Satellite Smithing

[Popeye the Sailor]

Lessee...so it's in CATR, it gets all it's happy performance tests done and if the RF weenies and the customer are happy, we take it down, and put the reflectors back on, and ready it for launch.

Then we put it in the sipping container-it's time for launch base.

This would be one of our shipping containers, going into an Antonov



That container was designed with that plane in mind. It had about an inch of clearance.

Those planes are huge. Check out the truck for a sense of scale.



They offered me some extra money to escort it on the cargo plane, so I took it. Notice the lack of windows? The view was less than ideal from inside.

I was heading to the cabin at the top.

Check out the luxury!

We were not allowed to use or sit at the tables:



The proletariat has no need for tables, comrade. Use glorious lap.

There were at least four seat covers on these seats. This made them lumpy, not cushioned.

[Popeye the Sailor]

It is amazing that plane stays in the air. It's a rough ride. The crew was content to ignore us. The cabin smelled of old cabbage and older Russians. They didn't care if we were standing, peeing, whatevering during flight, take off, or landing.

The ride was so rough I could not tell if we had taken off, were flying, or had landed.

The bathroom was interesting. Two toilets, facing each other. So close that when someone else joined you, you would have to interlace your legs. Cozy. Stainless. Cold. There was a back door to the rear fuselage in the bathroom. This is where the Russians went to smoke. I'm used to company in the bathroom but this was more than I cared for.

We went from San Fran to East coast Canada to refuel, and from there to Iceland. Iceland was a 12 hour layover for crew rest and for the passengers to explore.

The customs guy couldn't be found so they just....let us into the country. Remember that-it becomes important later.

We saw the many sights of Kerflavik, which is to say, not much.







Possibly the smallest hotel beds I had ever seen. The lights would not work without your room key put into a slot, I suppose to discourage energy waste. To those of us who didn't know this, figuring out the lights in the dark was interesting.

The people were very nice. While there, I saw a nice Ducati go rolling by with a very shapely rider in leathers. She pulled up next to another bike in a parking lot and both riders took their helmets off and shook out their hair. I was not expecting to see that-it was like out of a movie. A country full of attractive female sportbikers? I tried to quit, but no one would have any of it, and I was dragged back to the plane.

[Popeye the Sailor]

Next stop, hell.

[Popeye the Sailor]

Takeoff, land somewhere in Russia to fuel, take off, land in Kazahkstan.

Again, no customs people around. They just...let me in the country.


Check out the fancy hydraulics on this thing though! The nose opens:





It kneels:





Ramp deploys:



See the railcar in the back? It's going on that. The roads suck.







Meanwhile I need a make the beast with two backsing step to get into my pickup.

[Popeye the Sailor]

There are no pictures of the next steps, as I directed them and was indisposed.

Here is a video of what it normally looks like though-the nose is opened (as seen above), the ramp is built and secured, the satellite container is on skids and slid down the rails system that gets built on the ramp. Once clear of the plane, we pick it up with a crane and put it on a rail car, which then goes to the Baikonur Cosmodrome. In this video they use a truck, but we did not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=324&v=nskp7HIfvAk


After it and the other materials were packed away we took a terribly bumpy ride to the "hotel".

They called it a hotel. I think this was to make billing so much for it easier to the folks back home. This was a former soviet cold war barracks that had been "renovated".

Pictures are limited, due to camera restrictions. Let me share with you the epic scenery:

The Grande Entrance and sole bit of scenery anywhere in the entire country.



Hotel room with view-most of those buildings appeared empty. I did not check.





Lots of derelict bits. Lots of roving half wild dogs. Going for a jog? Say hi to the dogs-they'll chase you.

[Popeye the Sailor]

Ever been in or hear of those sensory deprivation chambers, kinda lets you be alone with your thoughts? I was in a country modeled on that. These look like the same pictures, but they aren't. This is everything we could see, all the time.







Just nothing out there. The company knew how boring it was and sent several cases of hard liquor and ten kegs of beer.



We ran out of beer.

[Popeye the Sailor]

Now, there was a nice big presentation of all the "amenities" at the "hotel" prior to leaving.

It was like some make the beast with two backsed up tourist movie where the brochure couldn't be further from reality.

We have a pool!

Yes. It was a pool. Once. It wouldn't hold water past half full. It might have held 3 people, tops. All of four feet deep. We decided not to try it.

Yes, there too, was a soccer field. Great if a giant dusty field with rebar sticking out randomly was your thing.

They *did* have a pool hall. It was locked up on the second floor of the VIP building. If you were lucky, they'd let you see it through the locked glass doors, but mostly they'd chase you off.

Things quickly devolved into drunkenly losing our money to the Pinkerton guards.

But hey-you're there to work-why so bored all the time?

It has to do with how one actually launches a satellite, which I'll go into next.

[Popeye the Sailor]

Random tidbits.

The hot water in the "hotel" was hot.
So was the cold water.

Wear shoes on the bottom floor of the hotel, because the scorpions do actually come in.

None of the stairs are the same height as the adjoining stairs. This was impossible for me to get used to. I did better navigating while drunk, which was possible for me to get used to.

They can't cook bacon there. Too salty to eat, which was a surprising first for me. I'm convinced they made one batch, and just took the cover off every morning. Similar to the plastic food they use in commercials.

I can't speak for the chickens, but those were the smallest yolks ever seen.

They had a white board upon which the daily meal was written. This was fine until we wandered in one day and were greeted with just the word "meat". Please consider the sheer lack of a common language here. We did not speak Russian ( okay fine, hey baby how much?), but that was no help. They (claimed) did not speak English, however security dictated no work talk in the unsecured areas.

Us: Meat?
Us: What kind of meat?
Russian: Good meat.
Us: half in pantomime like cow? moo? (shows horns)? Sheep? Baa?
Russian: It's good meat-eat eat.

This went on for a bit, given the local custom of eating well, whatever they managed to run over. Not even kidding.

Eventually we ironed out it was some combination of beef laid out, with chicken and lamb on it, then rolled up. They had no idea how to explain this, hence "meat".


It wasn't on my first trip, but on my last one where we went out to eat somewhere in the nearest town. I ordered the chicken and they fed me either a small dog, or a medium cat. I figured it out when I got to the third (and final) piece and realized it was just a ribcage. The jury is out on what it was, exactly.


The jury agrees it sucked though.

[Popeye the Sailor]

Satellite at the Cosmodrome.

We put it on the dolly and the electrical monkeys are making sure they can still talk to it.

Whatever it is they do.

That takes some days if all goes well. In the meantime my mechanical crew and I set up the *very* fancy scale and calibrate it using a certified set of weights. This mostly went well. I stopped operations and evacuated at one point because an unknown fluid was leaking into the fueling hall. We were assured it was just water, which is bad enough in the clean room fueling hall, but it was leaking out of one of the light fixtures. This actually turned into an argument.

So-the middle of the satellite is a big ole hollow cylinder-that there is the fuel tank. The rocket is set up to get a certain amount of expected weight up, and no more. One can theoretically make the satellite too heavy-we need to know it's weight, and it needs to be spot on.

Once we got the dry weight of the satellite, we left it on the scale, and let the propulsion guys do their thing. Their thing involved no one else being in the facility while they loaded the various highly toxic fuels into it. It all seemed a bit silly-those guys got suited up in protective suits. We got sent to the hotel.

The same hotel that would have been in the blast zone in case they screwed up. I'm comforted-you comforted? Here, have a beer.

Either way, it takes them roughly a week to fuel it-one of the things I found interesting was they calculated the amount of air displaced from the fuel tank (aka the central cylinder) and subtracted that weight. Like I said-having the weight spot on was vital, and the more fuel we could cram into the thing, the longer the service life would be. Satellite life spans are based on fuel-all the power is supplied from the solar arrays and the sun. The positioning is all the thrusters, which is reliant on the fuel.

[Popeye the Sailor]

So it's fueled, and ideally the mechanical team is sober.

There was also a party for electrical and RF upon the completion of their checks earlier. There was typically a fueling party, which did occur as well.

At some point during the fueling party I realized there was no celebration for the mechanical team yet, nor would there be at all. Being in a state of drunken belligerence I decided that I was not okay with this. As I am the amenable sort, I gathered the prop team and whoever would listen, and told them about a car I had restored over some years with my dad, and how nice it turned out, and how everything worked so well. I took that car down to the fueling station and the gas jockey filled it up and everyone watching told that pump jockey "nice job!". At this point they began to realize the parallel I was drawing and explaining that they were a bunch of glorified gas jockeys, and this was now the "Dave built a make the beast with two backsing satellite party". I suspect if beating me senseless would not have delayed the launch, I may have suffered for my mouthing off, but screw 'em-it's my bird.

Now the fun! Now we go to pick it up now, but instead of the 4,000 or so lbs it weighed when we put it on the scale, now it's around 12,000 lbs. I think that's about six kilos for our metric readers. For our German readers, it was really heavy. Sorry-I don't actually know any German.

So first time it's being picked up and being put under this amount of strain ever. Good thing now it's no longer just poisonous, but now it's explosive. Why am I sober?

So we pick it up, and we put it on the Russian supplied transporter.

The transporter was old. WWII vintage. Someone had modified some old troop truck, put a flatbed on it and a small satellite fixture. It looked solid enough, but if I climbed on it and gently bounced on the balls of my feet, the entire thing would vibrate violently. All. Of. It.

I wouldn't have trusted it to support a half yard of dry mulch. Let's put a bomb on it, drive it over to the other bomb, see what happens.

[Popeye the Sailor]

I have my best guy on the transporter-I had made him practice on it during the week-the controls were wonky. The steering was a toggle switch. I think it had pedals. I suggested we not use the brake pedal-we'll just go at .01 miles per hour and let it coast to a stop. It's more weight than that thing probably should have seen, and mounted as high up as was inadvisable.

So, we get to the room with the rocket, park the transporter, pick up the satellite. We put it on a special stand that gets launched with it, and a bunch of Swiss guys hook up a special band with more explosive charges in it that will let the satellite separate from everything else when the time comes.To complicate things, the other folks had requests in metric, and our equipment was in 'Merican.

At this point I'm trying to direct a procedure with three languages involved, two of which I don't know any words in. It was not smooth.

Years of engineering experience on all sides.

Gesticulating.

"Da?
"Da."

You'd think they'd try and plan for this, but you'd be wrong.

[Popeye the Sailor]

We're just hanging the satellite from the ceiling this whole time, watching the crane scale to make sure nothing goes amiss. When the Swiss were done what they were doing the next thing is to put it on the rocket base which is enclosed in this large gantry-the one that had minimal guards on it, and plenty of blood from some dude who fell off of it. True to form, the Russians couldn't be bothered to clean it up. This very much helped my dire fear of heights.

The gantry can be seen in this video at about the :16 second mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_YT0P3BSy4

See the huge metal ring at :30 seconds in? Right above the yellow bit-the parts below are rocket-that's where out satellite would sit.

So, we'd casually plop our bomb onto their bomb, making sure it was facing the right way, etc. The Russians would hook it up to their base, we'd disconnect our sling, and move it away.

Now, I don't...like heights at all. Turns out I needed to be all the way at the top of that gantry, and I had to move around a lot. Up down, round and round. I discovered a couple things while doing this. For starters, if I'm busy, I don't care that I'm up high. I was stressed and very much occupied-that whole operation/room/all the people in there answer to me during one of those moves. I was good at it too-no wasted effort-just very much getting it done with minimal fuss. I just wandered around like a high steel worker.

When the sling was removed and my operation was done, I no longer had anything to occupy me, and reality set in.


I crawled off that gantry.

All seven stories.

[Popeye the Sailor]

So, we're in the yellow gantry and we do our final checks, paperwork etc. Once we're happy, we need to encapsulate it in the faring.

So the entire mess gets tilted down like so:



All 12,000 lbs or so of bomb are still being held on to the rest of the fixture by glue.

And then one half of the faring is rolled up under it, and the other half is dropped on with a pair of linked cranes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvdoR-LclIQ

I was horrified at the craning process. They had a pair of cranes. They needed to move in sync as they're both connected to the same thing. How did the Russians solve this delicate process? One of the crane operators would watch the other crane operator and just....do what they did. Somehow, this worked.

It was traditional to sign the faring after this.

The powers that be frowned upon my putting a big arrow with "This End Up" on it.

No sense of humour there. 

[Popeye the Sailor]

Anyway, one the faring is on, it gets put on a railcar and brought to another room where it's mated with the Proton rocket.

Both pieces are on a set of integration dollies and are mated up. It is then brought to the transporter-erector, and then to the fueling station. Following that, its brought to the launch pad and erected. After that, ideally, the pointy end goes up.

I only ever got to see one launch, and it's because it happened while I as there for another satellite. We weren't typically allowed to stay on after it was in the faring because the job was done, and they didn't want to pay us for a week of not working. I cannot express how frustrating that mindset was after spending so much effort to put one together.

Next up, various launch base pictures:

Fueling hall:



Hooking the sling up to the spacecraft:



The scale we calibrated:



Satellite (in container (duh)) being put on railcar upon arrival:

[Popeye the Sailor]

Transporter:



This is the spacecraft going on to the adapter:



Not a lot of space to put the sling connections in-don't touch anything!



The adapter gets a blankie:



More transporter-that look top heavy to you?



Picked up the adapter, now to the gantry: