Afterward to The Genesis Mishap

Why haven’t humans tried collecting solar wind samples from L1 again?

(Afterward to The Genesis Mishap)

Genesis was what the NASA parlance of the era disparagingly denotes as a small mission. It earned this largely meaningless qualitative designation by virtue of its placement within NASA’s “Discovery” mission-bracket. From the GENESIS Mishap Investigation Board report:

Discovery

A NASA program that funds a series of principal investigator-lead, cost-capped, low-cost small missions. Genesis is the 5th Discovery Mission (after NEAR, Mars Pathfinder, Stardust, etc).¹

“Cost-capped, low-cost, small.”

The Mishap report itself lays extensive blame upon the pressures and practices imposed by the synthetically-constructed organizational culture which was then de rigueur within NASA, and to which any member of the Discovery mission-bracket particularly must adhere: “Faster, Better, Cheaper.”

After an oblique reference to FBC within the critique of JPL management’s “hands-off” oversight of Genesis’ builder (Lockheed Martin Space Systems) as bullet two of the proximate causes in the summary, bullet seven is dedicated to FBC specifically:

Faster, Better, Cheaper Philosophy.

As demonstrated by several failures, NASA’s use of the Faster, Better, Cheaper philosophy encouraged increased risk taking by the Projects to reduce costs. Although NASA Headquarters had solicited and selected Genesis under the Faster, Better, Cheaper paradigm, the way JPL chose to implement the Genesis Mission substantially reduced their insight of the technical progress of the project…²

This analysis is particularly borne out by the revelation, at several points later on in the report, that the Avionics Unit centrifuge tests mandated by Genesis engineers were cancelled; and that management, upon reading the incoherent missive reporting the cancellation, made no attempt to clarify what was being expressed to them. Such a clarification would have reversed the cancellation, revealed the backwards orientation of the AU g-sensors, and saved the mission:

• A centrifuge test to verify the directionality of the G-switch sensors had been planned, but was deleted in favor of drawing inspections.

• The only documentation indicating that Genesis Project Management or Systems Engineering had been informed of a centrifuge test deletion was a single bullet presented at two management reviews that read, “SRC AU 3-g test approach validated; moved to unit test; separate test not required.”³

Yet, one must also bear in mind that NASA was operating in an era when a project’s designation as “cost-capped” and “small” was the price of admission. It was a gesture toward political necessity, not necessarily a paradigm shaping every element of a given mission’s structure.

In fact, it so happens that another member of the Discovery mission-bracket, launched two years before our protagonist satellite, went on to accomplish one of the would-be firsts thwarted by the upside-down Genesis g-sensors in 2004. This was Stardust, a workhorse comet-dust-collector launched in 1999. In 2006, after having obligingly waved a sample tray around in various corners of the solar system and taunted “Here, dust-y dust-y,” it successfully flung a (very familiar-looking) sample return capsule at the Utah Test and Training Range from outside Earth while traveling several thousand km per second. Stardust, like Genesis, was “offshored” to one of America’s perennially incompetent military-corporate-welfare clients; and, like Genesis, cobbled together from legacy subsystems in order to cut down on quality assurance costs: Yet the Stardust capsule sample chute-deployment sequence went off without a hitch (no attempt was made to capture the Stardust capsule mid-air with a helicopter).

If two “cost-capped,” “small” NASA missions can have diametrically opposed outcomes, perhaps we should zoom out further when selecting the “structural” component which led to the inversion of the g-switches. In fact, let’s start by asking: Why was it possible to invert the g-switches in the first place?

This yields an immediate an, unambiguous answer: Because the designers of Genesis allowed it to be possible. They did so intentionally, because they did not think it mattered that it was possible.

⁴The formulation of what passes for the American common understanding of quality management, Murphy’s Law, itself stems from an incidence of reversed g-sensors - at least, according to the possibly apocryphal origin-tale. The story is this: Edward Murphy, upon learning that several of the strain gauges which he had instructed an assistant to install during a USAF deceleration trial were backward, declared that if any mistake is possible, his quasi-useless assistant will devise a means of making it. Murphy’s colleagues in the project later portrayed this minor HR hiccup as the origin of their more universalized rendition of Murphy’s outburst:

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

This is a prescription for rank managerial incompetence if there ever was one. Only a professional culture determined to construe all misfortune as the workings of an inevitable, arbitrary force of fate could produce the formulation “that can.”

Of course anything “can” go wrong. The world’s first perfect, un-crash-able airliner could take flight tomorrow, and all three hundred passengers and crew coincidentally perish of a heart attack in mid-air. That does not mean it will happen. It is by this type of fatalistic thinking that an engineer permits a $300 million effort to collect solar wind samples to include and depend upon reversible g-sensors.

The formulation of Murphy’s Law created by a professional culture that understood quality management would read:

Anything that is allowed to go wrong, can go wrong.

Under this construction, the Aerodyne 7200-6-000 acceleration g-switch clearly prompts a red flag. It is nearly symmetrical. Both leads are the same length and gauge, as opposed to one deliberately being shorter or thinner than the other so that, if paired with corresponding board design decisions, an employee cannot attach it to the board backwards. Lastly but most fragrantly, it is not significantly labeled in any way. Literally nothing prevents the Avionics Unit Timing Sequencer fabrication team from soldering it onto the board backwards. Therefore it can be expected to be soldered backwards. Trying to correct this with a centrifuge test - when nothing prevents the accidental cancellation of any given test - is chasing the horse after it has already left the barn door.

The above screed, of course, only reprises the engineering philosophy evangelized by W.E. Deming in Japan in the 50’s, which was responsible for their outpacing two decades later of the entire West in automotive and personal electronics product quality. That philosophy, after very briefly gaining fashion in America in the mid-80s, was itself reformulated brilliantly by Philip B. Crosby in his book, Quality Is Free. Another way to formulate Crosby’s title, which corresponds to the example of the g-sensors on Genesis, is:

Making it impossible for something to go wrong, always costs less than writing procedures against something going wrong.

L1: How Steak Is Done

That all said… “small” might not be far off the mark, when describing the likely impact Genesis would have had upon human understanding of the universe had the SRC not crashed itself into the Utah desert.

How, after all, does a researcher later “measure” the pure solar wind samples within the SRC, without violating their intrastellar pedigree? What prevents the measuring device, or the hyper-electromagnetically sterilized laboratory containing the measuring device, from contaminating the sample during observation? Likely, nothing. Indeed, this seems to be the fate befalling the samples successfully retrieved by the Stardust probe: it has been 15 years, and nothing of great import has been discovered.

Yet, even if pure L1 solar wind results would likely be of little significance, why not try again?

Genesis may, per the narrative framework employed by my article, be the perfect example of why humans should not mess with complex systems when the potential consequence of failure are above negligible - but it also the perfect example of why humans should mess with complex systems when the upper limit on consequence is the unproductive use of a measly $300 million: it’s fun.

In 2001, Americans hurled a satellite toward L1 Lagrange to try to collect solar wind, and in 2004 they tried to collect the samples in mid-air with a helicopter. What possible justification, after the hilariously ironic g-sensor-parachute-failure which ensued, could be articulated in favor of not dusting off our collective breeches, and trying again? None. A package gets thrown from outer space to the ground, where helicopters try to catch it with hooks! It’s ridiculous and awesome, and it only costs $300 million! That’s less than the lottery!

Oh, sure, we could return to consideration of the dreary political modus operandi with which this afterward began: namely, that NASA has been under-funded for decades. But, so what? There’s Europe. There’s China. We’re only talking about $300 million here. Doesn’t anyone want to give this a shot? Furthermore, the early 00’s were not in fact an epoch of relative austerity for American space probes. Rather, the political landscape which necessitated the formulation of Faster, Better, Cheaper - and which starved the Shuttle program into retirement, and ruled out any similarly-expensive replacement - was a boon to the probe format, just as the sundowning of Apollo was followed by a broad surge of unmanned American probes in the 70s. Above, we “zoomed out” to discover what made the failure of Genesis possible: Namely, the fact that failure was acceptable. Zooming out to why the attempt of Genesis was possible in 2001, but not afterward, leads to a paradoxical observation: Genesis was possible in 2001 because failure was acceptable. This insight serves as a consistent account for why China (which recently made history by with Queqiao, the first satellite to take up residence in L2, and has no real limits on its space budget) has made no effort to outshine the failure of Genesis, as well as why the American James Webb telescope mission has ground to a halt out of fear of failure: both super-powers are presently politically allergic to the funding of superfluous failure.

And that is a shame. Although America still pays its way in pain for the naive belief that indulging in possible failure will not result, always, in the realization of actual failure, we simultaneously deprive ourselves of the possible gains of daring to incur the cost of any mere pinch of pain - lest we suffer a political price for doing so.

Beheld from today, the America of the botched Genesis SRC delivery is nothing more than a fossil. Its weathered frame describes the same America observable in the adoring 2002 review of Jackass: The Movie by Roger Ebert. It was the America willing to press its tongue against a frozen metal poll, just to see how much agony would afterward be captured on camera; and willing to expend any amount of cultural capital to praise the resulting footage. It is not the America of today.

No wonder that four inverted g-sensors are all it takes to prevent the richest country in the world from trying to catch solar wind samples with a helicopter twice.

1. GENESIS Mishap Investigation Report, “Genesis Dictionary,” p. 72. (Apparently, the sentence’s budget for letters was expended before the fourth Discovery mission could be listed.)

2. ibid., p. 3.

3. ibid., p. 32.

4. (index link anchor)