8 ms·

STS-93: We don’t need any more of those (2014)

189 points by LorenDB 2y ago

pcardoso 2y ago
Impressive that all this happened after many uneventful flights of this vehicle. Makes STS-1 even more impressive. Huge respect for John Young and Bob Crippen.
- interludead 2y ago
  The achievements of John Young and Bob Crippen during STS-1 are indeed remarkable
  - euroderf 2y ago
    John Young was (and remains ?) the only astronaut to fly every class of US manned space vehicle.
    - pcardoso 2y ago
      Some of them twice!
    - EncomLab 2y ago
      John Young was not one of the Mercury seven - so "almost" every one.
      - euroderf 2y ago
        Oops! I misremember something I heard during the Shuttle's debut flight.
        EncomLab 2y ago
        In no way diminishes his accomplishments!
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      Young was only active as an astronaut from 1965 to 1983, so "every one available at the time" might be a better description.
      - echoangle 2y ago
        Even more pedantic but I think it has to be “every one ever available up to that time”. Otherwise, everyone flying in dragon would have had the same claim until SLS launched, because for some time, dragon was the only active US crew launcher. Young’s achievement was having flown every crew launcher that the US ever made, right?
        bell-cot 2y ago
        As user EncomLab noted earlier, Young never flew on the US's Mercury launcher. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mercury#Crewed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mercury#Crewed Maybe describe Young as having been to space on 3 successive generations of US space vehicles?
  - sillywalk 2y ago
    There's a good book on that flight - Into the black by Rowland White. Especially on how the National Reconnaisance Office - NRO used a spy-satellite to image the orbiter for damage to its heat tiles. The paperback has more details. Apparently this was set up in advance. Here's an article about it by the same author: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/spysat-and-shuttle-180962872/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/spysat-and...
interludead 2y ago
Expecting the unexpected is a necessity in space exploration. Murphy’s Law: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong"!
- pavlov 2y ago
  On the other hand, isn’t there a lot less things that could happen in space compared to Earth? The atmosphere is unpredictable. The ecosystem is teeming with life and a lot of it is animals with their own agency. Then there’s the whole human factor. If you’re making a vehicle that operates on Earth, you have to be prepared for drunk people and terrorists and all sorts of human contingencies. They’re not causing havoc in deep space. For better and worse, space is dead.
  - rachofsunshine 2y ago
    On the other hand, you don't usually get hit by random pieces of debris traveling at mach 25 [1] on Earth. And on the other-other hand, the things that go wrong in spaceflight usually go wrong on launch or reentry - the parts where you combine the extreme conditions of space with the unpredictable extra nonsense of Earth. Like, say, a cold morning making an O-ring brittle or aerodynamic stresses ripping you apart on reentry. Only three deaths - the crew of Soyuz 11 [2] - have actually occurred in space proper; all other deaths have occurred within the Earth's atmosphere. (Although Apollo 13 came close to adding to that list.) [1] LEO orbital velocity is ~8 km/s, mach 1 is ~300 m/s, although meteoroids necessarily strike at much higher velocities than that because they're accelerated to at least Earth's escape velocity on descent. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11
  - puzzledobserver 2y ago
    I suspect that it isn't the unpredictability, rather it is the acceptable margin of error. Say you have a 1500 kg car with a 100 hp engine, which starts from a standstill and runs for 5 seconds. How fast will the car be moving at the end of this run? This depends on how much friction the vehicle experiences, and is difficult to accurately predict. Try a similar calculation with a rocket in space, and you can calculate its final speed with a very high degree of certainty. But now consider the potential impact of a malfunction: if the car engine fails to start, you might be inconvenienced, but you will be fine. On the other hand, if the rocket engine fails to ignite in space, you can't perform necessary orbital maneuvers and you might be in deep trouble. It's something about environment on Earth being fundamentally hospitable to human life, and environment in space being similarly inhospitable. Because of this, malfunctions and unpredictable system dynamics on Earth are most often just minor inconveniences, while malfunctions in space / underwater / deep underground are disastrous events.
rwmj 2y ago
A picture would be worth a thousand words here. Where exactly is the LOX pin and what nozzle are they talking about?
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  The article introduces LOX - it's Liquid OXygen, the oxidizer for the Shuttle's main engine (with hydrogen as the fuel). The nozzle is the portion of the engine where the hot exhaust gas is allowed to explosively expand to provide thrust (what you probably think of as the "exit" of the engine). The pin caused two problems. First, the LOX itself was dangerous because if it had been released incorrectly, it could have caused an explosion. That, fortunately, did not happen. And second, the ejected pin severed several hydrogen pipes being used to cool the nozzle. I assume the cooling is to keep it from melting under the extreme temperatures of the launch - the article mentions "burn through", which I'm guessing is "the nozzle material melts and your rocket exhaust goes off in a random direction so you Will Not Go To Space Today". It severed three pipes; fortunately the shuttle was designed such that it could tolerate the failure of up to four, and the nozzle held. Wiki has a picture at [1] - the hydrogen leak from the severed pipes is in the engine on the right of the image, creating a white streak on the side of the nozzle and distorting the shape of the exhaust. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:STS-93_SSME_Hydrogen_Coolant_Nozzle_Leak_at_Liftoff.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:STS-93_SSME_Hydrogen...
  - plorg 2y ago
    Ok, assume that I've also read the article. What does the "pin" part of "LOX pin" refer to?
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      It's a plug that was inserted to block a damaged passageway. It fell out and hit the (fragile) wall of the nozzle which is hollow and itself full of tubes. Ironic really, that a leak prevention patch job ended up causing a different leak.
_zamorano_ 2y ago
So I suposse building an aircraft involves standard bolts, procedures, testing and much more standarized ways. In contrast a spacecraft like the shuttle, faces much harsher conditions and, as not many of these were built, I expect more manual procedures and tinkering while building the thing. In the end, it's incredible these things didn't crash more often.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > In the end, it's incredible these things didn't crash more often. I think two catastrophic space shuttle failures is more than enough :-/
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Also, the smaller number, and the smaller number of flights, means much less experience to wring out the low probability gotchas. Today's extremely reliable airliners got that way on a long, long string of accidents and near accidents.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  The risk of spaceflight is still very high. Wiki [1] lists 676 people as having traveled to space, of whom 19 have died in accidents as a result of that travel, meaning that going to space has about a 3% chance of killing you. The average age of an astronaut is 34 [2], and most are male, so a look at an actuarial table [3] tells us that going to space is approximately as likely to kill you as literally every risk an ordinary person would take in their life up to that point (at 34 years of age, about 4.3% of men have died, and a large proportion of those deaths are due [4] to accidental injury). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Corps#Qualifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Corps#Qualifica... [3] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK600454/table/ch2.tab4/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK600454/table/ch2.tab4/
  - krisoft 2y ago
z991 2y ago
Wayne Hale is always my favorite source for these: https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/sts-93-we-dont-need-any-more-of-those/ https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/sts-93-we-dont-ne...
- dotancohen 2y ago
  That was a great read, thank you! It has this tidbit: > STS-93 carried the heaviest payload the shuttle ever launched; the Chandra X-ray observatory (formerly known as the Advanced X-ray Astronomy Facility or AXAF) and it IUS booster. Why would such a heavy payload have been launched on Columbia, which famously was the heaviest orbiter and thus never visited the ISS?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - 51Cards 2y ago
    Columbia had slightly more space in the payload bay due to her airlock being internal and not taking up cargo bay space. Other shuttles had to have an external airlock fitted in the payload bay as needed which made them unable to fit AXAF. IIRC the airlock requirement was as a back-up in case there were deployment issues. Again, if my memory serves, Columbia's internal airlock however is what made it unable to dock with the ISS. It was the only shuttle that retained that configuration. It's also part of the reason it was heavier, along with it being the initial airframe and built heavier than the subsequent ones.
    - dotancohen 2y ago
      I am so glad that I asked. Thank you!
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      >it being the initial airframe Very minor nitpick, but the first airframe (spaceframe?) is OV-101 Enterprise. OV-102 Columbia is the second.
HenryBemis 2y ago
Oh the fear, that you are in space and you can only convert/adapt/manipulate matter to only a certain degree, so if you are missing a critical spare part... then what?? Which got my thinking and Ducking, and yes, in 2014 ISS got a 3D printer. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/3-d-printer-powered-up-on-the-international-space-station/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/3-d-printer-powered-up... Regarding some comments on "average", "male", "34", well they ain't the average dude, they are models T101 in the flesh (to begin with, and then they get extra training). But man.. I misplace a screwdriver and I stress..
loeg 2y ago
> "How lucky we were," Hale said. "Instead of being 200 or more fps short at MECO, possibly leading to an abort landing or requiring two tons of OMS propellant to make up, we wound up being only 15 fps short, well within the capability of the OMS budget." Is that feet per second?
- LorenDB 2y ago
  Yes.
- tomjakubowski 2y ago
  Yeah, it's delta-V, which in this case represents the remaining potential energy in the spacecraft's dwindling fuel supplies: in terms of how much it can change its velocity by burning it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v
  - loeg 2y ago
    Yes, the confusing part was that it wasn't in meters. I've never seen anyone use feet per second as a unit before.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      Feet per second is used when describing rate of climb/descent in aviation, though it's usually converted to feet per minute for better handling. eg: Climbing 1500 feet per minute.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Attempted TLDR: "The shuttle wasn't going fast enough when the big rocket ran out of fuel, but luckily it was close enough that we could fix it by running some of the rockets for moving in space, which use their own small fuel supply." ________ > "How lucky we were," Hale said. "Instead of being 200 or more [ft/s] short at [the time of Main Engine Cut-Off], possibly leading to an abort landing or requiring two tons of [Orbital Maneuvering System] propellant to make up, we wound up being only 15 [ft/s] short, well within the capability of the [Orbital Maneuvering System] budget."
Simon_ORourke 2y ago
If you've not already listened to the podcast, I'd really recommend The Space Above Us episode on this particular rabbit's foot/four leaf clover of a near miss... https://thespaceabove.us/ https://thespaceabove.us/ To have several "balancing" failures occur at the same time would be so unlikely as to be ascribed to some synchronicity rather than real life.
ranger207 2y ago
STS-93 carried the Chandra X-ray observatory, one of NASA's Great Observatories alongside Hubble, and which has been operating continually for the past 25 years. It can likely continue for up to another decade before it runs out of fuel, except that budgetary pressures mean that it might be cancelled this year: https://www.savechandra.org/ https://www.savechandra.org/
LordShredda 2y ago
> It was just a couple of minutes later that one of the projectors hanging from the ceiling in Mission Control – the projectors that put up the displays on the front screens – overheated and started smoking. Quick action by the Ground Control officer to shut it off probably prevented a fire in the MCC, which would have lead to an evacuation. Everyone prepares for complete engine failure, but no one expects and electrical fire in the office
ericcumbee 2y ago
Fun that this came up 39 years to the day of STS-51F (Challenger) the only Abort to Orbit flight of the space shuttle program. and only the heads up call by a flight controller for "Limits to Inhibit" saved the shuttle from being destroyed. of course its next Missions was STS-51-L
- kristianp 2y ago
  STS-51F: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-F https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-F STS-51-L: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-L https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-L

189 points by LorenDB 2y ago

Impressive that all this happened after many uneventful flights of this vehicle. Makes STS-1 even more impressive. Huge respect for John Young and Bob Crippen.

interludead 2y ago
The achievements of John Young and Bob Crippen during STS-1 are indeed remarkable
- euroderf 2y ago
  John Young was (and remains ?) the only astronaut to fly every class of US manned space vehicle.
  - pcardoso 2y ago
    Some of them twice!
  - EncomLab 2y ago
    John Young was not one of the Mercury seven - so "almost" every one.
    - euroderf 2y ago
      Oops! I misremember something I heard during the Shuttle's debut flight.
      - EncomLab 2y ago
        In no way diminishes his accomplishments!
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    Young was only active as an astronaut from 1965 to 1983, so "every one available at the time" might be a better description.
    - echoangle 2y ago
      Even more pedantic but I think it has to be “every one ever available up to that time”. Otherwise, everyone flying in dragon would have had the same claim until SLS launched, because for some time, dragon was the only active US crew launcher. Young’s achievement was having flown every crew launcher that the US ever made, right?
      - bell-cot 2y ago
        As user EncomLab noted earlier, Young never flew on the US's Mercury launcher. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mercury#Crewed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mercury#Crewed Maybe describe Young as having been to space on 3 successive generations of US space vehicles?
- sillywalk 2y ago
  There's a good book on that flight - Into the black by Rowland White. Especially on how the National Reconnaisance Office - NRO used a spy-satellite to image the orbiter for damage to its heat tiles. The paperback has more details. Apparently this was set up in advance. Here's an article about it by the same author: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/spysat-and-shuttle-180962872/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/spysat-and...

interludead 2y ago

Expecting the unexpected is a necessity in space exploration. Murphy’s Law: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong"!

pavlov 2y ago
On the other hand, isn’t there a lot less things that could happen in space compared to Earth? The atmosphere is unpredictable. The ecosystem is teeming with life and a lot of it is animals with their own agency. Then there’s the whole human factor. If you’re making a vehicle that operates on Earth, you have to be prepared for drunk people and terrorists and all sorts of human contingencies. They’re not causing havoc in deep space. For better and worse, space is dead.
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  On the other hand, you don't usually get hit by random pieces of debris traveling at mach 25 [1] on Earth. And on the other-other hand, the things that go wrong in spaceflight usually go wrong on launch or reentry - the parts where you combine the extreme conditions of space with the unpredictable extra nonsense of Earth. Like, say, a cold morning making an O-ring brittle or aerodynamic stresses ripping you apart on reentry. Only three deaths - the crew of Soyuz 11 [2] - have actually occurred in space proper; all other deaths have occurred within the Earth's atmosphere. (Although Apollo 13 came close to adding to that list.) [1] LEO orbital velocity is ~8 km/s, mach 1 is ~300 m/s, although meteoroids necessarily strike at much higher velocities than that because they're accelerated to at least Earth's escape velocity on descent. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11
- puzzledobserver 2y ago
  I suspect that it isn't the unpredictability, rather it is the acceptable margin of error. Say you have a 1500 kg car with a 100 hp engine, which starts from a standstill and runs for 5 seconds. How fast will the car be moving at the end of this run? This depends on how much friction the vehicle experiences, and is difficult to accurately predict. Try a similar calculation with a rocket in space, and you can calculate its final speed with a very high degree of certainty. But now consider the potential impact of a malfunction: if the car engine fails to start, you might be inconvenienced, but you will be fine. On the other hand, if the rocket engine fails to ignite in space, you can't perform necessary orbital maneuvers and you might be in deep trouble. It's something about environment on Earth being fundamentally hospitable to human life, and environment in space being similarly inhospitable. Because of this, malfunctions and unpredictable system dynamics on Earth are most often just minor inconveniences, while malfunctions in space / underwater / deep underground are disastrous events.

rwmj 2y ago

A picture would be worth a thousand words here. Where exactly is the LOX pin and what nozzle are they talking about?

rachofsunshine 2y ago
The article introduces LOX - it's Liquid OXygen, the oxidizer for the Shuttle's main engine (with hydrogen as the fuel). The nozzle is the portion of the engine where the hot exhaust gas is allowed to explosively expand to provide thrust (what you probably think of as the "exit" of the engine). The pin caused two problems. First, the LOX itself was dangerous because if it had been released incorrectly, it could have caused an explosion. That, fortunately, did not happen. And second, the ejected pin severed several hydrogen pipes being used to cool the nozzle. I assume the cooling is to keep it from melting under the extreme temperatures of the launch - the article mentions "burn through", which I'm guessing is "the nozzle material melts and your rocket exhaust goes off in a random direction so you Will Not Go To Space Today". It severed three pipes; fortunately the shuttle was designed such that it could tolerate the failure of up to four, and the nozzle held. Wiki has a picture at [1] - the hydrogen leak from the severed pipes is in the engine on the right of the image, creating a white streak on the side of the nozzle and distorting the shape of the exhaust. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:STS-93_SSME_Hydrogen_Coolant_Nozzle_Leak_at_Liftoff.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:STS-93_SSME_Hydrogen...
- plorg 2y ago
  Ok, assume that I've also read the article. What does the "pin" part of "LOX pin" refer to?
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    It's a plug that was inserted to block a damaged passageway. It fell out and hit the (fragile) wall of the nozzle which is hollow and itself full of tubes. Ironic really, that a leak prevention patch job ended up causing a different leak.

_zamorano_ 2y ago

So I suposse building an aircraft involves standard bolts, procedures, testing and much more standarized ways. In contrast a spacecraft like the shuttle, faces much harsher conditions and, as not many of these were built, I expect more manual procedures and tinkering while building the thing. In the end, it's incredible these things didn't crash more often.

kelnos 2y ago
> In the end, it's incredible these things didn't crash more often. I think two catastrophic space shuttle failures is more than enough :-/
pfdietz 2y ago
Also, the smaller number, and the smaller number of flights, means much less experience to wring out the low probability gotchas. Today's extremely reliable airliners got that way on a long, long string of accidents and near accidents.
rachofsunshine 2y ago
The risk of spaceflight is still very high. Wiki [1] lists 676 people as having traveled to space, of whom 19 have died in accidents as a result of that travel, meaning that going to space has about a 3% chance of killing you. The average age of an astronaut is 34 [2], and most are male, so a look at an actuarial table [3] tells us that going to space is approximately as likely to kill you as literally every risk an ordinary person would take in their life up to that point (at 34 years of age, about 4.3% of men have died, and a large proportion of those deaths are due [4] to accidental injury). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Corps#Qualifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Corps#Qualifica... [3] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK600454/table/ch2.tab4/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK600454/table/ch2.tab4/
- krisoft 2y ago

z991 2y ago

Wayne Hale is always my favorite source for these: https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/sts-93-we-dont-need-any-more-of-those/ https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/sts-93-we-dont-ne...

dotancohen 2y ago
That was a great read, thank you! It has this tidbit: > STS-93 carried the heaviest payload the shuttle ever launched; the Chandra X-ray observatory (formerly known as the Advanced X-ray Astronomy Facility or AXAF) and it IUS booster. Why would such a heavy payload have been launched on Columbia, which famously was the heaviest orbiter and thus never visited the ISS?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 51Cards 2y ago
  Columbia had slightly more space in the payload bay due to her airlock being internal and not taking up cargo bay space. Other shuttles had to have an external airlock fitted in the payload bay as needed which made them unable to fit AXAF. IIRC the airlock requirement was as a back-up in case there were deployment issues. Again, if my memory serves, Columbia's internal airlock however is what made it unable to dock with the ISS. It was the only shuttle that retained that configuration. It's also part of the reason it was heavier, along with it being the initial airframe and built heavier than the subsequent ones.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    I am so glad that I asked. Thank you!
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >it being the initial airframe Very minor nitpick, but the first airframe (spaceframe?) is OV-101 Enterprise. OV-102 Columbia is the second.

HenryBemis 2y ago

Oh the fear, that you are in space and you can only convert/adapt/manipulate matter to only a certain degree, so if you are missing a critical spare part... then what?? Which got my thinking and Ducking, and yes, in 2014 ISS got a 3D printer. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/3-d-printer-powered-up-on-the-international-space-station/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/3-d-printer-powered-up... Regarding some comments on "average", "male", "34", well they ain't the average dude, they are models T101 in the flesh (to begin with, and then they get extra training). But man.. I misplace a screwdriver and I stress..

loeg 2y ago

> "How lucky we were," Hale said. "Instead of being 200 or more fps short at MECO, possibly leading to an abort landing or requiring two tons of OMS propellant to make up, we wound up being only 15 fps short, well within the capability of the OMS budget." Is that feet per second?

LorenDB 2y ago
Yes.
tomjakubowski 2y ago
Yeah, it's delta-V, which in this case represents the remaining potential energy in the spacecraft's dwindling fuel supplies: in terms of how much it can change its velocity by burning it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v
- loeg 2y ago
  Yes, the confusing part was that it wasn't in meters. I've never seen anyone use feet per second as a unit before.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    Feet per second is used when describing rate of climb/descent in aviation, though it's usually converted to feet per minute for better handling. eg: Climbing 1500 feet per minute.
Terr_ 2y ago
Attempted TLDR: "The shuttle wasn't going fast enough when the big rocket ran out of fuel, but luckily it was close enough that we could fix it by running some of the rockets for moving in space, which use their own small fuel supply." ________ > "How lucky we were," Hale said. "Instead of being 200 or more [ft/s] short at [the time of Main Engine Cut-Off], possibly leading to an abort landing or requiring two tons of [Orbital Maneuvering System] propellant to make up, we wound up being only 15 [ft/s] short, well within the capability of the [Orbital Maneuvering System] budget."

Simon_ORourke 2y ago

If you've not already listened to the podcast, I'd really recommend The Space Above Us episode on this particular rabbit's foot/four leaf clover of a near miss... https://thespaceabove.us/ https://thespaceabove.us/ To have several "balancing" failures occur at the same time would be so unlikely as to be ascribed to some synchronicity rather than real life.

ranger207 2y ago

STS-93 carried the Chandra X-ray observatory, one of NASA's Great Observatories alongside Hubble, and which has been operating continually for the past 25 years. It can likely continue for up to another decade before it runs out of fuel, except that budgetary pressures mean that it might be cancelled this year: https://www.savechandra.org/ https://www.savechandra.org/

LordShredda 2y ago

> It was just a couple of minutes later that one of the projectors hanging from the ceiling in Mission Control – the projectors that put up the displays on the front screens – overheated and started smoking. Quick action by the Ground Control officer to shut it off probably prevented a fire in the MCC, which would have lead to an evacuation. Everyone prepares for complete engine failure, but no one expects and electrical fire in the office

ericcumbee 2y ago

Fun that this came up 39 years to the day of STS-51F (Challenger) the only Abort to Orbit flight of the space shuttle program. and only the heads up call by a flight controller for "Limits to Inhibit" saved the shuttle from being destroyed. of course its next Missions was STS-51-L

kristianp 2y ago
STS-51F: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-F https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-F STS-51-L: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-L https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-L