They said after the first leak that it wasn’t an issue since they calculated that it would take 4 leaks of that size to disable the thruster system. Now they have 3.
I hope we didn’t assume the odds of each leak was an independent event. Same failure mode and maybe we have uncovered something systemic! Kind of scary
Since the cause of the first leak was a defective rubber seal, it would have made sense to replace all of them. I’m pretty sure they didn’t use different types of seals on each thruster port. But for that, they would have had to disassemble the spacecraft and that would have taken too long for the available launch windows.
They said after the first leak that it wasn’t an issue since they calculated that it would take 4 leaks of that size to disable the thruster system. Now they have 3.
I hope we didn’t assume the odds of each leak was an independent event. Same failure mode and maybe we have uncovered something systemic! Kind of scary
Since the cause of the first leak was a defective rubber seal, it would have made sense to replace all of them. I’m pretty sure they didn’t use different types of seals on each thruster port. But for that, they would have had to disassemble the spacecraft and that would have taken too long for the available launch windows.
It’s a good thing rubber seals have never caused any problems in spaceflight