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Small missions are by their nature more susceptible to forces beyond the project’s control
and we had a lot of interesting experiences on GALEX.
I’ll give you just one example.
Our spacecraft supplier had selected the lowest cost radio equipment,
but we needed an X-band transmitter
and receivers for our spacecraft for our data volume.
And they had procured the X-band radio from a company in England
and they were 90 percent completed with the radio,
all that was remaining was the staking and tuning of the radio,
which, for you RF guys, you know is a very unique,
design-specific thing to be done to by the designer,
when we got a phone call saying that the company was declaring bankruptcy.
In England, they don’t have a Chapter 11.
Basically, they said if you want your radio you need to come with a final payment and come pick it up from us.
So we dispatched our spacecraft manager to England and made a payment,
took possession of the radio and the state that it was in and brought it back to the United States.
We then discovered that it was really not possible to tune and stake the transmitter
without the designer who had designed the radio.
So we located the designer, who had then moved to another location.
Then we discovered that we couldn’t ship the radio back to have it
finished because the export license we had was with the company that went bankrupt.
So there wasn’t any way to send it to England to finish it.
So we thought, the next best thing was we will bring the engineer to America,
sit him at a lab bench, and give him a few technicians and let him finish the radio.
We located this individual,
but then we discovered that he was a dual citizen U.K. and Iranian.
(Laughter)
And the company, the spacecraft supplier,
was so concerned about the potential to be fined by the State Department
for ITAR violations
that when the engineer showed up, basically he was let into an empty building in a lab
with a soldering iron and told to finish the radio as best they could without providing him any technical assistance.
After looking at the work that was done we discovered that the workmanship was such that the radio had become a doorstop.
So now we were very close to having to be finished,
dumpster diving, looking for an X-band radio,
which one night we cannibalized out of another spacecraft,
but we discovered that the spectrum is divided between Earth science missions
that radiate in one range and astrophysics missions that radiate in a different range.
We were an astrophysics mission, but we had stolen the radio out of and—I’m sorry, we had cannibalized the radio
from an Earth science mission.
So we had to go to the NTIA to get different licenses,
and of course the radio had a different demodulation scheme,
so we had to buy different demodulators for the ground stations so that there were just ripple effects
that that wound up costing an awful lot of money to repair and,
of course, it was not really anything we could have anticipated.
So things can happen to you and they will happen to you that are outside of your control.