General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Ok, age check, who remembers? [View all]Savannahmann
(3,891 posts)Interesting Note. I remember reading that Voyager I or II had ended up off the expected course slightly. I think it was a fraction of a degree or so. But someone wanted to know why NASA had mis calculated it. They wanted to figure out what assumed value was not correct. So they rounded up as much information that they could find on the original design and mission plan. It was helped by the discovery in a closet of several boxes of information. The problem was that the data was all on punch cards. They didn't have a working reader, and if they had a working reader, they didn't have a machine that would talk to the reader. If they did have that, they didn't have any idea what order the cards were supposed to be in or even if they had all the cards.
They exceeded the budget of $1 Million dollars just figuring out how impossible it would be to even ask the question. After a while they decided that it was best left alone, and moved on to other things.
Space Cowboys for real.