Space shuttle Discovery was moved to the launch pad Thursday to await a launch that could be as early as December 6 -- an effort to avoid potential New Year's Eve computer glitches.
The worry is that shuttle computers aren't designed to make the change from the 365th day of the old year to the first day of the new year while in flight. NASA has never had a shuttle in space December 31 or January 1.
"We've just never had the computers up and going when we've transitioned from one year to another," said Discovery astronaut Joan Higginbotham. "We're not really sure how they're going to operate."
Starting December 7, launch opportunities would be available as late as December 17 or 18. With a 12-day mission, that would mean the shuttle is back on Earth before New Year's Eve.
However, NASA was quick to say that even if the shuttle crew finds itself still in space on January 1, procedures could be devised to make a transition if necessary.
I remember that Dad, who worked for IBM at the time, lost a lot of sleep right before the first launch of Columbia. He wasn't involved with any development of the systems, but the fact that his company provided pretty much all of the Shuttle's computing components, he had a certain amount of anxiety.
What's amazing to me is that, despite upgrades of the human-computer interface and a variety of other changes, fundamentally it's still the same underlying system and rather primitive. I joke sometimes about how we basically went to the moon with computers that were less powerful than my digital wristwatch, and that's really not far off (IIRC, the landing radar system had 5k of memory). Then when you consider that the Shuttle was conceived in the 60s, designed in the 70s and built in the 80s, you really get a sense of how so many things can possibly go wrong with our aging fleet.
So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's concern over switching from December 31 to January 1, but it still boggles the mind that something so basic can cause potential problems. Yet fixes to complex systems have their own dangers so it's probably best not to tinker and just work around things until our next generation of vehicles is ready to fly.
ntodd
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