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October 23, 2004
Uncertain doom.
Murphy's Law describes how accelerometers were installed upside-down because they could be, dooming the Genesis mission.
Titan Calling describes how the Cassini-Huygens mission risks failure by reusing communications equipment developed for use in near-Earth orbit, without considering the effects of Doppler shift on the received signal. To work around the Doppler shift problem and ensure communication, they've had to alter the physical trajectories of the spacecraft -- a major mission change.
The author of both articles is James Oberg. He's on a roll.
My approach to project management tends towards paranoia; what can go wrong, will go wrong, and you have to constantly ask what-if questions about things that are ostensibly outside your areas of concern. However, in the long-term, that's stressful and perhaps ultimately unsustainable by most. These articles provide insight into a world where most people just happily presume that others have done their job correctly, without sanity checks providing system-level oversight, and without sufficient overlap of areas of responsibility.
Still, we're only human.
Posted by Lloyd at October 23, 2004 04:02 PM