But we are on Habré, and we can try to understand the problems of the space industry through the perception and interests of the geek. And moreover, perhaps it is fundamentally more correct to look at things and problems through the eyes of those who want to achieve a result.
To whom it is interesting, I ask for a cut (a lot of letters and no pictures).
So what is our initial disposition?
I am deeply convinced that in order to achieve a decent result in a serious field, it is fundamentally necessary to have a very good education. And by this is meant not even a red diploma obtained at a university with a good set of teachers, but that personal “engine” of knowledge and skills that are constantly developing and fully allow you to feel the drive to achieve a highly competitive result.
And now let's look together at such an interesting phenomenon as the space industry.
I
Historically, work in the space industry began with two things when they explain to you.
First, you now need to go and sweep the street (... or a month or two to work on a construction site, ... a couple of months with drunks on the collective farm, ..)
Second, we intend to shut up one problematic place with you ...
My first job - it was the design department of the 62nd OKB Fakel, 1983. The experienced Torch Design Bureau has specialized in plasma-ion satellite engines and one-component chemical orientation correction engines. In general, I still have rather fond memories of those people.
But the main thesis of this article is an examination of the space industry through the eyes of a geek. And the geek's primary task at this initial stage is a stubborn and constant movement from the status of a beginner and an amateur in the direction of the status of a pro and then super-pro.
In the history of the 1980s, OKB Torch can distinguish two events.
Somewhere in the very beginning of the 80s, OKB Fakel received a new Chief Designer. In the hierarchy of the space industry, the Chief Designer is a certain divine position, rigidly and defiantly emphasized by the entire hierarchical pyramid. But the person who was appointed at that time was not a peasant who was overheated by intellect, a Product Leader from some MOM-a serial plant. It was obvious that he not only did not think in plasma physics, but for the most part in physics itself, and even technology at the level of the requirements of the designer.
Around the second half of 1983, a nondescript commission came to us from the ministry. This audience delved into the archives of design documentation for a long time, and then this commission sounded extremely displeased. Some time later, devastating paper came to the OKB Fakel from the Ministry. The main idea of this paper was - "... Yes, they have with the release of Design Documentation - FULL DISASTER !!! ... "
... Just imagine, they use a decimal notation based on suffixes to systematize issued documents! This is absolutely unacceptable! For such tasks, only an advanced system based on prefixes can be used! ..
Well and further - a lot of things, and everything here is in such a style ...
And all this was said on behalf of the Ministry of General Engineering.
By this time, I had released the outline documentation of my first project - the 17B14 propulsion unit: assembly drawing, detailing and specification ... and ... came under this "distribution".
I was instructed - "... Urgently redo the designation system of the project! The deadline is a week! .. ”The final outline of the lines has already been made in the drawings to meet the blueprint requirements. And to redo all this scrupulously and manually - it was a big bullfight.
When the deadline came, and everything was fulfilled, the authorities had calmed down a bit, and the following idea came to them - “... And let's start not now, but from the next project!” Week - bring everything back! ”
The mere need for quality requirements for technical documentation does not cause any emotions or protests, but how it was done and what actual goals were achieved is an undeservedly forgotten story.
When I did my first project at OKB Fakel and passed the standard control for the first time, I found a lot of oddities: in Baumanka we were very well put in drawing, drawing, graphics, but problems appeared in my first project. As it turned out, the GOST system has already changed somewhat. It was not difficult for me to take already new GOSTs as a sample (... and roughly remember how they differed from the old ones, for example, the year of release). But after some time, the story repeated again. And then I began to notice that the standards somehow unexpectedly often undergo reformatting. In my project I used extremely conservative solutions for machining, post-processing and variants of standard standard solutions, and it was unexpectedly strange that the standards for these essentially unchanged things are constantly changing (with a time step of sometimes a year and a half). Somewhat perplexed by GOST-s for the design of drawings. As a matter of fact, there is nothing special to change there either. There is an acceptable range of the width of the main drawing line, recommendations for dash, dash-and-dot lines, ... the shape and dimensions of the arrows ... But the numbers describing their parameters, from GOST to GOST, somehow suddenly and randomly jump around and jump around , and as a designer, I constantly had to prove that you are not a “camel" and correspond to the "right phase".
And there is a certain paradox.
If your technical education is received in a good place, you studied in good faith, and when you bring simple guys - technologists, assemblers - drawings of your first project, they don’t have any significant questions for the drawings. All they really asked for was to make their life easier and expand their tolerances, wherever possible. And moreover, these drawings in the status of sketches went through trial production, and no one had big questions either.
But when those same drawings fell under standard control, a huge bouquet of complaints appeared. For the most part, the claims boiled down to - "... And now, everything is different! ..." - now we have to follow the new GOST! But there were substantially more advanced claims.
“- Why did you put this surface roughness here?”
“- I use the technique that was recommended to us at the Bauman school (and, by the way, it fits very well with common sense) ...”
“- There is no need to think here! "I will not miss the drawings until the roughness values specified in GOST are delivered."
For the uninitiated, it is far from obvious that this seemingly inexpressive and purely secondary service has tremendous potential for manipulating the situation, as well as the ability to quietly and safely go into the shadows in difficult situations.
And soon enough the opportunity presented itself to get acquainted with this in practice.
In our department, a number of projects were done. They went through some steps in their development. The model of the product of my project visited the customer, where in addition to positive feedback, I received a rather large list of comments. And everything had to go further in its next circle.
But then the deputy production manager calls the norm controller, his good friend, and explains that the production has problems with the implementation of the current plan, and he wants her to block the design department from passing the design documentation for a while while they solve production problems.
It was a time of shortage of telephone lines and the abundance of parallel phones. Somehow, our head of the design department was on that production site and listened to this conversation. Instantly, a command was given to get specialized recording equipment for our department. And one morning, a well-executed specialized tape recorder is brought into our sector. Among other things, the recorder had a special Velcro stick for taking data from the body or handset of the telephone. It is clear that in our sector no one had the experience of covert operations and the use of special equipment. And with great enthusiasm we began to work out the method of recording telephone conversations ...
And around us, a crowd of advisers and just spectators began to form, and all this began to take on the scale of a big stupid show .... And by lunch this toy was already taken from us.
The commission that came to us to check the documentation became, in a sense, a “watershed”. Previously, when developing drawings, we focused on previous developments as a model: from previous projects it was difficult to borrow something in large, but in small things they were extremely valuable for borrowing the style of design. It is especially important that in all the drawings there were references to all kinds of GOSTs, OSTs, STP. These were obligatory "curtsies", which were stupidly copied everywhere and over which no one ever "steamed."
And now? ... Now in the drawings "curtsy" should be 2 ... 3 times more. They should look somehow unexpectedly different. And the big question is "... And what now do I need to write here?! .." - the counter-question is received - "Yes, you What !!! .. You did not work out and did not study GOST-s?! .."
If you look at the same problem, but in retrospect, you can already see a slightly different understanding:
- What?! What curtsies ?! Time curtsy - it has already passed! All the inscriptions on the drawings before really consisted of a semantic part with some freedom in its presentation, and some template phrases - these "curtsies". Now freedom of expression is no longer allowed and everything must be presented in the form of GOST-phrased phrases.
Other new trends are emerging, for example, the task of eliminating words of foreign origin in the design documentation. Perhaps for some this may sound somewhat incomprehensible, which means that problems can arise extremely unexpectedly, artificially and completely from scratch.
In these trips to normative control, soul-saving explanatory conversations were sometimes conducted with me. And in one such conversation they explain to me ...
“... Here in the documentation being developed there is a box where the Contractor puts his signature ... Hereinafter, if everything is done correctly, the Verifier puts his signature in the next box ...”
There have always been plenty of cells on the documents, but the final stage of explanation is of interest.
"... The approving signature is put by the Chief Designer, after that I have to look and put my signature on the document .."
To come to the conclusion that in our “Egypt” the “Sun-Equal-Great” itself no longer has the right to actually sign, it basically couldn’t do anything on its own, it’s been pumped up somewhere.
Paradoxically, in the beginning of the 80s at the OKB Fakel was a very intelligent, fairly young team. People were really positive, pretty and in many ways remind me of the private company where I work now.
But if we make a comparison, for example, by the results of work productivity, by the dynamics of creating new developments, we have a shocking difference.
And at the same time, it should be noted that the Fakel Design Bureau had amazing conditions at least in the 80s. So in Baumanka, in the specialty E-8, in the sub-specialty "Plasma-ion engines" annually produced about 10 people. Only in 1983, four of us arrived in Kaliningrad. Significantly large groups in this specialty came from the Kharkov Aviation Institute. This specialty was also at MAI, and their graduates were represented.
And now you can look on the Internet at the official site of OKB Fakel and a list of their products.
Is there a feeling of wild imbalance?
This problem can be considered on the example of my own project.
From year to year, this project went through some stages, samples of these stages were taken to the customer, paper with comments came from the customer ... and I had to get to the culman again ... And I, essentially, again faced the original problem - “And what all the same need to be designed? ”Officially, only one correct answer was allowed here -“ ... Once again! Read the Terms of Reference! ".
The Terms of Reference is such a paper, where at first a bunch of men say what important posts and status positions they have, and then the text encoded by bureaucratic Latin follows. What we are looking for is a normal human description of the task of the project - this was not even close there. But the required second part - a description of how the final product will be evaluated and tested - this was that "encrypted message" containing links to a bunch of OST-s and GOST-s.
All I could do at the start of the project was to get the most information from the analysis of previous projects and discuss something with my closest colleagues.
And the main question - “Was there a human description of the project’s task from the Customer, at least in words?” - it was a big mystery.
In fact, we, the grassroots of the hierarchical pyramid, were kept in an actual informational vacuum. Here, the OKB leadership went somewhere, promised something somewhere, and then ... they are "silent as partisans" ... For some time they are undergoing a process of "digestion", and then "something" falls on us ... shapeless and bureaucratically framed.
In order to foresee unforeseen aspects of this situation, an informal analytical center worked in the smoking room in the toilet in those years, where men discussed technical problems and backroom games.
But there were questions ... As applied to my project, I would really like to understand, for example, the temperature field inside the engine block. Inside the block there was equipment for throttling the working gas - xenon, and practically all of them had certain temperature tolerances. But for this task, it was necessary to measure all sources of heat fluxes and coordinate some issues with the Customer.
... And then no one was ever going to do it ...
In fact, the leadership assumed moving forward by trial and a large number of design iterations (in fairness, it should be said, when I studied the old Internet site of OKB Fakel six years ago, I came across technical data in English that suggests that their life is somewhat "Treated").
By the way, what is it about and what is this project of mine - 17B14?
17B14 is a propulsion unit that was developed for the Relay Relay heavy communications military satellite. He was the first to contain the latest then plasma-ion modules SPD-100 (2 pcs.) And xenon throttle equipment.
Some parameters of that satellite:
The diameter of the main antenna is 18 meters.
Orbit - somewhere in the middle altitudes - 400 ... 600 km.
Weight - over 10 tons (... I repent, I don’t remember exactly, but the figure is spinning in my head - 12-18 tons). And what kind of sensations arise from these numbers? ... And if you imagine a constellation of such satellites? ..
Somewhere O Henry had the thought that Bolivar would not pull so much ...
II
The story presented above reflects personal personal experience in space KB, and you can always say that this is just a completely possible deviation from the standard normal case. Then let's try to look at the problem in a more general way.
And for starters, a little history.
OKB Fakel was created in the early 1960s as a small laboratory with obscure goals and randomly looking for its place in the sun. At first they tried to join Sredne-Mash (the Ministry of Atomic Industry) and even designed something for them. Somewhere in the late 60s, they met with plasma injectors (or ions) for tokamaks and stellarators that were rapidly developing at that time.
These injectors (in another terminology - accelerators) existed in several of their variants and proved to be extremely unpretentious and reliable "workhorses".
And something was wise to try to use these accelerators for space purposes.
Moreover, at that time the Americans were having a heated discussion of electro-jet engines, and a significantly different scheme of the ion engine, which was further implemented in SERT-II, was already beginning to win.
As far as I understand, at the first stage in the Fakel Design Bureau it was created (... or received?) About five trial different-scale versions of such accelerators. They picked up more or less optimal initial geometric proportions for the task.
Then came the creation of the flight version and the solution of a host of issues across the entire associated strapping (storage, dosing and supply of the working fluid - xenon, solving the issue of power supply, ..).
It is curious that when I got to the Fakel Design Bureau in the early 1980s, there were already produced small series of sets of plasma-ion engines in 3 ... 4 variants, but the organization completely lacked at least some instrumentation for measuring, visualizing and diagnosing plasma processes. Evaluation of engine performance was carried out by traction meters based on torsion scales and by measuring general electrical parameters.
Getting to know better, I was told that until recently a significant part of the research and development work was carried out at one of the departments of the Moscow Aviation Institute, and now the initiative is increasingly transferred to the hands of the Kharkov Aviation Institute.
The general trend of the movement was well expressed by the head of the design department, explaining what he wants from research: "... get [such] design techniques so that the designer can [not think, but] just substitute his numbers .."
This approach is highly controversial.
In the flight operation of the plasma-ion engines of satellites - marine reconnaissance radar surveillance systems, it turned out that the engines could turn off spontaneously - a plasma discharge in orbit sometimes goes out.
We decided to look at the stand, how the discharge current changes in time and applied the advanced method - an oscilloscope ... And there ... the discharge current really "sausages" in the range of ± 50..60% of the nominal value.
Well, the opinion of the military representative - "... yes he really can go out so ... do something to fit the fluctuations into a reasonable range .."
The solution to the problem was proposed by the head of the 61st research and research department.
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