enthalpy

Wednesday, July 20, 2005


After 21 years and over 100 successful shuttle mission, who would have suspected this headline:
Shuttle: no launch this week, engineers still baffled

NASA says the Shuttle Discovery will not launch before 26 July, as the space agency's engineers continue their investigation into the misbehaving fuel gauge that grounded the Shuttle again, last week.

The return to flight was cancelled after a liquid hydrogen low-level fuel sensor circuit failed a routine pre-launch test. It showed a fuel tank to be nearly empty, when in fact it was nearly full. This could cause the engines to cut out at the wrong point of the Shuttle's ascent, mission controllers explained, which could be catastrophic.
Ya know what NASA needs? Some real engineers that aren't scared to make a bad call. Where's Scotty when you need him? Oh yeah, dead.
James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original "Star Trek" TV series and motion pictures who responded to the apocryphal command "Beam me up, Scotty," died early Wednesday. He was 85.
Enter your own "beam me up" and/or "I'm givin' it all she's got, cap'n" joke here.



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