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On June 17, 1998, the Hughes Global Services subsidiary of Hughes Space and Communications Co announced that its HGS-1 communications satellite had successfully arrived in near-perfect geosynchronous orbit. This fact wouldn't be noteworthy except for one thing: The HGS-1 achieved this orbit after it made two trips from Earth to the moon and back as part of a carefully planned strategy to redirect itself from an incorrect and unusable orbit.
Briefly, what happened was: When the satellite was launched on December 25, 1997, a malfunction of the Russian-built launcher put it into a highly elliptical orbit (Reference 1). After the insurance companies declared the satellite a total loss and paid the $200 million claim to owners, Hughes made an agreement with the insurance companies that if the company saved the HGS-1, Hughes would split the subsequent satellite-lease revenues with them. But such an agreement was much easier said than done, as the HGS-1 didn't have enough onboard fuel to correct the orbit.
That's when Hughes engineers and scientists looked to more creative, albeit riskier, strategies. The company used some precious fuel to take the satellite out of orbit, put the satellite into a highly elliptical orbit around the moon and Earth—thus adding momentum and providing a potential second try at a viable Earth-orbit injection—and had the satellite loop around this route twice. After some course corrections and the second pass behind the moon, Hughes again fired the satellite's motor to put the HSG-1 into an acceptable, nearly fixed position over the Pacific Ocean, where it drifts just a few degrees north and south of the equator every day.
What impressed me was the solution that Hughes devised given the severe constraints of the problem. Finding such solutions is the essence of creative engineering—working not with a blank sheet of paper to create an optimum result, but working within tight boundaries, often imposed by outside forces, to come up with an acceptable outcome.
Not all such rescues involve anything as dramatic as launching a satellite and flinging it around the moon. In a less dramatic situation, you may be putting your product into production when a key supplier suddenly goes out of business, thereby setting off a scramble for a way out of the crisis. One technique you can use is to hunt for an alternative supplier, but a more radical and riskier method might be to design a piggyback circuit that lets you use available parts in a unique and unexpected way.
Unfortunately, except for rare instances such as the flight of Apollo 13—which was forced to use the lunar- landing module as an astronaut lifeboat with an underpowered rocket motor after the main vehicle's oxygen tank exploded—this type of radical creativity doesn't get much attention in the media. It's too bad, because such problem-solving is what distinguishes engineering and applied science from many other professions and is what attracts the problem-solvers who implement advances despite hearing "It can't be done." Don't restrict yourself to just extrapolating from what you have in front of you to where you need to be—take the time to think through some new ideas and approaches as well.
You can reach Technical Editor Bill Schweber at 1-617-558-4484, fax 1-617-558-4470, or bill.schweber@cahners.com.
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