May 19 1998
From The Space Library
NASA astronauts presented four employees of Boeing Reusable Space Systems with the Silver Snoopy, one of the most prestigious honors available to people working on NASA's Space Shuttle program. Mark Brewer of the orbiter electrical-avionics team, Jeffrey Lewis of the mid-module-major assembly team, Michael Argent of the external-tank, umbilical and payload latch-assembly programs, and Larry Echaves of the configuration-management team each received a letter of commendation, a poster, a certificate, and a Silver Snoopy pin that had flown in space.
The PanAmSat-owned Galaxy IV, a five-year old communications satellite, "lost its bearings" so that its antennas were not directed toward Earth, causing the "worst outage in 37 years since communications satellites first entered service." Most of the 45 million pagers in the United States were unable to function during the outage, which "severed electronic links vital to thousands of retailers, news organizations, and broadcasters." PanAmSat officials said that an attitude-control mechanism failed for an unknown reason and a backup processor failed to turn on, causing the satellite to rotate. At that point, hundreds of thousands of satellite dishes in the United States lost contact with Galaxy IV.
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