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Shuttle Discovery Lifts Off
An anonymous reader writes "CNN is reporting that the Space Shuttle Discovery has lifted off, marking the United States' returned to manned space flight for the first time since the Columbia disaster in February 2003"
That's why you watch CNN and Miles O'Brien if you need a commentator. The guy is an enthusiast, and his excitement comes across the screen quite well.
Watching the shuttle seperate from the fuel tank was amazing, and you could tell he was just as excited about the new video feed from NASA as I, or any self respecting nerd, was.
The missing link: Spaceflight Now's Mission Status Center (text version).
... spent four months living aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1998." So he's got experience patching up balky tin cans in space...
Darned Dallas newspaper printed the 10:39 time as though it were local, so I missed it. The Mission Status Center is the next best thing. Interesting tidbit: "Mission specialist No. 3 Andy Thomas
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Miles O'Brien's Launch Blog
Shuttle Details
Return to Flight
do.what.promptcmds
That's why I watched it on the Science Channel. No political commentary (not that I even know if the other networks offered any or not). Nothing but coverage from the scientific aspect of it. They had current and former NASA guys offering commentary.
I gotta say that it was the best coverage of a launch I have ever seen, even better than NASA TV's coverage!
bash: rtfm: command not found
it was a former nasa crewmember, commenting on his thoughts during one of his own launches
...and that's all there is to it.
Eileen Collins, James Kelly, Charles Camarda, Wendy Lawrence, Soichi Noguchi, Steve Robinson, and Andrew Thomas.
Good luck and come back safe.
Yeah, the liquid fuel tank camera view was incredible. I hope that I can find the clip of the shuttle executing its roll with earth in the background.
From the Mission Briefing
As much as I wish they were putting money into something other than the ISS, it's fantastic to see that the shuttle is fully operational again.fsh
From Spaceflight Now:
1512 GMT (11:12 a.m. EDT)
T+plus 33 minutes. A few seconds after solid rocket booster separation, a large chunk of something broke free from the external fuel tank. The onboard video camera mounted on the tank showed the object flying away from the vehicle without striking Discovery.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Perhaps, Tokyo should consider using Japan's arsensal high-performance computers to advance the state of the art in fighter aircraft and space vehicles. Designing these devices requires intensive numerical simulations which are ideally suited to such high-performance computers, which have been relegated to more mundane tasks like terrestrial simulations (e.g. weather simulation). Building the precursor to a starship seems to be a tad more interesting than terrestrial simulations.
or if that money would be better spent in not going to space for the next 5 to 10 years
That was the original rationale for the space shuttle program. There was a 7 year flight hiatus. What good did it do? We really need a more incremental program. This is something we should learn from the Russians. The new NASA administrator is behind the idea. I think you will see a new Crew Exploration Vehicle launched by a shuttle-derived booster, sooner rather than later.
an ill wind that blows no good
There are always vultures there. I went on a tour of the facilities a while back and there were vultures all over the place especially flying around the VAB. I asked some employees there about this and they say the vultures get great thermals there because of the huge building.
Fuel SENSOR, not valve. One of 4 redundant units, which only come into play when a few systems above them, which are duplicated for redundancy, fail. For this particular system to botch, the three other sensors would also have had to fail.
After draining the tank, NASA could not reproduce the failure. Wiring was tested/replaced/etc, no failures.
The decision was to test multiple times before the launch, including one last test at 9 minutes before. The only conditions that would allow launch to continue, the sensor works, or fails in the exact same mannor as before. Any other behavior patterns would have halted the launch. Had it failed the same way, the behavior would have been predictable, and the systems setup to ignore the faulty sensor and rely on three other duplicates.
SpaceflightNow reporting
- An image from the external tank video shows the chunk of debris breaking away from the tank just after the solid boosters separated.
See the image here
- Sh!t
From NASA's web site:
t ures/BO_index.html
"When the External Tank is empty, it separates from the Orbiter, too. It breaks apart, and its pieces fall in the ocean."
URL: http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/k-4/fea
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