Technical problems with the movie

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Boomerang
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Post by Boomerang »

I want to say it was some time in early 1999 that it was built. To my knowledge it was never used previously as anything else.
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Post by p51 »

I remember seeing this in the theaters when it came out because we had teachers that were really pushing the movie at the time (I was in high school then, I know some of you weren’t even a gleam in your parent’s eyes at that time). What immediately popped out to me even then was that Mission Control at JSC in Houston wasn’t involved at all. Once a vehicle leaves the pad, KSC turns it over to Houston right away. Mind you, Houston wouldn’t have been able to do anything without communications with the orbiter, but they would have done a “Apollo 13, all hands on deck” situation to try to get the orbiter down with all their engineers. At least they didn’t do like “Space Cowboys” did where people were at Kennedy watching the orbiter go up, then moments later had them walking into the MCC at Houston, which is several hundred miles away.
The orbiter at that time had alternate landing sites all over the world (and entire NASA and military teams ready to go at a moment’s notice once one was ID’d as a landing site, all the European TAL sites on a launch had teams just standing around at all of them during every launch just in case). But even then, you’d need all kinds of software for landing and approaches for any of them. That landing would have been dead reckoning, without any approach vectors or communications from the ground. Nope, Andie would have really landed Atlantis in a forest, on a lake or into someone’s bean field that way.
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