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Shuttle Delayed Due to Cloudy Skies
PunkOfLinux writes "The shuttle won't be coming down until Tuesday, due to a decision by NASA that the weather was not good enough for re-entry. After the first two attempts, at around 4:45 and 6:25 this morning, NASA called off today's landing."
If you were going to be in an unpowered descent through a vertical distance of around 250 miles (not to mention the horizontal distance), you'd be a little concerned, too.
Here in nearby Daytona Beach, we've been having near-daily thunderstorms. The clouds caused the abort of the landing because, once you do your deorbit burn, Houston can't say "Oh, wait, it's raining now, better turn around and go back into orbit."
I expect dopey headlines from the traditional media, but Slashdot should do better. Announcing "Shuttle Delayed Due to Cloudy Skies" is like saying "Airliner Crash Due to Ticket Sales." The headline incorrectly gives the impression that the weather problem is not significant. Cloudy skies are not the issue -- the shuttle lands with cloudy skies all the time. The issue is unstable weather with low ceilings (as low as 500 feet). This is a much more serious condition, as any pilot can confirm. For the shuttle these are marginal conditions. They require conducting the landing under instrument flight rules, with the possibiity of losing visibility just before touchdown. At the shuttle's high speeds, this is much more serious than for commercial aviation. Attributing the delay to timidity, a publicity stunt, or wanting better photographic conditions is just stupid.