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From: john@newave.UUCP (John A. Weeks III)
Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: Columbia showing her age?
Message-ID: <559@newave.UUCP>
Date: 15 Dec 90 17:37:37 GMT
References: <20792.2765fbdf@merrimack.edu>
Reply-To: john@newave.mn.org (John A. Weeks III)
Organization: NeWave Communications Ltd, Eden Prairie, MN
Lines: 24

In article <20792.2765fbdf@merrimack.edu> yetmank@merrimack.edu writes:
> Am I the only one who feels that Columbia is starting to show her age?
> This last mission was an absolute disaster for the orbiter.

Yes--you are the only one.  Columbia performed just about flawlessly.  Since
this was a long mission (9 days versus 4-5 day average missions), there was
a lot more time for things to go wrong.

Now here is the $10 question that I have been pondering:  were the problems
in Astro caused because Astro was designed as a human-operated device, or
were we very lucky that humans were in space to salvage a mission that
would have failed from the start if it were designed as an unmanned probe?

I didn't even hear NASA talking about TAGS all that much.  On some flights,
it seem that problems with TAGS (Text And Graphics System--the million dollar
Shuttle fax machine) dominate the conversations between the orbiter and capcom.

-john-

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