[Az-Geocaching] NASA in mourning

[Scott Wood]

At 04:12 PM 9/8/2004, you wrote:
>Yeah, that darn chute - but it was not the chute itself - it apparently never
>left the spacecraft, which means it was something else, the pyrotechnic
>charge, the circuitry that should have fired that charge (which normally is
>multiply redundant....), the sensor that detects the G load of entry and

As I mentioned, I just returned from a week long business trip to 
Denver.  There is a lot of news there since this craft was built in Denver.

The speculation of the local engineers that built this is that it was the 
batteries.  Apparently the battery issue was raised before launch, but NASA 
wanted to go ahead.  Sounded like I was listening to fall out of the 
Challenger accident.

If there is a real fault at NASA, and if it is true that the batteries were 
the cause, and that they were warned that the batteries would fail after 4 
years, then it is the bureaucracy that needs to be fixed at NASA, not the 
science.