A loose ball bearing on a camera may prevent the shuttle Atlantis from making its last flight today.
For want of a nail…
[Update a few minutes later]
Guess they decided it wasn’t enough of an issue to scrub for, or they resolved it. Launch still on in a few minutes.
[Update shortly after lift off]
Sounds like everything’s going fine so far.
Yes, a beautiful launch.
Sounds like they found a ball bearing that matched the size from the camera mount on the aft bulkhead. They were finalizing the ID and the paperwork in the last minutes before the launch!
the ball bearing was from something called a pip pin, which is basically a pin that you insert through an attach point. the balls are spring loaded so that once through the spring is released and the balls are then supposed to keep the pin from backing out. There are several of these depending on how many legs are on the camera. Each pin has two balls, so the loss of one leaves the other to still prevent backing out of the pin.
So how do we go from this seemingly incredibly delicate technology and allergic oversensitivity to safety to something much more robust? How many conestoga inhabitants perished on the road west? If the Mayflower crew and cargo were to come over today, they wouldn’t.
I wonder what SpaceX would do in a similar situation?
Probably the same thing NASA did yesterday: figure out it’s OK, and launch on time.