REXUS-BESPIN

Hey again,

I’m Cassidy Thompson, head of the mechanical team. By now I’m sure you’ve all heard, or at least read about, how we’ve had to change our project. Put simply, we have removed everything that happens after the parachute is deployed. Sounds like a simple change right, just delete everything after that? I wish that were true, believe me all of mechanical wishes that were true. We’ve basically had to start from scratch, and even simple things have to be changed because now all our calculations are done with the wrong mass. Load cases have to be redone, block diagrams, the flight sequence, just everything. And the mass budget, don’t get me started on the mass budget, it’s a pain every time we update. However, over the past few weeks that we’ve had to make changes, we’ve made quite a bit of progress. Which is impressive because while the mechanical team is full of hard working intelligent people, we aren’t known for being the most punctual. Don’t get me wrong, things will be done on time and done well, but chances are we’ll still be working on them right up to deadline. After we decided to descope I made a schedule of our new deadlines and we are actually sticking to it pretty well. We were even ahead of schedule on a few things.

Right now as a team, we are working towards finishing our next SED, and I am working on thermal load cases. If you don’t know what those are don’t worry neither did I at first. Basically it is just a table that lists all the events during the entire experiment, from shipping individual components to the landing, and the temperatures that will be experienced during each phase. This upcoming deadline for the SED just happens to fall into the period of time where a bunch of us need to be studying for exams, and even worse our new CDR is during exam week. This always seems to be the case with us, but then again there are always so many deadlines so some are bound to overlap.

 

Before I end this post I figured I’d give you a glimpse inside the mechanical team meetings. We aren’t even punctual with joining meetings so while we wait for the stragglers to join someone always starts singing. Why? I honestly have no clue, but others quickly join in. Once everyone who is available arrives, we spend a good chunk of time going over everything, asking questions, discussing options, and figuring out what still needs to be done. This is the productive time. During this time, Oskar occasionally graces us with his magnificent drawings. He’s the best drawer out of all of us and we always let him know. Honestly it’s a good thing we went into the space field because we’d never make it as artists. After being productive, we usually have a period of awkward silence where we’re all thinking we’re done but no one wants to actually say that, occasionally this includes intermittent singing while calculations are being done on the side, or a bit of joking around, which could include anything from memes to coming up with new names for BESPIN that while clever, I wouldn’t necessarily want on a t-shirt. 

 

This then leads to a few more relevant questions and short topics, some complaints about being hungry, setting a day for the next meeting, and me telling everyone to leave so I can keep what’s left of my sanity. Keep in mind this happens at least once a week. None of the other meetings I have to join are this exhausting, but they also aren’t nearly as entertaining so I guess I’ll stick with the mechanical crew.

Well that’s it from me. Cya next time,

Cassidy Thompson