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A routine engine firing to raise the orbit of the International Space Station failed to come off today.

A routine engine firing to raise the orbit of the International Space Station failed to come off today.

Though it appears the engines on the European ATV cargo craft did not fire as scheduled, the report is very vague and does not make clear what actually happened. Stay tuned.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

4 comments

  • Chris Kirkendall

    The comment “…to adjust for the Earth’s gravity” was rather odd – I thought the only reason an orbit gradually begins to ‘decay’ is that even at 200 or 250 mi. up, there is still some minuscule amount of atmospheric drag. There are many knowledgable people on this site regarding spaceflight – if anyone knows different, please feel free to correct me.

    Hopefully the next “burn” will come off OK, but it didn’t sound like a major problem…

  • You beat me to it Chris. How is it a science reporter screws up the science?

  • Chris Kirkendall

    HA HA ! ! Yeah – good question ! !

  • I suspect that the stringer who wrote this short article for UPI was based in Russia and was not a native English speaker. That the wording in the article is sometimes odd suggests this.

    This is not unusual. News services like AP, UPI, Reuters use native stringers all the time. Sometimes they can write better than this. Other times they are downright horrible, as in the case of the Arab stringers used by Reuters and others during the last Israeli-Lebanon conflict. In that case the stringers were more interested in providing pro-Palestinian propaganda than reporting what was happening.

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