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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.
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
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.
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