on August 9, 2012 with Morpheus
lifting off under full power, after just
a few seconds the vehicle tumbled
over and crashed to the ground in a
virtually destroyed. Data coming from
computer so it knows which way is up,
down, and so forth stopped relaying.
Without the data the vehicle was
crashed.
It is not unusual for failures to occur
in testing new systems and the team
went back to the drawing board
with the data they had learned up
an even better lander.
As Olansen said to us, “When I
give presentations, I don’t shy away
from problems we’ve had, we don’t
try to hide any of that stuff. Usually
when I give presentations I start there.
lot of what we are trying to convey
in that setting is that engineering is
not a precise science that you always
learning process.
“Working through failures, and
understanding
them,
advances
appropriate risk early enough in your
development process allows you to
end up with a much better design
instrumentation where appropriate,
increased structural margins, and
mitigated
launch
vibroacoustic
environments. It was time to test once
again.
Starting back with the basics, the
team conducted a 50-second static
vehicle at Johnson Space Center.
Included in the test was simultaneous
demonstration of thrust vector control
It took just eight months from
the time of the crash till the debut
Having learned many things from the
previous vehicle’s testing, this lander
looked the same but 70 upgrades
had been made to both the vehicle
and the ground systems to improve
reliability and operability.
improvements such as advanced
engine performance capabilities
primary engine components from
communication protocols, redundant
RCS jets are used to keep the vehicle
pointed in the correct direction. All
worked well and once again tethered
return to Kennedy Space Center for
Ian Young describes some of the
other testing done at Kennedy other
simulation capability, so that the
operations team, the folks who sit at
the consoles, will actually go up to
the control center the day before
and we’ll run through eight to 10 runs
react to those. It’s good for the team
to see the planned trajectory and to
talk through any responses to failures.
on how we could improve our current
design.
We have done a number of tests
also. Sometimes the only way to
get integrated data is too actually
take the vehicle out and swing it on
a crane so we get motion on the
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