Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!elroy!jpl-devvax!lwall From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle Subject: Re: Discovery: Go for throttle up! Keywords: IT'S UP!!! Message-ID: <2961@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> Date: 30 Sep 88 05:13:19 GMT References: <5680@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. Lines: 75 In article <5680@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> rcj@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Robert Johnson) writes: : Control: Discovery, you are go for 104% throttle up. : Discovery: Roger, go at 104% throttle up. And a very hearty "Roger" it was, too. : 1) What the hell was that just of fire coming from the side of the : SRB? (The starboard one, I believe...) Someone else mentioned it : a few messages back, and I never heard any commentators mention : anything about it, nor anything about it in the press conferences..? I saw that too. I was very relieved when we got separation. All of us in the dark room at JPL cheered. All that aside, a benign explanation might possibly be some kind of refraction of the image of the normal flame due to shock waves or such. Shore looked like a flame to me though. We'll know soon enough. Whether it was a flame, anyway. One thing that bothers me about these SRB's is that, if someone were to sabotage them, you couldn't determine that after the fact because the evidence ends up in the form of a large hole. At least, a hole considerably larger than the sabateur made. : 2) Could someone elaborate on the problems that they are having with the : cooling system? The flash evaporator is a means of cooling the shuttle when the radiators aren't deployed. They just let water evaporate in the thing. Apparently they let too much water to it, and it got too cool, and partly froze up. To thaw it out they just decided to let the entire shuttle run warm for a bit. When I checked on them in the afternoon, they were running about 86F in the cabin. The folks on the ground were recommending they drink about 8 more ounces of water per hour. Apparently it's just one of those situations where the silly thing worked too good. Kinda like having weather that's too good to launch in, doncha know? Actually, much of the delay was not due to weather. The close-out crew seemed to be really slow. Of course, the hatch has been redesigned, and some of the crew may have been new at this (or at least out of practice), and they were checking everything three times it seemed. I don't remember them taking so long to check cabin pressure before. Also, the cooling fans in one of the partial-pressure suits blew their fuses, and they had to bring in some new 5 amp fuses from elsewhere. At first I wondered why they wouldn't have 5 amp fuses on board, but they probably do--those fuses are probably reserved for flight problems, however. : 3) What was the problem that they were going to hold the countdown at : T-31 seconds for? They decided to forget about it, but what caused : it? The reason they were able to forget about the problem is that it was predicted even before they came out of the T-9:00 minute hold. The guy at the OTC (orbiter something control?) said that the cabin pressure was near the upper end of the nominal range, and that as the countdown proceded it might well raise an alarm if the cabin got warmer (from the sun). I gathered that they'd forgotten to take into account the extra oxygen being introduced into the cabin from partial pressure suits (do the suits in fact release oxygen to the cabin?). Anyway, one of the astronauts requested that they keep the sunvisors in the window till T-2 minutes rather than the usual T-4 minutes, just to keep solar gain (and air pressure) lower. Just about the time they took the sunvisors down (T-2 min), the alarm went off anyway. This is one of those alarms that the computer would see and automatically stop the countdown at T-31 seconds. I suspect the decision to override the alarm had already been made (or at least contemplated) several minutes earlier. That's all I was able to gather from listening to two NASCOM circuits simultaneously. Some of it is speculation on my part, and I certainly don't speak for NASA. Larry Wall lwall@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov.