Shuttle Unable to Televise Mir Linkup
Space shuttle Discovery was hit by a TV blackout Wednesday that could deprive NASA of live images of the final shuttle linkup with Mir today.
NASA scrambled to work around the failure, which more than anything else was a PR nightmare.
Because of the unprecedented trouble, NASA expects little if any live television of the docking or the rest of the 10-day mission to bring home Andrew Thomas, the last American to live aboard the Russian space station.
The problem also prevented the shuttle from transmitting some scientific data to Earth. But the information was not lost; it was being stored on board.
Barring a breakthrough, the only scenes from space during the mission will come from Mir, whose spartan system provides only meager TV coverage, and from a few U.S. ground stations. But the shuttle and Mir will be out of range of those stations when the docking takes place. Engineers sketched out a repair plan that the astronauts might attempt after the shuttle docks.
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