Search Results for: sts-93

In the early days of rocketry, when subsystems reliability was low, hard experience led designers to add redundancy for critical functions where they could.  Redundancy comes at a cost:  increased weight, increased complexity, unintended interactions, complex schemes to manage the … Continue reading →

  Calling it Rocket Science is, of course, a misnomer. Science provided the background but today it is definitely Rocket Engineering. Scientists and Engineers mix together like, well, cats and dogs. Friendly détente some days, not so much other days. … Continue reading →

Some time back I started to tell the story of the most interesting shuttle launch:  STS-93.  I think it is time to return to that topic.  To understand what happened, some background is necessary. If this is too engineering-geeky for … Continue reading →

The summer of 1990 is remembered in shuttle circles as the hydrogen leak summer. We tried to launch Columbia and found that there was a leak in some of the plumbing carrying that volatile gas. The launch team scrambled into … Continue reading →

One of the most interesting shuttle flights was STS-93 which put the Chandra Advanced X-Ray Telescope into space. Not only was it the first shuttle flight to be commanded by a woman – Eileen Collins – and the heaviest payload … Continue reading →

The official NASA history of STS-109 can be found on the agency web page:  The last part of that official account reads:  “After a successful launch, flight controllers in Mission Control noticed a degraded flow rate in one of two … Continue reading →

The STS-93 launch attempts proved the adage we knew well in the Flight Director office: When the weather is good, the vehicle will break; when the vehicle works perfectly the weather will be bad. On the first launch attempt – … Continue reading →