Anonymous User asked: Whats your favorite weird rocket fact/story?
You’ve probably seen (a less crunched version of, sorry! only gif I could find) this video before, of a Russian Proton-M cargo rocket going out of control immediately after liftoff at Baikonur, pointing the flamey end towards space, and exploding in a quite spectacular (and toxic, given that the propellants were a hypergolic mix of N2O4 and UDMH, both obscenely unpleasant substances) fireball.
Among other questions, you might be asking “why does a launcher rocket in the 21st century use these fuels” and “why was there no flight termination system”? The answers to those are “Proton was originally an ICBM design for the Tsar Bomba” and “The Russians decided it’s fine because Kazakhstan is sparsely populated”. They’re also not important questions , because this whole disaster was unrelated to those facts. You want to guess what the cause was? A faulty accelerometer.
Now, you may wish to interject, “But Morgan, aren’t these things usually redundant? How does a single failed accelerometer doom a rocket?” And you’d be right. It wasn’t a single faulty accelerometer. It was three. And, to be frank, I’m being rude to the accelerometers. There was nothing wrong with them.
Now, as a quick aside, what you’ve gotta understand about these particular pieces of kit is that they only fit in one way. They also have arrows, as you can see, indicating the correct direction to install them. What investigators discovered was that all three yaw-measuring sensors had, somehow, been installed upside down, something that was assumed to be impossible.
It turns out some idiot inexperienced technician had forced the things in the wrong way, without stopping to consider once that there might be something wrong with what he was doing. When the rocket lifted off, the yaw sensors sent nonsense inputs to the flight computer that ultimately doomed the rocket.
So, in short: An inexperienced technician managed to install a critical part wrong. This wouldn’t be a shock (especially with proper oversight, where it might have been caught). The kicker is that he managed to make a mistake that was thought impossible, both physically and logically, by hammering a part that only fit in one way, and had markings showing the correct way, upside down.
Completely unrelated, but reminds me of some of my favorite "wtf" maintenance moments. It's a keyed cannon plug, it should literally only fit in one way to line up with the pins, wtf did you do???
Brute force can overcome any amount of engineering, apparently 💪
For those among us who are in any way surprised, I am in fact making the largely unfounded assumption that you come from white-collar backgrounds. Maybe your parents are office workers, or artists, or draftsmen, or architects, but spending two minutes watching any of my family members mash and yank on shit with all the confidence of a mediocre white frat boy in their "Home bar" would make your head spin.
The concept of an instruction manual is as a thing that you put down on the ground to keep your knees from getting dirty as "I've done this before" (They have not installed this particular thing before, no.) The idea that something has changed? Not possible. Arrows? Can't see 'em. doesn't fit? Made wrong. Just gotta' give it the GREASE. Absolutely not climbing down this ladder to get the mounting brackets they didn't bring up the ladder. Just gonna' make do with these three screws a nail, and a paperclip from the depths of their pocket lint. There is no problem that is not better solvable, or faster solved than by just wrenching on it fuckin' harder.
I've seen these men take angle grinders to shit rather than admit they're putting them in the wrong way. I've seen people take things from companies literally marketed as precision engineering and tear whole chunks of plastic and locking mechanism wholesale rather than considering that perhaps, just maybe, you should use a key. Oceans of stripped screws instead of pre-drilling. Cracked wood, structurally superfluous new mounting holes.
"How could this happen?" I'm tellin' ya, people are wildly dumber than you could possibly imagine sometimes.
