Wow this gives me flashbacks. I interned there one summer, working on a project that was in absolute crunch mode with no budget left for the fiscal year.<p>I and some other interns got press-ganged into helping assemble a prototype device ahead of a visit from some higher-ups at (I think) JSC, and I ended doing a lot of soldering - something I had only a little experience with before that summer. As I was learning, I spent a lot of time with one of the electrical engineers scrutinizing my practice pieces under microscope for tiny scratches in the conductor and little burn marks. I also distinctly remember burning my fingers over and over using the thermal wire-stripper, since it tended to made the conductor extremely hot.<p>I ultimately ended up having very little confidence in my workmanship, and when I found out that the thing we were working on might end up flying on the ISS, I became terrified that I would read about a fire on the station someday and not know if it was because of something I had messed up. That was also the summer I got my first gray hair.
This goes well with <a href="https://llis.nasa.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://llis.nasa.gov/</a><p>"The NASA Lessons Learned system provides access to official, reviewed lessons learned from NASA programs and projects. These lessons have been made available to the public by the NASA Office of the Chief Engineer and the NASA Engineering Network. Each lesson describes the original driving event and provides recommendations that feed into NASA’s continual improvement via training, best practices, policies, and procedures."
TIL that most of my electronics work is well represented in the "bad" sections of the NASA manual. Then again, I'm not launching it to Mars, so it's OK.
Interesting, thanks for sharing! It would be even nicer with some kind of table of contents: named chapters and the like, especially in the PDF structure so that PDF viewers can show and provide direct access.<p>How did you create this compilation?<p>Also, pages seem out of order, with blank pages, but I guess that's to print that to leaflets?
If anyone is interested, the IPC J standard is often followed for flight hardware. Advantage being you can get a certification in this standard.<p><a href="https://www.ipc.org/ContentPage.aspx?pageid=J-STD-001" rel="nofollow">https://www.ipc.org/ContentPage.aspx?pageid=J-STD-001</a>
Not to sound too harsh, but ~ 300 MB seems a bit too much. Maybe you forgot to enable image compression.<p>I did some poking around and discovered that the problem is that all those drawings are incredibly detailed vector art. The "proper solution" is to open each page with Inkscape and convert those vector art drawings into regular bitmap images, probably encoded in JPEG to save space.<p>Alternatively, you can get a reasonable quality DJVU file for under 50 MB with:<p>pdf2djvu --dpi=900 --verbatim-metadata -j4 "NASA Workmanship Standards.pdf" -o "NASA Workmanship Standards.djvu"
Having worked on SMT stuff years ago, I (kinda) fondly remember the specs of what's acceptable/unacceptable in this guide (starting around page 125).