30 Apr
2015
30 Apr
'15
7:22 a.m.
On Apr 30, 2015, at 5:51 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at update.uu.se> wrote:
It would have been very stupid to just have keyed
connectors and then assume that things could never be plugged in wrong.
That is *true*. We carefully keyed connectors on a mission I worked on. The technicians
at our Spacecraft vendor, who make a living making sure the right connector goes the right
way in the right socket, worked hard enough to defeat the keying preventing them from
plugging the spacecraft cable into the payload socket.(In their defense, it was about 0600
Sunday morning, but still.) We had several days of work in front of us trying to prove
(analysis and test) that nothing got shorted in a damaging way.
Johnny?s comment was as true when we got overruled on using different size connectors as
it is now. I feel for Ethan in a very very sympathetic way.
- Mark