The art of remote control

The Command and Control Systems (SCC) play a central role in the smooth running of launch operations.  To guarantee year-round management of the Ariane Launch Complex’s auxiliary systems, the systems used and maintained by the consortium’s CCS (housekeeping command and control) team are deployed to manage, in one place, a fire-fighting alarm system, in another, a system for detecting toxic vapours, and in another the alert system which notifies on-call base employees to report to their stations in an emergency.  During a campaign, the teams in charge of the SCC are called on to provide technical support for all the key operations, to such an extent that two employees have to be expressly assigned to each new launch as campaign specialists, in order to coordinate all the actions for which the teams are responsible.

In practice, as soon as a campaign begins, the software configuration management (GCL) team, which is responsible for the integrity of all the SCC software, is mobilised to tailor the software configuration to the particular launch campaign, according to the users’ needs.  In fact, just as the software parameters of an office computer have to be set according to any equipment, printer or scanner that is connected to it, the command and control software has to be adapted to the actual configuration of the launcher (whether it has an EPS or ESC-A stage, for example) and launch facilities.  The SCC software is also updated regularly throughout the campaign to take into account the results of checks made on the launcher.

Once the software configuration has been adapted to the campaign’s hardware configuration, and once the checkout systems have been made operational by the System team so that they can control and monitor the different equipment connected to the launcher, all the pressure, temperature and voltage test operations are carried out in advance at the request of the Arianespace authority, in order to determine the status of the launcher and payloads at any given time.  All the values obtained during these tests are recorded continually, in particular by the team in charge of exploiting the data, before being transmitted for analysis to all the users in the Launch Complex.

Up to and including the last checks on the launch system that take place during the final countdown, every single launch preparation operation that requires equipment to be controlled remotely calls on the expertise of the SCC.  To give just two examples, while the upper cryogenic stage (ESC) is being filled with propellant, the teams responsible for fluids will be using the MEX SCC systems to activate the opening of the valves.