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NASA Investigates Possible Sabotage by Worker
mytrip writes "NASA said today it is investigating suspected sabotage of a recorder placed on the shuttle Endeavour for delivery to the space station where it will track physical stresses on the orbiting lab."
Someone tried to play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" but discovered that one of the holes was blocked.
On the X-Files. Maybe someone should call Mulder.
So does NASA hire all the nut-jobs who are too wacko to work for the post office?
Dr Smith works for a subcontractor now? That Jupiter2 gig must have finished.
space-station-destroying disgruntled-government-employee working-class overlords!!!
-WtC
*insert sig*
Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
TFA's a bit light on details but maybe someone just dropped a wrench on the thing. OTOH if it's cut wires or something like that's another story...
Accept Eris as your Fnord and personally sate her
Spies could be everywhere. You must report only to us, the communist party. We want to protect you from harm, so we must know everything. Even about your parents! So, what do you know, child? Oh, woops... Wrong country. Still could be spies though! Prepare for war!
Brilliant Journalism!
Two! Measly! Paragraphs!
=/
I know NASA might have been sketchy on the details, but I can't believe this has made its way to the front page with a few lines of text in the fine article. I know we never RTFA, but we don't have a bloody chance today! How can you get a meaningful discussion out of this?!
Ahhhhh.
Bye bye, karma.
Talk about a vague story, I bet half the comments on Slashdot in the last 24 hours have more to them than that story did.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
More info at BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6918490.stm "The discovery came as an independent health panel found astronauts had been allowed to fly after drinking alcohol." Is this a joke? So all this time 'The Right stuff' was in reference to a Johnny Walker?!?
FTA: The recorder, which does not play a role in protecting astronauts or the space station, was damaged by an unidentified person or persons and will be repaired. No word yet on suspects, but NASA investigators said it was "peppered pretty good."
I was flipping bits on an abacus, newb.
guyzz.... omg its liek soo obvious. duh, the lil thingy was trying to psychially track itself in liek a warmup test or sumthing. and it scrwed up. duh!
Here everybody, this one has much more info: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/26/nasa.computers.re ut/
My sig is permanently on strike.
The BBC has a much better article that goes into the incident in detail: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6918490.stm
The damage was done by a (currently) unidentified sub-contractor on a non-essential computer intended to collect and moniter data from sensors that detect the vibrations and forces on the space station's external trusses.
There have been several incidents at NASA that could only be caused by sabotage. None know to make it to the pad.
;)
Of course, why is this happening? Who would do it? At this point it just looks like a group that wants NASA to fail.
I blame Thomas Dolby.
can explain the problems. NASA is a dysfunctional bureaucracy that has killed dozens of our best and brightest people through carelessness, malfeasance, and incompetence. There is no proper oversight and when people screw up, they face zero consequences.
One the one hand, I've no doubt there is a need to take security very seriously there. On the other hand, if you look at how many astronauts have died from terrorists vs how many have died from bureaucracy and bad management, the score is 0 to a few dozen. And yet, none of those managers or bureaucrats or contractors ever underwent any consequences for the negligent deaths they caused.
At least in the private sector, the customers of your space ship flight can sue you if they die in a fireball because some dumbass was too eager to push the go stick or ignored the warnings of the low level engineers. But if it is NASA, you just get a weepy eyed president blabbering on and on, a handshake and a wreath of roses. Nobody gets fired. People just try to cover each others asses and save their jobs.
So he's still trying to do his thing. Wonder what happened to Isis?
Now all we need is a UFO sighting by a decorated pilot..
FTA:"It launched an investigation after finding cut wires in a piece of computer equipment intended to transfer data from station sensors to the ground, the agency said." If the equipment was built by an outside contractor and the cut was inside it, well, maybe it was the contractor's employee. If it was in house, cut wires would show up. I think the prelaunch diagnostics would have found it anyway.
In the weeks before the successful relaunch of the STS program with STS-26, we in the UK had news broadcasts about deliberate sabotage to the O-rings of a forthcoming space shuttle launch (not STS-26 and probably not 27). Despite a suspect declaring her innocence on TV, we heard nothing more about it. Maybe this will go the same way?
My web domain.
if by "tumbles" you mean "hit an all time high" then yeah. I'm crying all the way to the bank. cha-ching!!!!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
there is a subculture in NASA of pure antisocial losers hiding out as ubertechs at contractors. one flipped and cut a bunch of wires is how I see it.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Or follow the story here, complete with links to the source articles at Reuters, AP, etc.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Apparently the astronauts piggy-backed a of recording "My Lipgloss is poppin'" illegally.
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
And the conspiracy theorists are off! With Poperatzo in the lead!
seems to have missed the story that some nappy-wearers have been found out to be drunk in charge of thousands of tonnes of combustible materials...
It's management trying to cover their tracks.
Table-ized A.I.
It was just damaged, probably someone dropped it and put it back in hoping nobody would notice.
Happens all the time! Although you would hope people would be more willing to own up to that kind of thing for anything life threatening.
I guess they never talk about the guy that dropped the o-rings while they were putting them on the shuttle, huh...
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
James Bond!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Between the sabotage news, the drunk astronaut news, and the following, this is looking like a pretty bad day for spaceflight:
x plosion&btnG=Search+News
... According to KBAK-TV, the explosion took place at a Scaled Composites facility at the airport, but the TV station said they didn't know yet if any Scaled employees were among the casualties.
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&q=mojave+e
http://www.personalspaceflight.info/2007/07/26/
According to local media reports, there has been a fatal explosion at a rocket test stand at Mojave Airport, home to a number of entrepreneurial space companies. Two people were killed and four people were injured. The company involved hasn't been identified; according to an amalgam of the sketchy reports available so far, it involved a nitrous oxide "flash explosion" on a test stand.
I'll bet we'll never hear the follow-up, other than that they'll find a scapegoat and put them away. But not every cut wire in the world is sabotage ... for all we know someone just pruned out an unused section of a wiring harness, or something. So it would be nice to hear what the effects were supposed to be before we get too excited about those evil bastards trying to save a few grams of weight on an expensive space flight.
I'm more of a Lacey Chabert guy myself.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"the kids here probably only remember the 1998 version"
Worst. Film. Ever. The friggin series was bad enough.
Need Mercedes parts ?
NASA is a dysfunctional bureaucracy that has killed dozens of our best and brightest people through carelessness, malfeasance, and incompetence.
No, they've killed one and a half dozen astronauts through making mistakes, and if you use your head for something other than keeping your ears apart you'll realize that making mistakes is part of their mission. That's what exploration and research are all about. How the hell do you expect to learn anything new if you don't make mistakes? Did you learn to walk without skinning your knees? Did you learn to use the toilet without crapping in your pants once or twice? Does any complex program compile the first (or fifth) time through without error?
Or do you think using chemical bombs to accelerate people and tons of hardware to 4 or 5 miles per second up into a hard vacuum, with reusable craft, over and over again, with randomly shifting priorities set by a bunch of accountants and lawyers is a trivial task, the kind of thing any moron can get right the first time?
Apparently you haven't learned that the way to avoid any mistake is totally obvious in hindsight, but that, alas, this profound wisdom has yet to reduce the frequency with which human beings make mistakes. Go accomplish something new and remarkable in your life, count up the goofs you make along the way, and then come back with a little more wisdom and a little less clueless arrogance.
Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?
(two references for the price of one)
Were that I say, pancakes?
The same inspection also caught a failed AE-35 antenna control module, which was removed and replaced. The defective module was tested and found to be in perfect working order; NASA spokepeople point to human error as the cause of the problem.
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
Worst. Film. Ever. The friggin series was bad enough. I assume you're saying that only because you've successfully managed to wipe such gems as Highlander II and Battlefield Earth from your memory. I apologize for having undone that. But it was for your own good. Perspective is important... even if painful.
What are you doing, Dave?
What?
You are correct, sir. The perp's name is Mohammed Salah. No surprise here.
"Worst. Film. Ever. The friggin series was bad enough."
If Matrix Reloaded, Episode II/III, and Third Space hadn't come out since, I'd agree with you.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Highlander II, what a joke! After finally being forced to watch Highlander I, I immediately questioned the possible existence of any sequels. And not just because the first one wasn't particularly good.
Is this a rhetorical question?
There was no sequel to Highlander, because, as we all know, there can be only one!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"I don't understand it, that was non-alcoholic champagne."
Gigli.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
There are certain things you never do in this world. Hold lit firecracker in your hand. Knock over a beehive. Watch news stories about celebrities who do things to be Media Attention Whores (MAWs).
But if there is anything that you never EVER do if you want to live, it is f*ck with a nerd's computer. If you f*ck with a NASA nerd's computer, you are dead where you stand.
Whoever this person is who has attempted to tamper with so much as a peice of recording equipment has attempted to tamper with an international construction project, possibly in an effort en expand the authoritative powers of the first world nations who are playing Chicken Little and shouting "The terrorists are coming. The sky is falling. Everybody panic!"
By compromising NASA's security, they have infringed upon the freedoms that they claim outsiders are taking from up when it is the people from within who can't keep their hands off of things they know they shouldn't be messing with.
NASA has had its share of scandels over the past year that are far more trivial compared to breaking into a laboratory owned by one of the most reviered organizations on the planet.
Even the sleeping giant gets bit on the hand by it's own dog. This dog has teeth, and tommarrow we will use them.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
One word.
LEVIATHAN
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
Oh come now, you're not even trying! Between Manos: The Hands Of Fate, Monster A Go-Go, and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, MST3k has you all beat :-P
(And yes, I rather liked the Lost In Space film - certainly no worse than any Michael Bay stuff. Yes, this includes Transformers.)
Can't find examples of evolution? No matter, neither could Dawkins
I see your Battlefield Earth and raise you one Manos: The Hands of Fate.
Six sick
I want to know if unidentified is a code word for muslim? Honestly, with the UK retreating from being able to say 'war on terror' or to be able to connect 'muslim' and 'terrorist' in their verbiage (or whatever), and with the Dems trying to allow people to get sued for tipping the gov't on suspicious activities....is this just CYA? -Anon
But Highlander won the Academy Award for best movie ever made!
'nuff said
It was probably tweakers looking for wire to recycle for money to buy more meth.
Really? I hated it.
Is this a rhetorical question?
And all the events happened in real-time..
> "NASA said today it is investigating suspected sabotage of a recorder placed on the shuttle
> Endeavour for delivery to the space station where it will track physical stresses on the orbiting lab."
The article continues:
"The worker, a man in his early 30s with long, platinum blond hair, is currently being held in a facility in Virginia. Sources report he was concerned about 'these kinds of men talking to your god for you', and had previously been a rising star in the President's 'Faith-Based Initiatives' program."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Sigh.... I'm dumb. Of course Colombia is a country in South America, and the space shuttle to which I referred multiple times in my post is spelled Columbia.
well done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But was the saboteur wearing diapers? That's all I care about.
Nope, Battle Field earth is worse.
A) It had a potential it didn't even come close to fulfilling,
B) Manos never tried to pretend it was good.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Two words: Ice Pirates.
Five words: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
I developed what I humbly call the "Sean Connery Principle" specifically for H2. I found that the movie wasn't unwatchable while Sean Connery was on screen, but as soon as his character left, I couldn't believe I'd sat through the whole thing.
I must be a terrible power to have, to get the audience to ignore the awfulness of a movie.
Personally, I rate movies by how little I check my watch during them, but maybe that's just me.
It had potential? Obviously you never read the book. It was too crappy to even be camp.
I mean, they haven't found the person who did it, so far all they know, the damage could have simply been caused by gross negligence or incompetence.
The fact that there's a serious lack of motive for this sort of sabotage suggests that this possibility may merit consideration.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
not if you keep repeating the same ones, over and over and over, while people die.
of course, you can still get +5 moderation points, get cheering crowds, and get elected, with a philosophy like yours.
then after millions of people die (vietnam), you can act like it was someone elses fault, and go around talk shows admired as a 'brilliant person'.
just dont show up at any human rights group meetings or any other gathering that is made of the 'grunts' whose lives you sacrificed for your noble agenda and your propounding on the virtue of other peoples deaths.
company than government employees do over the government.