Space Shuttle Atlantis Delayed Again

eldavojohn writes "An electrical short cause the space shuttle Atlantis to be delayed since a lightning strike to the pad and Tropical Storm Ernesto caused delays. From the article: 'Liftoff was only hours away Wednesday morning when engineers reported a short in one of three fuel cells that supplies electricity for all the on-board systems, including the crew compartment.' It also points out that 'The faulty cell is currently operational even with the short. But after the 2003 Columbia disaster, which killed all seven astronauts, NASA says it has adopted an aggressive, safety-conscious approach to launching.' It causes one to wonder whether pre-Columbia-disaster NASA would have just replaced the fuel cell on the fly without telling anyone — and whether or not that is an ethically sound choice."

Comments

Re:Lightning? Phht. I know the fix...

[zerocool^]

The poster of the above comment is a friend of mine, aside from being a pre-space shuttle space program junkie and also a big fan of apollo 12, and he explains the above post as this (over IM):

HIM: man, im a fucking dork.
ME: how's that?
HIM: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=196049 &cid=16065585
HIM: gotta read the story
HIM: problem is, no one at /. is gonna get it.
HIM: basically, like 90 seconds into the apollo 12 flight it was hit by lightning and the entire computer stopped working
HIM: the fix was a switch labled SCE, and to flip it to aux to basically power cycle the computer.
ME: heh
ME: you know your shit.
HIM: Apollo 12 is the shit.
HIM: its my specialty.
HIM: haha
HIM: im *that* guy on /. that has a absurd amount of knowedge about one small area of things that are discussed.
HIM: and its useless information.

I figured those of us who haven't spent weeks in the Air and Space museum, or read the audio transcripts from all available NASA flights, would want an explanation.

~Wx