Jun 17 1999
From The Space Library
NASA disclosed that a sequence of computer commands issued by flight controllers on the ground had failed to fire the ISS's engines, placing the uninhabited space station in potential danger. The cause of the failure was human error. Flight controllers had sent commands directing the new space station to move out of the path of a piece of space junk, which posed a danger to the craft. A U.S. military organization tracking such objects had predicted that the "fairly large" piece of space junk of Russian origin would pass within 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) of the space station on 13 June. However, the debris came no closer to the new ISS than 4.5 miles (7.2 kilometers). A collision could have destroyed the uninhabited space station. NASA's Deputy Program Manager for Space Station Operations, Frank L. Culbertson Jr., explained that, because the space station's computers had rejected the flight controllers' faulty commands, the station had no motion control for an entire orbit.
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