I thought I'd give my spin on the launch slip. First of all, I think it is a great tribute to the savvy nature of the people who read this thread that there wasn't wide spread panic. I think I read only one person who rose the valid concern that this could be a signal of something serious. I don't think it is. Here's why.
I have worked a lot of launch campaigns, and not one of them ever went off on time. (I have admitted on this thread in the past that I work in aerospace, but I do wish to remain anonymous.) There are a lot of pieces that need to come together at the same time, and I for one have never seen it happen on schedule. Some examples might be Lockheed-Martin's Intelsat 8 program, which I believe was almost two years late before the first in that series ever got off the ground. Iridium was about a year late when they finally got their first one up. SS/L's GOES program (inherited from the old Ford Aerospace) was something like5 years late (most industry insiders put most of the blame on the customer, NOAA & NASA for that one).
G*'s original launch date was August of 1997, and if it goes up in February, that will be all of six months. The fact that this slip was announced 4 weeks away from launch and slipped only 8 weeks tells me two things. The first is that they must be pretty darned close, because they were close enough to the end of the tunnel to see light, and yet they only asked for a 8 week slip. When you are that close, you generally know where your problems and weakness are, and to request only 8 weeks tells me that everything is under control. It would have been very easy to slip the launch for six months, and say something like that was the next available date that we could arrange with the launch vehicle.
Which leads me into the second thing that I got out of this slip. Mr. Schwartz must have a lot of pull with the launch people. It is not very easy to play musical chairs with launch dates. The fact that he did and got one so soon tells me that he must have friends in high places.
So will G* go in February? Probably, but not even Mr. Schwartz with his friends in high places can answer that with 100% certainty. One thing is for certain. A year from now, there will be satellites whizzing over our head, testing will be going on, and this little slip will be all but forgotten. With a new spacecraft, new ground station, and new tracking station all needing to come together at the same time, and only be six months behind schedule, to me, is a sign that everything is going OK. That may sound strange, or even cynical, to the uninitiated but it is the nature of this type of business. I personally see it as a good sign that the slip was only 8 weeks.
Mr. A |
