Finally, the Beetle Kit is Delivered

Many Sides of Project Planning

Over the past few weeks, we saw the many sides of project planning, hardware devlopment and manufacturing. The design process went as smoothly as can be expected. The engineers made their best effort at designing on paper a functional piece of hardware. The paper design was used to build an engineering design unit (EDU). Then the EDU was used to flush out many of the design flaws so design modifications could be done as required. After the design modifications were agreed upon, the drawings were modified.

So at that point, we had an EDU, good drawings, and a better understanding of what it takes to produce the hardware. The next step was to produce real flight hardware. (In a program with a longer schedule, we would have spent more time testing and tweaking the EDU, but we had a very short schedule and a long road ahead of us.) So, machine shop and electrical shop support was coordinated. Drawings were delivered to the various shops through the manufacturing engineering liasion and the work began.

Problems Almost Always Occur

Even though time is spent ironing out manufacturing processes on the EDU, problems almost always occur during manufacturing of the flight hardware. It's just a fact of life. No design is perfect and no manufacturing process is perfect. At the end of the manufacturing process, piece parts were delivered and inspected and then assembled in our labs. This is another place where you typically run into problems, and we definitely had our share of problems. The first unit came in with an undersized box. This was caused by a miscommunication between the design engineer and the metal box manufacturer and, of course, this raised some serious concerns. But a little luck and a quick thinking design team resolved this problem with minor hardware redesigns.

Finally, the first flight unit was assembled and a mountain of testing was ahead. The electronic parts that were designed and assembled by outside vendors had to go through environmental stress screening (ESS). This is a series of thermal and vibration tests that "stresses" the hardware. After the ESS, the hardware is tested to determine if it still functions as intended. The ESS is a very harsh test and acts as a weed-out device for non-robust designs. Eventually all the commercial hardware passed ESS and was acceptable for integration into the flight hardware.

There was still quite a bit of testing to do on beetle kit flight unit #1 (BK #1) but the development schedule did not allow for completion of all the testing prior to shipment of the hardware to Johnson Space Center (JSC) for Acceptance Testing (AT) with the Russian engineers and quality assurance staff. (Did I mention that the beetle kit will fly on the Russian MIR Space station?) So an agreement was made to ship BK #1 to JSC for the start of AT and then follow up with BK #2 for the end of AT.

While BK #1 was at AT we completed the flight hardware testing on BK #2. Then BK #2 was shipped to JSC and BK #1 was shipped back to Ames, and the testing on BK #1 was completed. BK #1 was then returned to JSC and, finally, all the hardware got through AT. That was a lot easier said than done!!!!

Lastly, we are now cleaning up the documentation from the design changes, big and small, that occurred because no one and nothing is perfect......

Milestones:

1) EDU completed.
2) BK Design completed.
3) BK #1 build-up and assembly completed.
4) BK #1 shipped to JSC for AT.
5) BK #2 build-up and assembly and testing completed.
6) BK #2 shipped to JCS for AT, BK #1 returned to Ames.
7) BK #1 testing completed, BK #1 returned to JSC.
8) AT completed.
9) BK #1 and #2 returned to Ames.