Qualification clinic: your first thermal-vacuum campaign

Most small payload teams write their first thermal-vacuum procedure from a blank page, at the point of maximum schedule pressure, having discovered that the chamber they need is booked until spring. This clinic exists to prevent that particular sequence of events.

The morning covers the procedure itself: pass criteria, instrumentation placement, abort conditions, and the named individual authorised to stop a test. Teams find this laborious to prepare and are grateful for it at two in the morning when a thermocouple reads something unexpected.

The afternoon is a working session. Bring your draft procedure, your thermal model predictions and your instrumentation plan, and experienced test conductors will go through them with you. Teams that do this typically leave with a shorter campaign and a longer list of things to check.

There is also a frank session on booking behaviour, which is the commonest cause of a lost quarter in small-satellite programmes and has nothing whatever to do with engineering.