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From: pstinson@pbs.org
Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: Columbia showing her age?
Message-ID: <1990Dec13.121946.11012@pbs.org>
Date: 13 Dec 90 17:19:46 GMT
References: <20792.2765fbdf@merrimack.edu> <1990Dec12.202553.16598@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Organization: PBS:Public Broadcasting Service, Alexandria, VA
Lines: 21

In article <1990Dec12.202553.16598@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>, gsh7w@astsun7.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Hennessy) writes:
> In article <20792.2765fbdf@merrimack.edu> yetmank@merrimack.edu writes:
> #This last mission was an absolute disaster for the orbiter. 
> 
> How do you conclude that it was an absolute disaster? There was a
> large quantity of scientific data returned, that should be considered a
> sucess. 
> 
> Now there were problems with things breaking, but the mission was by
> no means an absolute disaster.

Furthermore, except for the plumbing problem, the things that broke did not
belong to Columbia.  They could have been carried into orbit aboard any shuttle
and they will not be present aboard Columbia for its next mission.  I believe
the balky computers running the telescopes where from the team of
experimenters and various universities involved. (Maybe even one of you out
there on this net overlooked a syntax error while programming. :-)

In any case, the trouble was not with Columbia's regular baank of computers
that fly the shuttle itself.  Payload problems can affect any orbiter
regardless of age.