The Devastating Dilemma of Valves for Spacecraft Engineers
Valves play a critical role in the spacecraft’s architecture, regulating the flow of pressurents like helium and propellants.
“There’s a thousand different ways you can make a valve unhappy,” said Jake Teufert, CTO of Benchmark Space Systems, a Vermont-based startup developing propulsion systems for spacecraft.
Valves must also have ultra-low leakage requirements; Teufert said that some valves have allowable leakage rates equivalent to leaking only one gram of helium over the course of 200 years.
Engineers run spacecraft through a host of tests on the ground, but the flight environment can only be matched to an extent, Teufert explained.
But adding two valves (or any additional subcomponents) can create whole new failure modes that you would never have with one valve.
