Word: mir
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...case of life imitating Arthur C. Clarke: A skittish computer malfunctions aboard a manned space station, putting a bid to retrieve a U.S. astronaut in jeopardy. Mir's main computer may not be a HAL 9000, but it has spent the last three days succesfully resisting all puny human attempts to restart it. The malfunctioning mainframe may prevent space shuttle Discovery from picking up the Australian-born Andrew Thomas this Friday, since NASA flight regs prohibit docking without an operational steering system on the other end. Now shuttle managers are meeting to decide whether to abandon Tuesday's launch altogether...
...course, the Mir computer has acted up many times before -- during the battered Russian station's string of misadventures last year -- and was successfully rebooted. But it's never baffled the folks in Moscow quite so much. Neither a reboot nor a replaced unit has brought it back online yet. Next up: A telemetry data upload and long-distance restart. The crew is hopeful: "They still have a lot of spares," said mission control spokesman Valery Lyndin. With luck, they'll find the glitch before it strikes up a chorus of "Daisy, Daisy...
...deaths of dozens of baby rats aboard the space shuttle Columbia wasn?t warning enough, the crew of Mir risked the ire of animal rights activists Monday -- or rather, amphibian and mollusk rights -- when their latest cargo came in. For the newest residents of the Russian space station are 15 two-year-old Oriental newts, and ?about? 80 snails -- Mir biologist Georgy Samarin being unsure of the precise number of gastropod cosmonauts...
...worth of trouble, to be precise. That's how much an independent advisory board told NASA it will cost to complete the U.S.'s commitment to the project, due mostly to "the current economic situation in Russia" and fears that Moscow is spending too much time and money on Mir. In 1993, President Clinton put a $17.4 billion cap on American contributions...
...Finally, in the Stories That Should Have Been April Fools' Dept.: The Mir cosmonauts performed a flawless space walk, and made it out of the module five minutes ahead of schedule. Which is only fair -- those guys have had enough April Fools' Days already...