3 ms·

It's not out of 'communication range' with personnel aboard the station. An ultra basic integration of alarms and communications would be the minimum requireme

It's not out of 'communication range' with personnel aboard the station. An ultra basic integration of alarms and communications would be the minimum requirement to allow personnel to monitor and modify mission critical systems.

jjk166 5y ago
It was prior to docking. It was a separate entity which had to fly itself without continuous communication to the station in order to be integrated. The entire problem was that the module did not recognize that it was docked with the station and was trying to maneuver itself. Why would you put in a "tell the station to which you are attached that you are firing your thrusters which should never be fired while attached to the station" signal?
- kfarr 5y ago
  It's not a crazy suggestion to have ability for an emergency stop or docking success signal sent from the station to the module.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    The problem was that the "docking success signal" was not properly recieved. The very presence of an emergency stop system should be a signal that the thrusters should not activate, if you are ever in a situation where you would desire to send an emergency stop signal, it is because that emergency stop system has already failed.
    - jollybean 5y ago
      "The problem was that the "docking success signal" was not properly recieved." Then it's not docked and docking procedures should be observed by all personnel as a serious ongoing operational concern, right? So, if there is integration, which there hopefully would be, that there wasn't proper integration would imply something bad. Otherwise, while the crew obviously believed it to be docked, why wasn't the auto-correcting features etc. on the Russian module disabled while it's docked? Again, as part of the docking procedure?
      - jjk166 5y ago
        But they thought it was properly received. This was a computer bug. Function updateDockingState() executed and returned exactly what it was supposed to, but it never properly updated the value of variable DOCKED, so function checkIfDocked() later returned False when it should have returned true. The exact nature of the bug and how it went unnoticed is yet to be determined, but the issue is not with the theory of operation. No integration is going to fix that. Are you proposing that a manual review of every line of code should be part of the docking procedure? It is amazingly presumptuous to assume you know how to make a safe spacecraft better than a literal space agency.
- MrStonedOne 5y ago
  Docking brackets can carry electrical contacts and SPI with redundant conductors would more then cover this usecase.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    That system exists, the problem is that's the thing that failed here. The module didn't recognize it was attached to the station explicitly because there was an issue with those connections.

jjk166 5y ago

It was prior to docking. It was a separate entity which had to fly itself without continuous communication to the station in order to be integrated. The entire problem was that the module did not recognize that it was docked with the station and was trying to maneuver itself. Why would you put in a "tell the station to which you are attached that you are firing your thrusters which should never be fired while attached to the station" signal?

kfarr 5y ago
It's not a crazy suggestion to have ability for an emergency stop or docking success signal sent from the station to the module.
- jjk166 5y ago
  The problem was that the "docking success signal" was not properly recieved. The very presence of an emergency stop system should be a signal that the thrusters should not activate, if you are ever in a situation where you would desire to send an emergency stop signal, it is because that emergency stop system has already failed.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    "The problem was that the "docking success signal" was not properly recieved." Then it's not docked and docking procedures should be observed by all personnel as a serious ongoing operational concern, right? So, if there is integration, which there hopefully would be, that there wasn't proper integration would imply something bad. Otherwise, while the crew obviously believed it to be docked, why wasn't the auto-correcting features etc. on the Russian module disabled while it's docked? Again, as part of the docking procedure?
    - jjk166 5y ago
      But they thought it was properly received. This was a computer bug. Function updateDockingState() executed and returned exactly what it was supposed to, but it never properly updated the value of variable DOCKED, so function checkIfDocked() later returned False when it should have returned true. The exact nature of the bug and how it went unnoticed is yet to be determined, but the issue is not with the theory of operation. No integration is going to fix that. Are you proposing that a manual review of every line of code should be part of the docking procedure? It is amazingly presumptuous to assume you know how to make a safe spacecraft better than a literal space agency.
MrStonedOne 5y ago
Docking brackets can carry electrical contacts and SPI with redundant conductors would more then cover this usecase.
- jjk166 5y ago
  That system exists, the problem is that's the thing that failed here. The module didn't recognize it was attached to the station explicitly because there was an issue with those connections.