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Space Station Suffers Power Glitch

Posted by Hemos on from the bad-times-in-space dept.

TheSexican writes "As if the MRO's vision problems weren't enough, it seems that NASA has another problem on their hands as of late. " The problem itself has been solved; one of the solar power array went off line, and had to be repaired, but is back up and working.

4 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. What's that thing for? by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hey, are we acually doing anything in that space station, except fixing it?

    1. Re:What's that thing for? by beh · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Even continuing to fix it IS useful - if only to teach future space missions what kind of problems evolve over time. (i.e. for a lot of things you might be able to do a "quick and dirty" hack, if all you need it for is a day or two... For a space ship to be in space for months or even years, we do need to know more about the actual degradation of materials in the conditions out there...

      But - even with the regular repairs, I would still think they're doing SOME research - even if that might not be quite is visible in the headlines as "read all about the latest power outage!"...

    2. Re:What's that thing for? by pimpimpim · · Score: 2, Interesting
      And 12 billion $ of that money, in actual paper bills weighing 360 tons was completely lost in the distant land you implied. Propably just burning these bills would give enough power to launch a sattelite.

      P.s. The article linked to here is the first I found and seems pretty biased, please find a better source for yourself.

      --
      molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
  2. Re:It's not done yet by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Now that it is so common place people are use to watching Star Trek people in space and wonder why the hell the space station is so difficult.

    Hey, it took them five tries to get the Babylon project working!

    Seriously, though, you have a good point. Is it possible for a society to become so successful that its members lose the ability to do hard things?

    I always figured Iraq would be a mess for seven years because that's how long it took to get things straightened out in Germany and Japan after WWII. But now the politicos are calling for a "Run Away!" strategy after four, and have been for two. I'm not a hawk, per se, but live isn't TiVo'ed.

    --
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