Acbosgd.139 net.columbia utzoo!decvax!duke!chico!harpo!cbosg!cbosgd!mark Wed Nov 4 09:13:12 1981 31 seconds and backing up For those few of you that weren't watching the attempted launch this morning, it got down to T minus 31 seconds and a check on fuel pressure failed, so the computer held the count. Mission control decided that the low pressure was not a problem and manually told it to resume the countdown. The computer refused to resume the countdown. After about 2 minutes of this, they exceeded the auxillary power unit's capacity to wait and had to back up the count. They were wavering between 9 minuters and 20 minutes, but had to cool off fuel, find the bug, and so on, so estimated liftoff time was 9:45 EST at the earliest. If they don't get it by 12:30 PM EST it will have to wait at least 2 days (to unload and reload the fuel) and probably more, depending on weather. Only once did the commentators point out that some turkey didn't test his software's manual restart provisions. They've been blaming it on the computer all morning. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.