Author's Story - Satellite

Remember how I mentioned I was working on a satellite launch etc etc?

At around 6 am on launch day I was in office, getting all the  groundstations ready and what not for our very first pass. We've done  everything we could to work our asses off to fix it, and cover every  damn edge case. Even went to the launch site itself to manually put the  satellite into the rocket with our hands - battery levels, deployment  test, shock test, vibration test, the works. two weeks code review of  every damn single line of code, four pair of eyes going and checking  three times over. Flowcharts, powerpoints, mechanical drawings to check.  We literally done everything to avoid failure.

And then it failed. The first pass -  nothing

Zilch.

Nada.

"Eh, it was just one orbit, maybe we were slightly off with the  pointing. Let's recalculate the TLE and compare orbital parameters. We  got a shot every one and a half hours anyway."

Second Pass: Nothing.

Third pass: Nothing

Fourth Pass: Nothing

A meeting was held. "What the fuck is going on? We covered every edge  case!" Called up everybody we knew to try to get some help. Ground  stations all over the world to try and ping it.

There was a sinking feeling in our hearts - my heart. I knew if we  didn't get the satellite, I would be an unwilling full-time author. We  had put too much money and manpower hours into it for it to fail.

Cubesats fail all the time (check stats) but you always get this subconscious idea that it wont happen to you.

Now it's happening.

Fifth Pass: Nothing

Sixth Pass: Nothing

Seventh Pass: Nothing.

At this point, we were in shambles. Every pass with no signal was like a hammered nail, nonstop.

Nobody talked in the server room.

Nobody talked during the meal.

It was silence.

I didn't even feel the need to crack a joke - it was like  'life-and-death' there and there. Millions of dollars and career at  stake. Can I say I was a good satellite engineer if my main project  flopped so badly after two years of working on it?

Eight Pass: Nothing

If we didn't find the satellite today, it would be increasingly worrying.

The solar panels might not have been deployed

The satellite might have been hit by a natural meteorite.

The satellite might not even be fucking turned on due to an edge case we missed.

Could the satellite's power budget survive if we didn't deploy the  solar panels properly? Everyone was running math checks, calculating the  pointing in a loop.

Over

and

Over

What do I do? I can't go up to the satellite and fix it from the  ground. All I can do is keep trying everything I can on the ground  station with the doppler shift compensation, and keep working.

Ninth Pass: Nothing

Life isn't like a progression fantasy. I wish I was Kyle sometimes, almost nearly guaranteed success.

But when you launch something into space, you only get one shot.

One chance.

There's no rewind, no 'pull the fiction down, edit the chapter, fix  this grammar mistake.' Every inch of your ability is put to the test in  one final no re-do test. Unless I'm rich. (I'm not)

At this point, I'm already telling the discord (BM's discord that  shit is going down) I can barely think straight. I could only sit and  wait.

1 hour and a half

90 minutes of terror in loop

Tenth Pass: We got it.

First contact.

We found the satellite. And it was working perfect. Got it on the eleventh pass as well.

I nearly cried (I cried).

God damn it. Fuck.

I had a career goal of making a satellite. A very short-term goal, yes. Sounds damn achievable.

But after all the shit I just went through - it was probably the  hardest project I've done so far (apart from avoiding 0.5 stars on Black  Market - Difficulty: Impossible)

I'm... going to take a break. Gonna go on a family trip soon for a  few days. Five or four days. I'll be driving nearly non-stop then, so I  can't write for both Patreon or Royal Road. Should be sometime between 8th August and 14th August 2023. I'll try my damn hardest to get the edit pass done, but this entire shit took up most of my focus.

If you read the full story, thanks for reading. It was a pretty  harrowing day for me - where it was like the 'Decision Point' : between  full-time author and satellite engineer.