Fragments

I’ve not been up to a great deal, as has been mentioned before.

Yesterday (Saturday) I woke up very tired as I have been having problems staying asleep rather than getting to sleep. I’d just managed to have breakfast and was about to leave home at about 11am when Rob Newson phoned me up. For the next hour and a half I helped him with Linux problems.

Following this I went to Sainsbury’s and got home at about a quarter to two. I put the shopping away, made some sandwiches and turned on BBC News 24 for the news.

It was just before 2pm and after the weather the newscaster trailed that they’d be covering the landing of the shuttle live at about quarter past then started on the news headlines. Following a few stories, at about 5 past two they mentioned that NASA was having problems with communications with the shuttle.. I thought “Oh bugger. It’s broken up during re-entry.”

It was about 10 minutes to a quarter of an hour before reports of “multiple trails” being seen over Texas, but the news people still kept on saying that even though the shuttle was late that NASA was still only having comms problems when it was obvious to anyone with any slight knowledge of space flight that the shuttle was never going to land in one piece.

I was astonished at how little knowledge the journalists had and how much they asked stupid questions of “experts” and then misheard their answers.

In the evening, at about 8:30pm GMT, I watched the direct, uncut and unfiltered NASA press conference on CNN. It was so nice not to have the distortion of journalistic chinese whispers and to hear things from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

It’s a sad day for NASA and the astronaut’s families. It was good that it seems that the astronauts themselves had very little time to come to terms with what happened as the failure was so fast and the g-forces involved and the lack of oxygen would have probably made them unconcious before they felt any great pain or fear.

I must admit that I wasn’t really surprised that this has happened. The whole shuttle system is a kludged bodge designed to a budget (safety’s too expensive so don’t bother with it) in the 1970’s with the military pulling the strings in the background. It’s amazing that this hasn’t happened before. There have been a number of times when the shuttle has returned with parts of tiles missing in dangerous places but luckily, the skin of the shuttle had not quite burnt through. This time the luck seems to have run out.

This is purely speculation, of course. It could be that the loss of sensor function was caused by an electrical fire caused by faulty wiring in the wing (faulty wiring has been found in the shuttles before ) which caused the control wires for the control surfaces to fail leading to improper control surface actuation and loss of attitude, along with electrical failure and comms loss. It’s unlikely that anyone will ever know for sure.

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