5 ms·

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.