Optimism Fuels Spaceflight, But It Isn't Blind

How often do you hear stories of engineers eating peanuts in Mission Control and performing rituals that seem misaligned with the popular notion of what a rocket scientist should behave like? You know the ones who shall never make mistakes, who do not believe in anything besides logic, who are guided by mission objectives so much that nothing can ever spin out of control?

The truth is no matter how much we like to believe that outer space is a heavenly abode and the rocket scientists are the charioteers taking us there, the entire domain of spaceflight is run by humans building machines that turn fiction into reality. The performance of a launch vehicle is still an engineering feat. And you know why space engineers are widely respected? Because once they build and launch a system, they cannot simply call it back. Sure the rockets and satellites are monitored and controlled, still a lot of these steps are at the mercy of the unforgiving space environment. No matter how many perturbations you take into account, the heavens don’t easily reveal their mysteries to their Earth-based counterparts. So when something unexpected happens, finding that source of faith becomes important. Faith in the people who are working on the missions, faith in our understanding of technology, and faith in the coherent operation of human-machine systems.

But is this optimism all blind? Nope. Risk calculations, management and mitigation procedures are all part of mission preparations. Fault detection and recovery is a specialisation that has progressed spaceflight to what it is today. If you have ever built a quadcopter or a larger UAV, you know how many electronic components have to work simultaneously to make the entire vehicle function. Now imagine a launch vehicle weighing hundreds of tonnes carrying both solid and liquid propellants and over 15 satellites (which are engineering marvels on their own), plus the wiring and support structures, getting battered by all the layers of atmosphere you read about in science books, cruising on while getting rid of the used stages, and suddenly an anomaly is detected. It’s not a piece of cake, is it?

If you are feeling sad reading the news today, there there! I am sad too, thinking of all the people who had put in years of extremely difficult work for this day. And in these times, it is easier to find a person and blame them than to wait for the people involved to figure out what went wrong. So if you are close to pointing fingers, I suggest you look at how much they have already achieved. For tomorrow’s achievement will arise from today’s failures. If we can learn to be patient and reserve our comments until we hear more, we would have already placed our faiths in the capabilities of the rocket scientists who are solving a problem that occurred hundreds of kilometers from the surface of the Earth.

And that’s how we build a supportive space ecosystem.

Ad Astra,

Sumana.

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