If you know anyone who's been involved in building a spacecraft, I'm sure you've heard the mantra, 'Test what you fly, and fly what you test.' Listen to a project manager from my institution (The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, a.k.a. APL) talking in his or her sleep, and this is likely what you're going to hear. At APL, we do a lot of testing. We probably do more testing in the initial stages of a project than we could explain to review boards. Perhaps we are conservative in this respect, but our project managers and engineers believe in getting a good night's sleep before a launch, and testing is a good way of ensuring that. So you can imagine my reaction when the NASA project manager, Don Margolies, suggested that on the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) mission we pull all the instruments off the spacecraft after we had just completed the full range of environmental testing. This would allow the scientists to do a better job of calibrating their instruments.
Customer Responsiveness
ASK Magazine ; 9
2002-10-01
Miscellaneous
No indication
English
Foresight Vehicle Project: increased customer responsiveness through late product configuration
Automotive engineering | 2002
|Foresight Vehicle Project: Increased Customer Responsiveness through Late Product Configuration
SAE Technical Papers | 2002
|British Library Conference Proceedings | 2002
|Responsiveness Through Adaptive Avionics
AIAA | 2004
|The Upper Stage Responsiveness Study
AIAA | 1990
|