Hunter on the board of Burisma is a symptom of a bigger problem.
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Common among the rich. Hunter on the board of Burisma is a symptom of a bigger problem.
How is that a problem? Nothing illegal was done. We know this because the FBI agent lied about any supposed crime after he told investigators he relied on Russian sources for the information [cnn.com].
Whatever Hunter did was perfectly legal and has no bearing on anything else. Unlike having your failure of a son-in-law appointed to a government position despite not being able to truthfully complete [cnn.com] a top secret background check.
Or maybe you meant keeping hundreds of classified documents in boxes in a bathroom [cbsnews.com] or on a
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They wanted to buy influence from the Biden family. It's not "illegal" in the sense you can't prove such motivations in court, but it's pretty obvious: Hunter was being paid a lot for knowing shit about the industry. Similar happened with Jared, by the way.
Move fast and break things (Score:2)
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Microsoft's Motto: "Move slow and break things"
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All I can say is... (Score:5, Funny)
Mal is NOT gonna be happy about this.
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Mal is NOT gonna be happy about this.
Can someone explain the chain of command to me?
And do it without getting all... bendy?
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Just reduce the amount of flash they get to use (Score:3)
Take their code size, then allow them to use only 1% of that.
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Should have used AI to write better code (Score:2)
*snicker*
History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes (Score:1, Interesting)
I've seen people get the words of wisdom wrong and claim that history repeats. The proper wording is that those that forget their history are doomed to repeat it. But that's not quite right either because history truly repeating would be highly unlikely, but we do see it rhyme with itself.
It seems every technology goes through similar cycles. Things start out badly as people are intent on details to get things right. Then things start to go right. After a time of going smoothly for a while people get r
The root course is bad testing (Score:2)
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A simulation would not catch a software error if the test code is bad. An example, the people writing the code for the satellite enter the gravitational acceleration of Earth as 9.8 feet per second squared. Then the people writing the code for the test look at the same specs, and also enter the gravitational acceleration of Earth as 9.8 feet per second squared. But that's not correct, it is supposed to be 9.8 meters per second squared.
Maybe if everyone makes the same feet vs. meters error then everything
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I don't know if the issue was explained to me but I suspect that the LED with voltage supplied it would light up full brightness and then go dark immediately once voltage was removed, which is unlike an incandescent indicator or even many other LED types. Our attempts to modify the PWM code to dim it only resulted in blinking brightly.
I can't remember ever having come across an LED that wouldn't respond well to PWM that was at a fast enough pulse rate and sufficient resolution in the duty cycle, but I 100%
"increasingly commonplace" (Score:1)
post SpaceX paradigm (Score:2)
We've reached the era of the tech-bro mantra "fail fast, fail often".
Programming Is Hard (Score:1)
Colleges have stopped teaching real computer science because its was too hard and students were dropping out. Colleges, only caring about the money, started teaching just Java and C#. I had a new engineer flip his shit because he actually had to write code ("what do you mean there isn't a library for that?!").
Companies, only caring about budgets and schedules, make their engineers release broken, unteste
They should have watched the documentary! (Score:2)
There was a documentary about this a couple of decades ago that demonstrated what happens when you show things the wrong order in . . .
Now, what was it called? Castle? Rookie?hmm . . .