Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Space, Has Died

Re:Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Sp... by pvg on Sunday December 24, 2017 @05:32PM (#16001661)

Most space gear (excluding the stuff that gets you to and back from space) has been almost implausibly reliable. Voyager 1's thrusters still work far past their intended best-before date and they were not designed to have someone's life depend on them.

If a Manned Maneuvering Unit somehow failed, it would have been a highly extraordinary event. The crew on the shuttle along with their mission controllers could have made an assessment of the risk of failure of the second MMU.

This isn't like your computer kernel-panicking and you rebooting it and hoping for the best.

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Re:Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Sp... by limaoscarjuliet on Monday December 25, 2017 @08:33AM (#16004021)

Correct, but serious issues do arise, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#PGNCS...

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Re:Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Sp... by sitkack on Monday December 25, 2017 @04:42PM (#16005831)

And it had load shedding built in, so even in the mis configured state, it still worked.

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Re:Bruce McCandless, First Astronaut to Fly Untethered in Sp... by ProAm on Monday December 25, 2017 @01:38AM (#16003030)

Definitely, but it doesn't stop the carnival from playing in your mind as you strap in to go and rescue MMU-01 with MMU-02

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