The actuator breaking wasn't as concerning after seeing the design.
It reminded me of a collaboration I had with a small Swiss company that did wonders with electro-discharge machining such as this flexure-based mechanism machined from a single block of aluminium: https://i.imgur.com/PDAVDmJ.jpg
Hmm, can you elaborate on that? What is the strong lesson for software people specifically?
Don’t get me wrong it is a beautiful design, and I’m a big fan of flexure designes in general. There is this amazing open source project which uses similar flexure mechanisms for very accurate positioning of microscope samples: https://openflexure.org/
But I fail to see any obvious takeaways which would generalise to software development. Other than perhaps “Think and work on the same problem for a decade and more and you might find a compact and elegant solution.” Which is nice, when one has that luxury.
The thing about any problem, is that "the devil is in the details." It may seem simple, from a high level, but, once we start to "drill down" into the issue, the "rough edges" appear.
At that point, we start to break out the baling wire and bubblegum, to kludge our original "graceful" design to meet the facts on the ground.
It doesn't just happen for software. Hardware suffers from the same issue, but software makes it easy to start coding before modeling the requirements and context completely.
I actually leverage this, in my own work. I call it "Evolutionary Design"[0]. It's not for the faint of heart, because a big part of it is recognizing when I'm rabbitholing, and tossing out what may be weeks of code, wholesale. I'm actually going through that process right now, with the app I'm developing. I'm working on the final feature set.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/evolutionary-design-...
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
-- H. L. Mencken
“When the map and the terrain disagree; believe the terrain.”
-- Swiss Army Maxim
I think the actuator is an equivalent of a very clever Perl one liner.
Unrelated: reaction wheel assemblies (used for attitude control) typically would have one extra wheel as a "spare." Redundancy is important enough on spacecraft you expect it wherever it is practicable. I used to work in aerospace - spent enough time coding spacecraft simulation tools that I had to develop at least a working familiarity with how some of the common satellite bus systems are supposed to work :)