The Dumbest Mistakes In Space Exploration

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hello I'd Scott Manley here now you may have seen my recent Cassini video and you may also have noticed that partway through the video I accidentally mispronounced the planet Saturn as Jupiter which is probably one of the dumbest mistakes I've ever made and I apologize so err to make up for I figured I would highlight some other dumb moments in the history of space and rocketry now let's be clear on this we're not gonna take you know unfortunate things who were poorly understood for example yes it was sort of funny when SpaceX had a rocket explode on the pad but the reason for that was actually down to some pretty complicated material science and physics similarly yes every time a moon landing deny or ppens their mouth that's pretty dumb but it's not really anything to do with space science so yeah my 10 or so lists the first one is the Russian paulius spacecraft which you may not have heard of now in the mid-80s Russia or Soviet Union was developing their Buuren shuttle which looked pretty much like the NASA shuttle it had a different launch vehicle the energy Arak aquit was awesome and could in theory carry something like a hundred tons into orbit now the rocket was ready way before the spacecraft and they wanted to do a test launch so they required a simulated payload another project had a the polio spacecraft which was possibly a weapon system is in space now it was going to be mounted to the side of this because they figured they could get a free launch to test this it's a for complicated reasons actually had to be mounted backwards so that its engines that would boost it into his final orbit were at the top so the rocket launch carried it up most of the way into orbit and then it would detach it would do a 180 degree flip and then fire its engines now the launch went off perfectly the NGO was a good rocket the spacecraft began performing as 180 degree flip fired up its engines and then continued to rotate all the way around 360 degrees so the engine started slowing the payload down until it fell and was destroyed [Music] number nine in my list is the Apollo TV camera so are the astronauts took a TV cameras to the surface of the Moon so that they could capture the imagination of the public with Apollo 11 it was a black-and-white TV camera and it would be sending the signals back to earth at about 10 frames per second 320 lines now the receiving station for Apollo 11 was in Australia and well they didn't have complex equipment for converting one TV signal to another so the TV stations they pointed a camera at the monitor displaying the TV and then sent that across the satellite further degrading the signal where it was broadcast to the world so the first pictures our first video of Neil Armstrong coming down the ladder are frankly awful and the good news was of course that the original signal was being recorded to tape back in Australia so in theory at a later date they could take that signal make a much better copy and indeed people showed there's somebody that filmed a super8 version off this and there's some fragments of that but the data tapes yeah these were sent back to the US and promptly lost and probably recorded over when they were needings data tapes towards the end of the late 80s for the the Landsat program bonus points for Alan bean on Apollo 12 where the while setting up the new color TV camera accidentally pointed at the Sun and burned out the tube making it useless [Music] for number eight we go to Europe so Ariane five was a seven billion dollar project to develop a bigger and better launcher for the European Space Agency it was able to carry a 7-ton rocket our sorry payload up to geostationary orbit and on its very first test carrying a very real scientific payload it went out of control at 37 seconds into the launch this was unfortunate the reason for this was because they had reused the software from our en for to save money and that was fine sort of but part of the software was taking the velocity as calculated by the inertial guidance system and converting its 64-bit double-precision value into a 16-bit an integer and as soon as that 16-bit integer went above 32767 it flipped around and went negative that meant the routine started seeing garbage and declared a problem the spacecraft then went out of control and destroyed itself now okay so first of all you've got this dumb process of converting a v' perfectly valid there's 30 a 64-bit number into a 16-bit number and risking all sorts of problems but even worse is the routine that caused the problem was and something that set up the inertial guidance system at launch orbit just before lunch it wasn't even needed after the spacecraft took off however they decided that it was good to keep it running straight after the countdown in case they needed to do a quick reset so it would run up to T plus 40 seconds and then shut itself off and of course the failure occurred at 37 seconds the reason occurred is because of course Ariane 5 was a much more powerful and faster rocket and therefore saturated the value before this 40 second cutoff that was fine in the area and for number seven this ski a Parelli land are also from Issa during descent to mars it of course went through its usual aerobraking it fired the engines it fired a parachute and as soon as the parachute fired are deployed the spacecraft spun like crazy as sometimes they do when you've got these complex forces happening that high-speed spin saturated its inertial guidance system again and it decided since it was getting bad data that it was actually had already landed on mars so they cut the parachutes great I mean just think about the programmer here or the think of the program oh the altimeter says were we hide the radar altimeter says were really high the clock says we couldn't possibly have landed but the inertial guidance system it's got some sort of crazy idea that we might have landed hey let's cut this parachute why step away from inertial guidance systems for a while and talk about the Venera spacecraft now the venire a spacecraft of course went to the surface of Venus which is Wow that is awesome you engineers however why do you have so many problems with your lens caps so Lanvin era 9 10 11 and 12 all had issues with lens caps not coming off the cameras there I could understand the first couple may be having some issues but you can't having these problems so they kept on losing footage simply because the lens cap wouldn't deploy and to add insult to injury while the landscapes came off on veneer a 13 and 14 for veneer 14 the lens cap fell off and landed underneath one of the surface sensors therefore they were testing the properties of the lens cap rather than the surface of Venus [Music] for number five no talk of dumb mistakes in spacecraft would be complete without the discussion of Mars climate orbiter now that was a fine spacecraft designed to go into orbit around the Mars however it was navigated by groups of people that would use imperial units on one side and metric units on the other and due to some issues with translation between the two groups at one point when it was making a course correction it made a burn in meters per second when the navigation team had requested a change in feet per second therefore it was three point three times bigger than expected as so therefore when the spacecraft went into orbit to perform his aerobraking maneuver it was way too low and burned up in the Martian atmosphere you might have seen this awesome meme that says there are two types of countries those that use metric and those that have landed a man on the moon well I have a different version that says there are two types of countries those that use metric and those that use metric to land on the moon and then crash the space probe into Mars because they couldn't convert metric and imperial look yeah I'm glad nASA has fixed all this by no [Music] the Hubble Space Telescope mirror now the murderer of course had to be grown to a very exacting shape and since it was going to space it was the most accurately ground mirror in the world at the time however they ground it to the wrong shape the company that had been contracted to do this a mirror figuring they'd had a lot of work with it they had their stock instruments that you used to determine the shape so for the first few steps of grinding the mirror to the correct the air state the they used add the in-house hardware to produce started to determine the shape in the mirror but the stringent requirements for the Hubble Space Telescope required a specialist calibration instrument to be built one two the exam exacting standards somewhere along the way though an error was made in a particular mirror element was about 1.3 millimeters out of place so in the final phase they ground the whole thing wrong by about a whole two micrometers at the outer edge of the mirror so that meant that when the mirror went into space it was the wrong shape and was out of focus now that's dumb enough but they actually had a loved one later tests prior to launch where they they had to use the old hardware and the old hardware hardware said hey you're getting Saphira collaboration this is wrong but they rejected that because their good instrument their special single high quality test gear was still saying that they were right on target I mean the happy ending of course is that after they figured out the problem they were able to send up a servicing mission to put in a correction system that would correct the images and then later they made sure that all the instrument packages that were sent up to the HST included the correction built in so they were able to get a fully functioning amazing instrument after the fact [Music] my next dumbest moment in rocket science history goes way way back to Robert Goddard yes he was a pioneer he developed some of the earliest liquid-fueled rockets however he didn't understand basic physics he fell for the pendulum rocket fallacy that is his first rockets actually put the thrusters at the top and the fuel tank underneath thinking that it would hang like a pendulum and become elegant and stable however physics doesn't work like that and as soon as it took off it flew over in an elegant arc and crashed into the ground this is a mistake that many people make when they come into rocket science and to be fair he was a pioneer but it's the same as he made the mistake and many other people keep making this dumb mistakes that's why it's on my list the proton rocket and it's inverted accelerometer Oh we're back to inertial guidance units aren't we so yeah proton rocket had a one particular proton rocket after launch it went of course it wobbled around and eventually crashed later upon investigating the wreckage they discovered that the accelerometers had been put in upside down and yeah the accelerometers apparently required a technician to go in and install it they had arrows on them to show which orientation they were in but the mounting plates that there were to be mounted to didn't have arrows that aligned up with these they did have mounting pins to make it hard to these accelerometers in anything but the correct rotation but apparently with enough brute force you could still mount these things upside down and so yeah it was getting its signals backwards and the proton rocket was unable to control itself correctly and crashed so that is number two in the dumbest moments in space history so for the number one dumbest moment in rocket science I have two options for number one I have Britton who developed an orbital rocket and then cancelled it they're the only nation ever to have developed an orbit capable rocket and then step away from said capability they could have been much more pioneering they could have done great things but no the the politicians decided they didn't want to pay for it and instead ended up paying even more money to the US to launch their spacecraft so yeah alternatively since we're talking about spending lots of money the entire space shuttle program could be argued to be one of the great moments of dumb in the history of rocket science so yeah I mean on the surface the Space Shuttle seemed like a good idea however after it went through many iterations of design by committee and picked up all sorts of capabilities and features that made it even more expensive and complex and dangerous to fly it never really managed to satisfy all of the goals and became a bit of a boondoggle to be honest and don't get me wrong the Space Shuttle is jaw-droppingly amazing piece of hardware I love it it's just this awesome bit of Technology it's a testament to all the amazing engineers and scientists and programmers and all the money spent that it did as well as it did but you just have to look at this artist's impression of what they thought the vehicle processing would have been like and compare it to the actual photograph of what vehicle processing was like they were never able to turn the Rockets around the shuttles around and relaunch them quickly and so that's why the shuttle never really material that's why the goals never really happened you know maybe we will one day get to that stage is great to see that winged spacecraft are actually coming back with the Dream Chaser in the x-37 but the space shuttle has one of these weird places in my heart where I admire it but I can't honestly say that it was nest sir er good at what it's what it did and so that's my list of dumbest moments in rocket science now I may have missed some very important ones I'm sure I have and we all know that in the future there will be even more dumb moments to talk about because let's face it people are very very good at finding new ways to do things badly I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] [Music]

Info

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 997,289

Rating: 4.8349705 out of 5

Keywords: nasa, esa, russia, roscosmos, proton, schiaparelli, apollo, venera, mars, hubble

Id: Xsqe3utT6rs

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2017

Reddit Comments

Dumb mistakes yes, but there was much learned in those mistakes.

Here's to failing and learning from those failures! 🍻

👍︎︎ 135 👤︎︎ u/_Apophis 📅︎︎ Sep 18 2017 🗫︎ replies

I remember a presentation on MCO that I attended years ago where they noted that there were three flaws that combined to doom it. The units confusion led to excessive course correction burns, but the reason they needed course correction was the huge solar panel on one side of the spacecraft, which caused the solar wind to push more on one side than the other. I'm trying to remember the third thing, it might have been the use of momentum wheels instead of ACS, leading to large single burns instead of small attitude corrections.

Edit: found this article, which goes into it, basically the thrusters to desaturate the momentum weren't arranged symmetrically around the center of mass because of the giant solar array, so the cross coupling from desaturation burns pushed the spacecraft off course.

👍︎︎ 13 👤︎︎ u/nation12 📅︎︎ Sep 18 2017 🗫︎ replies

Of course, NASA had their own accelerometer-installed-backwards incident some years ago... And guess what sort of mishap it was that inspired Ed Murphy to formulate his famous law? Hint: it starts with "accelero" and ends with "wards".

👍︎︎ 19 👤︎︎ u/Sharlinator 📅︎︎ Sep 18 2017 🗫︎ replies

My favorite dumb moment was the Fobos-Grunt russian spacecraft which never made it because some of its onboard electronic part was made with cheap chinese circuits meant for household use. It got struck by a cosmic ray and fried so the spacecraft didn't even leave orbit.

👍︎︎ 18 👤︎︎ u/blacktornn 📅︎︎ Sep 18 2017 🗫︎ replies

I was hoping it was Scott Manley, and it was! Yeah!

Also, I think all scientists and engineers should just agree on the metric system. If not all engineers, than at least those that design items where lives are at stake.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/PM_ME_UR_SPACESHIP 📅︎︎ Sep 19 2017 🗫︎ replies

I could have sworn I read in a book that NR-1 (the US Navy's nuclear research sub (the only unarmed one in the fleet, it can actually land on the sea floor too and has arms for retrieveing things) happened to be in the splashdown zone of the Polyus battle station. Anyone else encounter this and remember where?

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Chairboy 📅︎︎ Sep 19 2017 🗫︎ replies

Energia is actually pronounced with a hard 'g', like in 'grass' or 'gas'.

👍︎︎ 9 👤︎︎ u/Dawidko1200 📅︎︎ Sep 18 2017 🗫︎ replies

Favorite part at 8:47 : https://youtu.be/Xsqe3utT6rs?t=8m47s

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Tvashtar_Paterae 📅︎︎ Sep 18 2017 🗫︎ replies

I love the part where they film the feed from Apollo 11 in Australia only to send it via satellite to America. All this because converting it is too hard.

But I guess this proves the moon landing was actually filmed on earth. More specifically in Australia haha.

👍︎︎ 12 👤︎︎ u/asg0noir 📅︎︎ Sep 18 2017 🗫︎ replies