The Silent Shortage
If you google the word ‘shortage’ these days and search for news, you’ll quickly see how topical it is. Shortage is a term that has—unfortunately—become quite trendy, largely triggered by the global glitch the COVID19 pandemics caused around the world, combined with the current geopolitical state of affairs. Supply shortages are noticeable and newsworthy as they affect the everyday life of millions in very tangible ways. While some shortages are a consequence of real lack of materials and supply chain misadjustments, some other are the result of pure artificial scarcity.
From the latter kind, one that has been on the rise lately is the shortage of good engineering specifications. This is, numbers and figures related to attributes and performance metrics of technical devices and products.
If you go to a brick manufacturer and ask how much a brick weighs, the manufacturer will most likely be able to tell you. This means, if you randomly picked a brick from a lot, the manufacturer would be capable of knowing that the randomly chosen brick’s mass would be between a range A and B, with some level of confidence, say, 95%.
Space industry, and more specifically that peculiar side of the space industry done by young, dynamic, small companies, is particularly prone to sprinkle specs sheets, brochures and datasheets with a dose of magical mystery coated with the typical amount of TBCs, TBDs, TB-whatevers. Since quite some years ago, spec sheets and brochures have become largely marketing pieces owned and issued by, well, marketing and sales departments and lacking the most basic cross-checks for consistency. A value or parameter can be X in one page, then be Y a few pages further. Which one is correct? As Segal’s law states: “A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”
Even more annoying, parameters as basic as power consumption and mass are put under tiny padlock icons along with an unfriendly “contact for info” or similar. Do I need to send an email to an actual human to know how much power your device consumes? How strategic is that information? Yes yes, customer engagement, yawn. Let alone getting pricing information: oh dear, that requires writing a letter to Queen Elizabeth II. Even during calls with suppliers’ sales folks you feel extremely uncomfortable bringing the pricing question up—same tension in the air as when you ask your auntie Genoveve her age on her birthday1.
As an old, tired designer evaluating alternatives for my preliminary design, I don’t want to make new friends and have to come across industrial amounts of small talk and meetings to get the specs. If your specs are good—and you demonstrate somehow they are not just marketing-grade vapor—your product should naturally stand out no? Is building artificial intrigue and delaying everything a strange mechanism of accepting your product is subpar? Take radiation specs, a classic: they are as obscure as can be. No methodology specified, no standards compliance, just some random kilorad number thrown out in the wild. Or—this is a great one—lifetime; another bastardized, manipulated figure which you should typically read more as a desire of the manufacturer than an actual objective measure of performance stemming from testing and qualification.
And I am not talking here about things under development. In such a case, it could be reasonably understood to be hesitant to convey figures—you’re developing, maybe your confidence levels are still low to be too outspoken about it, fine. But products flagged as fully released, with all almighty heritage, having flown in 150 NASA missions in and out of the solar system and beyond the galaxy, still follow this incredibly lax approach. Every time I come across this nonsense, I need to go back and read some datasheets from the 80s or the 90s from Atmel or Texas Instruments to soothe my mind and remember the days when you could read technical data you could trust. How many times have you doubted a figure while reading the datasheet of NAND gates?
Underlying all this is the impression that we seem to be living in a strange age where the line between prototypes and released products has blurred so much that we have become just beta testers of things pushed out too soon.
Today, doing conceptual and preliminary design has turned a bit into a heroic adventure. It doesn’t only require you to grow a thick skin and a critical eye to double check all figures and specs you come across, but it also requires making a lot of friends you are not very interested to make along the way.
I was just guessing at numbers and figures
Pulling the puzzles apart
At least in Argentina, this is a sort of taboo.