Ham Radio Astronaut procedures.
What made the man-safety issues of PCSAT2 costly? Didn't you just agree to power PCSAT2 off for long periods of time whenever the need arose?
I'll answer this on the AMSAT-BB to share the pain.
This should be a real eye-opener as to what the space business is like from the inside out...
A 2W TX on shuttle or ISS is considered a catastrophic safety hazard due to potential for loss of life due to interference or reset of the space suit, or shuttle ISS control systems or anything else.
Not only must we then design a system with FOUR independent ground commandable OFF switches in series (or three that have positive feedback) they all must be proven to be man safe to NASA man safe criteria. This means, not a $2 on/off switch, but a $5,000 on/off switch that has been built from raw materials that have a paper work history all the way back to the manufacturer certifying the materials, assembly procedures, and all testing, and all handling of -each- such switch. Now that is just a switch. You have to have this for every component involved in the on/off of a man-safe circuit or that an astronaut touches.
Then you have to present this material and plans 4 times to the 30 or so engineers on the NASA Safety Review board. Each meeting involves flying people from all over the country to participate. Meetings usually take 2 days to review every detail of the design. At $200 per man day plus travel, that is $6000 times 4 or $24,000 just for the meetings, not counting the days of preps and reviews of everyone leading up to it.
Then the documentation, and reviews, and presentations... And testing, and travel to observe testing, and paper work over 3 years, all because a 2W TX is considered to be a catastrophic hazard. Then you fly.
Now you say, we "simply agree to turn it off". But this involves a week of planning for each "turn off". NASA must have a plan at least a week in advance, not only showing when we are going to turn it off, but what backup systems we have in place to assure that it will be off. And the exact time is planned, but is not known for sure, It changes up to the day of the EVA or whatever evolution. Hence we are constantly revising this plan all week long...
We have to coordinate the schedules of all our ground stations, find who can be awake at the right time, and still have 2 more chances to turn it off after that. Each change of 5 minutes to the evolution completely changes the ground station we need and all our planning. Mean time, NASA has to man the consoles, and DOD has to provide a 24 hour operator at their console to talk to NASA to talk to me. Then we send the commands, and have to report it to all concerned.
Meanwhile NASA has to plan contingencies in case we fail to get the switch turned off from the ground. They have to include the plan in their Astronauts procedures to take time out of their EVA preparations (getting their suits ready) to include then going over to the HAM radio and going through 74 steps in a 5 page procedure to send the OFF command themselves. Yes, 74 steps... Just to send the DTMF code 123456, because you have to have a procedure for the crew to turn on the radio, set the channels, tune the radio, set the controls, verify operation, etc, etc... This requires 15 minutes or more and has to be done before they get into their space suits. Which takes 3 hours. So, this means we had to have exhausted all three of our ground opportunities prior to that 3 hours, so, we have to attempt to send the command 6 hours prior to EVA.
Many times that is in the middle of the night over the ground station of choice, and since we had to do this for every EVA, every Docking, and Every use of the robot arm, you can see why no-one is going to let us do that again. It wore everyone out.
DOD had at least 6 people probably 1/4 time on this project over 3 years, that is about $500,000. And that had nothing to do with actually building the hardware. That is just "oversight and management" overhead. Presumably if we didn't have all the man-safety issues due to the 2W TX, this effort would have been much less involved.
But it all makes sense. NASA must assure the safety of the Shuttle ISS system, and these procedures all make sure that the material, plans, procedures and operations are thoroughly reviewed and are as safe as possible.
Hope that helps.
Bob, WB4APR
Back in the Dark Ages, when I worked for NASA, I once found myself in a Center director's office over flying a newfangled LCD display as part of a Spacelab payload. They were locked up on the word "liquid" and were trying to apply all sorts of safety regulations in case of spills. My solution, not to approval but to break them out of that mindset, was to remove a board, two LCDs, and a heavy cloth from my briefcase. After placing them on the table in that order, I proceeded to literally hammer the two LCDs to twisted metal and other fragments, which I passed around the room to demonstrate there was no spillable liquid in an LCD.
'tis the NASA way.
Alan WA4SCA
At 08:54 AM 2/9/2007 -0600, Alan P. Biddle wrote:
Back in the Dark Ages, when I worked for NASA, I once found myself in a Center director's office over flying a newfangled LCD display as part of a Spacelab payload. They were locked up on the word "liquid" and were trying to apply all sorts of safety regulations in case of spills. My solution, not to approval but to break them out of that mindset, was to remove a board, two LCDs, and a heavy cloth from my briefcase. After placing them on the table in that order, I proceeded to literally hammer the two LCDs to twisted metal and other fragments, which I passed around the room to demonstrate there was no spillable liquid in an LCD.
'tis the NASA way.
Alan WA4SCA
Good one, Alan.
I had assigned to me a project to make a power supply crowbar for microwave beacon tranmitter at a ground station. It had to switch 1000-volts to ground in less than 30ms. That was not too hard to do, but it had to work from -50 to +150 deg F. I started with a two transistor circuit with maybe 25 components. The final circuit had less than 12 components. It took six months of testing and fiddling to get a reliable circuit. All this to send a timing signal between tracking stations.
I saw my old boss at MUD-2005 and one thing he told me in reminiscing the old days at Goldstone....was the circuit worked for over ten years until they dismantled the project. Not one failure. That is the NASA way.
Side Note: the timing system was kind of neat as the signal was sent around the world to other tracking centers via mooon-bounce...that's right they reflected the mw digital signal from the Moon. It sent precise timing code tied to a Hydrogen Maser time standard. Eventually phased out by better technology.
73's, Ed - KL7UW ========================================= BP40iq, Nikiski, AK http://www.qsl.net/al7eb Amsat #3212 Modes: V - U - L - S USA Rep. for Dubus Magazine: dubususa@hotmail.com =========================================
participants (3)
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Alan P. Biddle -
Edward R. Cole -
Robert Bruninga