alt Hacker NewsThe Spacecraft That Wouldn't Die
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Ah, one of those articles that starts with a few paragraphs related to the title, and then pivots to talk about the childhood of one of the people involved...
I thought orbital launches were very carefully planned:
> 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.
So the way I see it is fundamentally there was an issue with receiving signals on the spacecraft and that caused issues. I'd really like to know more about that. They mention doppler shift but that's bidirectional so even without the spacecraft knowing how fast it's going, they should be able to account for it based on the received signal. Common issues could be reduced receive sensitivity, interference, oscillator drift or instability, or plenty of other things but there's no mention of even one that I've been able to find.