The sensors are much like the low-fuel indicators in an automobile. As the shuttle rockets toward space, the sensors monitor the amount of liquid hydrogen in the external tank and automatically shut off the main engines when the tank is empty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I have a tip for NASA: remove those sensors!<\/p>\n
That would fix the problem with them reporting an empty tank, while in fact it still contains fuel.<\/p>\n
But, you may ask, how would they then tell when the tank is really<\/strong> empty?<\/p>\nEasy: the engines will shut off!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The shuttle launch has been scrubbed again. Technicians have been unable to fix the faulty engine cutoff sensors since last Thursday. The same sensors that have plagued earlier launches too. Which suggests they were never fixed in the first place. Which is scary, because a bad sensor can result in cutting the engines before the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary","category-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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The shuttle launch has been scrubbed again. Technicians have been unable to fix the faulty engine cutoff sensors since last Thursday. The same sensors that have plagued earlier launches too. Which suggests they were never fixed in the first place. Which is scary, because a bad sensor can result in cutting the engines before the shuttle is in orbit.<\/p>\n