Spacewalk Required to Fix Circuit Breaker on Gyroscope

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34857-2004Apr22.html?nav=rss_nation

One of the international space station's massive gyroscopes has tripped a circuit breaker and shut down, leaving the station without a backup gyro and forcing ground controllers to schedule an extra spacewalk to replace the damaged part, NASA officials said yesterday

Sigh. I spent 10 years working in the space biz for a now sold off division of IBM. Among other things I oversaw some software design for a more ambitious space station called Freedom. Alas, Freedom never made it off the ground,so to speak.

The ISS is a very poor substitute, barely more than the first "space station", Skylab. A friend of mine works for NASA on the ISS. He tells me that it's "one or two failures from having to be abandoned". And once it's abandoned there's not much rush to get the Shuttle fleet flying again. And there goes government sponsored manned space flight in America.

Working in the space biz is rather like seeing sausage made. As Larry Niven said in Fallen Angels

...and if it weren't for NASA we'd be on the moon by now...