8 ms·

It's funny now - imagine being the Commissar for Lens Cap design in the old USSR and overseeing all that

staplung 1y ago
Oh that Commissar was fine. It was the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Systems on Interplanetary Probes that got thrown under the avtobus.
- roughly 1y ago
  I heard the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Trajectory Modeling for Venusian Planetary Environments caught the brunt of the blame, but the real fault was with the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Trajectory Modeling for Venusian Atmospheric Dynamics, who got off scott free. Turns out he was the general’s nephew.
  - transcriptase 1y ago
    At the end of the day, all that matters is that someone involved accidentally fell from a 5th to 12th story window.
    - jl6 1y ago
      Falling upwards - truly a comrade of the space programme.
dluan 1y ago
It's not limited to Soviet missions. My high school physics teacher worked at JPL on the Mars Climate Orbiter in the 90s. His entire NASA career was in development of it, and after 10 months of travel following successful launch, the thing exploded in the atmosphere without ever reaching the surface because the team at JPL used metric while Lockheed Martin used imperial. He was so spiritually broken by the experience that he quit and became a high school physics teacher. Great teacher, but to have your life's work go up in smoke like that is brutal.
- cbanek 1y ago
  And the classic accelerometer installed backward which doomed the Genesis mission sample return, although some bits were successfully recovered, the parachute never deployed.
  - dudeinjapan 1y ago
    Elsewhere in this thread someone was asking about the difference between acceleration and deceleration. Well, this is a good example!
    - cbanek 1y ago
      The difference is just a minus sign!
- wileydragonfly 1y ago
  Should have gone with the “martians shot it down” explanation which was far cooler and less embarrassing
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    I think turning the whole earth into a total war economy is worth avoiding the engineering embarrassment!
- dekhn 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...
  - userbinator 1y ago
    Still, NASA does not place the responsibility on Lockheed for the mission loss; instead, various officials at NASA have stated that NASA itself was at fault for failing to make the appropriate checks and tests that would have caught the discrepancy. The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed because they "did not follow the rules about filling out [the] form to document their concerns" Typical bureaucratic BS. Not surprised; what's surprising is that anything works in that sort of environment.
drob518 1y ago
Sergei is, sadly, ahem, no longer with us.
smallnix 1y ago
Jest aside, do we know how such failure was handled in the USSR?
- kerkeslager 1y ago
  This is a question I've tried to answer to myself, and I think it's actually pretty hard to tell, if all your sources are Western media. I'll give you my impressions but I'm by no means an expert. I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans. They weren't all idiots or sociopaths: they understood, just like we do, that people make mistakes and that if you punish mistakes too harshly, people won't want to risk working with you. The Soviet government punished dissent harshly--but if you were working with them they weren't typically so foolish as to punish honest mistakes with a stay in the gulags. In fact, technical fields like their space program (and, for example, infrastructure programs) were safe havens for intelligentsia, where some criticism of government was tolerated because it was understood that criticism from people with technical knowhow was necessary to progress Soviet goals. There are exceptions I've found, but I tend to think those are the result of a few people with too much power making bad decisions, rather than a pervasive cultural norm. None of this should be perceived as a defense of Soviet totalitarianism. Stalin has the highest body count of any dictator by a wide margin, and that's totally reprehensible. All I'm saying is I think he killed political dissenters, mostly, not allies who made mistakes.
  - Scramblejams 1y ago
    Since you brought him up: Stalin was also motivated by a truckload of paranoia, though, right? Hard to make rational decisions about who is dissenting if you think they’re all out to get you. The flimsiest accusations related by the least reliable people could be enough. He executed and imprisoned a bunch of his best aircraft designers. Look what he did to Andrei Tupolev and his design bureau; they designed a whole aircraft in the Gulag: https://vvsairwar.com/2016/10/20/aviation-design-in-the-gulag-and-the-development-of-the-tu-2/ https://vvsairwar.com/2016/10/20/aviation-design-in-the-gula...
    - 1y ago

Oh that Commissar was fine. It was the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Systems on Interplanetary Probes that got thrown under the avtobus.

roughly 1y ago
I heard the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Trajectory Modeling for Venusian Planetary Environments caught the brunt of the blame, but the real fault was with the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Trajectory Modeling for Venusian Atmospheric Dynamics, who got off scott free. Turns out he was the general’s nephew.
- transcriptase 1y ago
  At the end of the day, all that matters is that someone involved accidentally fell from a 5th to 12th story window.
  - jl6 1y ago
    Falling upwards - truly a comrade of the space programme.

dluan 1y ago

It's not limited to Soviet missions. My high school physics teacher worked at JPL on the Mars Climate Orbiter in the 90s. His entire NASA career was in development of it, and after 10 months of travel following successful launch, the thing exploded in the atmosphere without ever reaching the surface because the team at JPL used metric while Lockheed Martin used imperial. He was so spiritually broken by the experience that he quit and became a high school physics teacher. Great teacher, but to have your life's work go up in smoke like that is brutal.

cbanek 1y ago
And the classic accelerometer installed backward which doomed the Genesis mission sample return, although some bits were successfully recovered, the parachute never deployed.
- dudeinjapan 1y ago
  Elsewhere in this thread someone was asking about the difference between acceleration and deceleration. Well, this is a good example!
  - cbanek 1y ago
    The difference is just a minus sign!
wileydragonfly 1y ago
Should have gone with the “martians shot it down” explanation which was far cooler and less embarrassing
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  I think turning the whole earth into a total war economy is worth avoiding the engineering embarrassment!
dekhn 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...
- userbinator 1y ago
  Still, NASA does not place the responsibility on Lockheed for the mission loss; instead, various officials at NASA have stated that NASA itself was at fault for failing to make the appropriate checks and tests that would have caught the discrepancy. The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed because they "did not follow the rules about filling out [the] form to document their concerns" Typical bureaucratic BS. Not surprised; what's surprising is that anything works in that sort of environment.

drob518 1y ago

Sergei is, sadly, ahem, no longer with us.

smallnix 1y ago

Jest aside, do we know how such failure was handled in the USSR?

kerkeslager 1y ago
This is a question I've tried to answer to myself, and I think it's actually pretty hard to tell, if all your sources are Western media. I'll give you my impressions but I'm by no means an expert. I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans. They weren't all idiots or sociopaths: they understood, just like we do, that people make mistakes and that if you punish mistakes too harshly, people won't want to risk working with you. The Soviet government punished dissent harshly--but if you were working with them they weren't typically so foolish as to punish honest mistakes with a stay in the gulags. In fact, technical fields like their space program (and, for example, infrastructure programs) were safe havens for intelligentsia, where some criticism of government was tolerated because it was understood that criticism from people with technical knowhow was necessary to progress Soviet goals. There are exceptions I've found, but I tend to think those are the result of a few people with too much power making bad decisions, rather than a pervasive cultural norm. None of this should be perceived as a defense of Soviet totalitarianism. Stalin has the highest body count of any dictator by a wide margin, and that's totally reprehensible. All I'm saying is I think he killed political dissenters, mostly, not allies who made mistakes.
- Scramblejams 1y ago
  Since you brought him up: Stalin was also motivated by a truckload of paranoia, though, right? Hard to make rational decisions about who is dissenting if you think they’re all out to get you. The flimsiest accusations related by the least reliable people could be enough. He executed and imprisoned a bunch of his best aircraft designers. Look what he did to Andrei Tupolev and his design bureau; they designed a whole aircraft in the Gulag: https://vvsairwar.com/2016/10/20/aviation-design-in-the-gulag-and-the-development-of-the-tu-2/ https://vvsairwar.com/2016/10/20/aviation-design-in-the-gula...
  - 1y ago