While on the way to rendezvous with the Space Station, Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL suffered a thruster failure on Tuesday morning, September 15th. As a result, this morning's (Wednesday the 16th) attempt to dock had to be cancelled.
As a result, "the Cygnus XL will not arrive to the space station on Wednesday, Sept. 17, as originally planned, with a new arrival date and time under review," NASA officials announced in an update on Tuesday afternoon.
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The Cygnus XL's "main engine stopped earlier than planned during two burns designed to raise the orbit of the spacecraft for rendezvous with the space station, where it will deliver 11,000 pounds of scientific investigations and cargo to the orbiting laboratory for NASA," agency officials added in the update. "All other Cygnus XL systems are performing normally."
It's admittedly extremely sarcastic and dark humor to compare the Cygnus XL to Starliner, especially in light of how terrifyingly bad that mission was. If you haven't read that summary lately, you might not remember that Butch Williams, a very senior and very experienced astronaut went through more than one issue that had one of the possible outcomes being, "then the crew dies." I don't honestly know this set of problems compares directly to how bad Starliner was, just as I don't know this set of problems is any better than Starliner's were.
I've been watching every site I know all day for updates to the situation. The big question (the several million dollar question) is if there's some way to get the Cygnus XL from whatever orbit it's in up to the ISS. Is there any vehicle that can dock to the ISS docking adapter on the Cygnus XL that can then maneuver it up the ISS orbit? Too many questions there I just can't answer.
The cargo flights to the ISS have a rotating schedule, such that there's always a couple of cargo loads in the process of getting ready to fly. A new cargo carrier on the schedule is from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan and JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA); called the HTV-X . The HTV-X No. 1 is scheduled to launch on an H3 rocket from Japan on Oct. 21.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s new unmanned cargo transfer vehicle, the HTV-X No. 1, is seen at the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture on June 2. Image credit: The Yomiuri Shimbun
(facepalm)
ReplyDeleteWell, it's only one thruster. It's not whole thruster clusters that were known to be screwed up before the launch (like Stayliner, they knew things weren't quite right before the launch but they launched anyways.)
ReplyDeleteThe thing about Cygnus is as long as it has fuel, it can continue, slowly, to boost up and because it docks the old-fashioned way using the Canadair Arm, eh, close is all that's required.
But, yes, as John Wilder said (facepalm)
Okay, space is hard, but really?
Did all of the competent engineers, techs and managers decamp to go work at X?
ReplyDeletePretty much. The legacy aerospace engineers post-Apollo love to sit around tables and design stuff and not actually make stuff that works. So, yes, the competent have decamped to SpaceX or the other exciting forward thinking companies.
DeleteThe not so competent are with BO and ULA
The incompetent? Boeing and NASA.
Sigh.
This morning's headline at Space.com is saying, "Northrop Grumman Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft arrives at the International Space Station" and below that, "was captured by the station's robotic Canadarm2 at 7:24 a.m. EDT (1124 GMT). "
ReplyDeleteThere's a string of update articles on https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/.
Beans is right, as usual.
The purpose of redundant systems is, of course, redundancy. The Cygnus has redundancy in its thruster systems. And Northrop-Grumman (was once ATK...) doesn't do The Stupid like Boeing seems to have embraced in the last 20 years or so.
DeleteSo it was an easy call.
Now if it was Boeing or BO? Yeah, would have been totally lost...
Nit: rereading that first paragraph. Days/dates?
ReplyDeleteOT: thought I was having a stroke yesterday. Set up my phone to display both local time and UTC. I know our offset. The time for London was wrong. Eventually realized despite adopting UTC in 1880, they were on British Standard Time. Jeez.
Sigh. British Summer Time, not Standard.
DeleteThe engine seems to be a fairly mature design, the BT-4, from Japan. Could be hardware, could be software.
ReplyDeleteSometimes things happen, space is hard.
At least one site, the Angry Astronaut channel, says s/w problem - fixed by a reboot.
ReplyDelete