Greetings and Felicitations,

Evidently someone has deliberately sabotaged a piece of equipment designed to be placed on the space station.

Endeavour heads for launch amid troubles at NASA.

What do you think?
Deliberate sabotage for industrial espionage.
Deliberate sabotage for a disgruntled employee.
Deliberate sabotage to derail the space program.

Eglaelin

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Probably someone mad at America in general.
I always wondered about Apollo 1 and 13, both were electrical shorts.
If you’ve ever built anything under military specs (They x-ray flipping screws for goodness sakes.), you’d have a problem with believing frayed wires caused them. They actually weigh the gold solder on the gold connections.
They could have killed people and cost many billions of dollars and years of advancement, it should carry the death sentence.

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Only a liberal would know how hard it is to get a nicotine patch to stick to a monkey.

Faults and even design failure can creep into the most scrutinised manufacturing processes, such quality control will always be fault minimisation, not fault elimination.

Hmm.. I would say it's likely a micro-fracture in the teflon undetectable by the QC process of the day could have been the cause. Space-flight then and now tests our practical application of science and engineering to the edge, and the edge is where you'll expect failures of even the most well-crafted and engineered devices.

An analogy could well be drawn to the hiring of the individual who took it upon himself to sabotage NASA equiptment. The most zealous personell screening processes do not eliminate loonies entirely, instead it vastly reduces the chances of one being hired.

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THE GOVERNMENT HAS SENT ME

The reason I exampled military specs is argument for this occurring at normal probable rates in special assembly for explosive environment.
Some people don’t understand why a toilet seat for a C-130 cost $600.oo, having built devices using medical and military specs I’m amazed you can get them that cheap. The resins are kited in clean rooms, mixed in de-humidifying chambers and then placed in vacuum chambers before going into ovens. There x-rayed and examined under a microscope and the process is repeated at final destination before final assembly.
A 34volt wire @18awg frayed would be noticed with visual inspection. With Apollo 13 it was a 22 gage coaxial shielding designed for spark free use in explosive environment.
“As with medical application involving oxygen”, entire assemblies and connections are coated in resin and tested.
If nothing else it should send up a flag for an investigation starting with the last inspector.

Makes sense, still it was low D.C. voltage, the fray would have to be within 1/32nd of an inch from a ground source for it to short (The obverse bad coaxial design to save space and weight.) and around 1/8th of an inch for the Apollo 1 explosion from a 34volt power supply board to chassis short.
Yea okay I see your point, I just don’t understand that kind of sloppiness with that magnitude of engineering.

Agreed, they should make the penalty so sever that no one would risk it.

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Only a liberal would know how hard it is to get a nicotine patch to stick to a monkey.

Unfortunatly the very kind of people motivated to do so are not deterred by punishment, they have a higher calling.

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THE GOVERNMENT HAS SENT ME

I know what you mean, we had the same problem during WWII with the Japanese not deterred by death. If not for our superior intellect and abilities they would have forced us to kill the last women and child of there race. I hate seeing our young men and women up against this again with the Muslim belief system..

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Only a liberal would know how hard it is to get a nicotine patch to stick to a monkey.

Yay racism!

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When they come a wull staun ma groon
Staun ma groon al nae be afraid
Thoughts awe hame tak awa ma fear
Sweat an bluid hide ma veil awe tears