CHANDAN KHANNA/Getty Images
- Space company Astrobotic's lunar lander won't reach the moon after a fuel leak.
- Two former SpaceX employees explained how to prevent and troubleshoot anomalies during missions.
- Most space companies don't operate like SpaceX does, they said, which can lead to mistakes.
Astrobotic's lunar lander Peregrine won't make it to the moon following a fuel leak. The NASA-backed mission was meant to be the first time a private company's spacecraft landed on the moon.
Astrobotic, which built Peregrine, theorized that a valve connecting two tanks failed. Pressurized helium leaked into an oxidizer tank, which burst. Though it won't reach the moon, the lander continues to collect data while it still has power.
This is far from the first time a private space company has experienced an anomaly.
Two former SpaceX engineers told Business Insider that space companies that invest heavily in testing and robust software processes tend to be successful and learn from their failures.
Karthik Gollapudi is a cofounder of Sift, a startup that helps space companies analyze their data and automate tasks, and Jason Hunter is its lead mission manager.
While Gollapudi and Hunter don't know how Astrobotic tests its vehicles, Gollapudi said the reason he started Sift was because of issues he saw across the space industry.
Companies would build and test the propulsion, solar array, and other systems separately, then test them all together when the vehicle was fully assembled. "And sometimes you run into mistakes doing that," he said.
At SpaceX, "the culture was, you need to integrate these things all together as soon as possible," Gollapudi said. Then the engineers would run hundreds of tests.
"What we're doing at Sift is making it so the whole data review is automated into rules that are running all the time," Gollapudi said. Otherwise, he said, companies tend to leave long gaps between tests because the review process is so lengthy.
"If you don't test, you're introducing risk to your system," Gollapudi said.
Business Insider reached out to Astrobotic for comment, but the company said it is not providing additional statements at this time.
Prepping for lunar launch
To prepare for a mission, Hunter said he would expect a company to run simulations of every device, create a hybrid setup with real and simulated hardware, and then make sure that the simulations and hardware tests matched up.
SpaceX engineers would also simulate different types of failures to see how the whole system reacted, he said.
"Without a comprehensive suite of tests, it is hard to determine how all the subsystems are interacting with each other," Hunter said.
Even after launch, Hunter said Sift could help companies quickly pinpoint issues. "If something happens, you should get multiple alerts at the same time" from all the systems that are affected, he said.
Astrobotic
That way, "the operators don't have to go looking" for the root cause of an anomaly, Gollapudi said.
With Astrobotic set to deliver NASA's VIPER rover to the moon later this year, it will need to show that it addressed not just the valve problem but "the issue that caused the issue," Gollapudi said.
Following Peregrine's mishap, NASA announced it's delaying its own moon missions until at least 2026.
"Space is hard," Gollapudi said.
NASA's and Boeing's 2019 Starliner mission, which had software glitches, made him want to start his own company. An independent commission released 80 recommendations for improvements. "That was actually the motivation for building Sift," he said.
Astrobotic's current setback could actually help the company prepare for its next launch, Gollapudi said.
"I think it tends to be a learning moment of how do you recover from that mistake and upgrade your processes so that you don't have something like it again," he said.