[LINK] "Nothing could possibly go wrong"

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/454332/


Communication with the astronauts on board the International Space Station 
were restored after problems with a software upgrade knocked out contact 
for several hours Tuesday.

NASA reported that communications between the ground crew in Houston and 
the orbiting station were down for nearly three hours starting at 9:45 a.m. 
Tuesday.

The problem occurred while flight controllers were updating the station's 
command and control software, and were transitioning from the main computer 
to a backup system to complete the software load.

When the orbiter flew over Russian ground stations, NASA was able to use 
those stations to connect with the crew and tell them to connect another 
computer to begin to restore communications.

Kevin Ford, a NASA astronaut and space station commander, reported that the 
station is in good shape and all of the astronauts onboard are fine.

Two American astronauts, three Russians and a Canadian are onboard the 
space station, which flies about 250 miles above the Earth.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield tweeted about the experience.

He started Tuesday morning by tweeting, "Good Morning, Earth! Today we 
transition the Space Station's main computers to a new software load. 
Nothing could possibly go wrong."

He spoke too soon.

Hadfield later tweeted, "As I transition the Space Station computers, I 
notice our Houston CAPCOM's name is ... Hal ! The irony, as life imitates 
art." 

Then he wrote, "The computers gave us problems today, comms going in and 
out, but our superb Mission Control team has it all fixed, back, with an 
upgrade."

The Canadian Space Agency also got in on the Twitter action, noting, "Open 
the pod bay door Hal!" @Cmdr_Hadfield at work today despite the outage 
w/the ground. Comms were restored @ 12:34pm."

By Sharon Gaudin (Computerworld (US)) 20 February, 2013
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Cheers,
Stephen