Attitude Control

The 37-Second Failure | The Software That Flew on the Wrong Rocket

On June 4th, 1996, the Ariane 5 launched for the first time. 37 seconds later, ten years of development, seven billion dollars, and four scientific satellites were gone. Every system on board performed exactly as designed. Every sensor read correctly. Every safety system fired on cue. The cause wasn't a hardware failure or a programming mistake — it was a perfectly reasonable engineering decision, inherited from a rocket that had been flying flawlessly for a decade. This episode traces the cascade from one unquestioned assumption to total loss, and asks: when is "it worked before" not good enough? Topics: software reuse, heritage code, inertial reference systems, integer overflow, redundancy design, the ESA inquiry board, systems engineering, launch vehicle safety.

Flying Blind | How Apollo 13's Guidance System Brought Three Men Home

Everyone knows the Apollo 13 story. The explosion. The duct tape. "Houston, we've had a problem." But almost nobody talks about the part that actually saved the crew: the guidance system. This episode tells Apollo 13 from the GNC perspective — the instruments, the physics, and the people who navigated a crippled spacecraft home. From gimbal lock to the Earth's terminator, from a hand-calculated platform transfer to a 14-second burn where Jim Lovell steered by the shape of a crescent Earth while Jack Swigert timed with his wristwatch. Topics: inertial measurement units, gimbal lock, sextants vs. optical telescopes, the PGNCS and AGS computers, Earth terminator navigation, manual attitude control, cold-restart of a dead IMU.

The First 107 Seconds | What Happens When a Rocket Leaves the Ground

When the VEGA rocket's P80 solid booster ignites, you can't throttle it, you can't shut it down, and you can't restart it. For 107 seconds, the only steering is a nozzle that tilts five degrees. That's the gravity turn — the most critical phase of any launch. In this episode, Gaetano explains the physics of the gravity turn and shares his experience as GNC Flight Safety engineer at AVIO, where he ran thousands of Monte Carlo simulations of everything that could go wrong during a VEGA launch — and computed where the debris would fall if it did. Topics: gravity turn, solid vs. liquid propulsion, thrust vector control, Monte Carlo simulations, flight safety, VEGA launcher, CNES range safety.

The Satellite That Refused to Die | Kepler's Reaction Wheel Failure

In 2012, the Kepler Space Telescope lost a reaction wheel. A year later, a second one failed. NASA said the mission was over. But one engineer had a wild idea: what if you could use sunlight itself as an attitude control tool? This episode tells the story of how Kepler's team turned photon pressure on the solar panels into a virtual reaction wheel — and how a "dead" telescope went on to discover thousands more exoplanets as the K2 mission. Topics: reaction wheels, solar radiation pressure, pointing precision, exoplanet transit detection, the K2 recovery. Host: Gaetano Livornese — GNC engineer.

Trailer

The engineering, the failures, the hacks, and the brilliant humans behind every mission that's ever left this planet. Attitude Control is a podcast about how spacecraft know which way they're pointing — and what happens when they don't. Hosted by Gaetano Livornese, a GNC engineer who's worked on launch vehicles and satellites across Europe. New episodes weekly. Find Gaetano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaetanolivornese/