| COMM CHECK... The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia Michael Cabbage William Harwood New York: Free Press, 2004 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-7432-6091-6 | ||||
| ISBN 0-7432-6091-0 | 320p. | HC/BWI | $26.00 | |
| Page 31: | "Ramon and his family prepared to move to Houston. Training at Johnson was scheduled to begin in the summer of 1998. He gradually came to understood the importance of being his country's first astronaut." |
| S/B "came to understand". |
| Page 54: | "The mailbox-sized chunk tumbled down along the tank and hit one of the shuttle's twin rocket boosters an instant later." |
| I think "mailbox-sized chunk" is overstating the dimensions. |
| Page 54: | "...Kennedy's Vehicle Assembly Building, the mammoth facility where the orbiter, fuel tank and boosters are put to-gether for flight." |
| Hyphen unneeded: S/B "are put together". |
| Page 79: | "Normally bustling with activity, the pad was evacuated on launch day because of the danger inherent in the external tanks liquid hydrogen." |
| Missing apostrophe: S/B "external tank's". |
| Page 88: | "One experiment was designed to study the behavior of xenon at low temperatures, another was designed monitor Earth's ozone layer..." |
| Missing word: S/B "designed to monitor". |
| Page 96: | "I did not pass on Bob's little comment about 'Gee, are there some other ways to get pictures?' " Hale recalled later. "Remember, the pictures are going to be on orbit. It's not what happened during ascent. So I did not pass that along to them at the time. Whether that was a major screw-up on my part—I guess that maybe it was."1 |
| My opinion: This reveals the condescending attitude of a manager with TS clearance for an underling without, and probably the rationalization of someone with more on his plate than he should have to deal with. Bob Page's point was that the on-orbit pictures might show the result of what happened during ascent. It is a crucial distinction that, if appreciated by Hale and his superiors, might have saved Columbia's crew. |
| Page 212: | "In the weeks following the accident, Ham had been a lightening rod for criticisms of the Mission Management Team's poor handling of the foam issue." |
| Spelling error: S/B "lightning rod". |
| Page 214: | " 'Most of the investigators had a pretty light touch,' Wallace said, 'but not all of them. We actually had to throttle a couple of them a couple of times." |
| You know things are bad when a board has to strangle its own investigators <grin> But seriously, I know Wallace meant "throttle back". |
| Page 240: | "...some of the hot air blasting into the RCC cavity was exiting through the vents on the upper surface of the wing, carrying thin clouds of metallic vapor with it from melted insulation." |
| S/B "from melted wiring". Insulation is non-metallic. |
| Page 243: | "The superheated air left in the shuttle's wake that glowed in the dark sky like a phosphorescent contrail." |
| Extra word: S/B "wake glowed". |
| Page 275: | "Once in orbit, military telescopes and spy satellite would take pictures of the shuttle." |
| S/B "and spy satellites". (There's also a dangling participle.) |
| Page 289: | "After the Clinton White House announced plans to find a space shuttle replacement in the mid-1990s..." |
| I believe this S/B "to fund a space shuttle replacement". However, "find" is not precluded; it works if you look at it right. |
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