Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
Ken, Ken!
>In Metastability and Synchronizers: A Tutorial, there's a story of a spacecraft power supply being destroyed by metastability. Supposedly, metastability caused the logic to turn on too many units, overloading and destroying the power supply. I suspect that this is a fictional cautionary tale, rather than an actual incident.
You have said enough to identify the logic, years and the satellites involved. It likely involved the MOTOROLA encapsulated logic gates you have scanned before, and the satellited had been named "spacecraft" for its maneuverability and special abilities. But ho-boy, had it been the most launched mission by far, with so many failures before they got to anything resembling a successful mission! It makes a worthy reading, if you know HOW to read between the lines and connect the dots. Because even at this day, some people involved as station operators had not connected the dots themselves, or at least you could assume that, reading what they write online. (assumed either of which is true)
Either way, find the early satellite history, you will find a movie. It's script had undergone a security review before filming and publishing, so that it is not all accurate, but good enough. It shows the FRUSTRATION the people involved had to endure... but now you had brought it up... what if the unreliability of many of the rocket types had been caused by defective logic design, that involved "undefined" and "metastable" logic states allowed by careless design?
Aug 24, 2025, 12:09:22 PM
Posted to Here be dragons: Preventing static damage, latchup, and metastability in the 386