Word: houstons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Linda L. Marshall Houston...
Only seconds after the space shuttle touched down on the California desert last week, a playful voice crackled from the radio at Mission Control in Houston. "Columbia," it said, "we've got some good news and bad news for you. The good news is, we've had lots of beer waiting for you. The bad news is, we drank it eight hours...
...Edwards Air Force Base's Runway 17 in the California desert with the "right on the numbers" precision only a master pilot like John Young, 53, America's premier astronaut, can muster. For seven hours and 50 minutes before that landing, however, flight controllers worked frantically hi Houston to get Young, his five crewmates and their prize scientific cargo, the European-built $1 billion Spacelab, safely back to earth. During the unscheduled extension of the 166-orbit flight, the shuttle's longest, some California radio stations had even begun speculating ominously that the ship might become marooned...
...that instant, the spacecraft's No. 1 computer, responsible for directing the orbiter's navigational and guidance systems, as well as general housekeeping duties, "crashed," or shut down. To the relief of Houston controllers, the No. 2 computer promptly took over. Indeed, under NASA's suspenders-and-belt philosophy, the orbiter is equipped with four electronically linked computers, plus an independently operating backup. Any one of these machines can take charge of the shuttle. About four minutes later, however, after the thrusters fired again to slow the ship, the second computer also stopped...
...situation was never life-threatening, since a computer was always available to take charge of the ship. Still, the controllers decided to wave off a landing for several orbits while hundreds of engineers in Houston pored over data in an effort to discover the cause of the failures. The controllers were afraid that the difficulty, whatever it was, would spread through the system and bring down all the ship's computers. Without a computer, even a John Young probably would not have been able to take Columbia safely out of orbit because of the complex sequence of rocket firings...