fisher@wsgate.DEC (Burns Fisher, MRO3-1/E13, DTN 231-4108.) (11/04/85)
>How is the shuttle controlled from Germany? Very carefully! :-) Actually, the entire mission is not being controlled form Germany, only the Spacelab stuff. The German control center is equivalent to what has been done from Goddard in past Spacelab missions. Houston is still controlling the "operational" aspects. I believe I read recently that the way it works is that the German control center is linked to Houston by satellite, and the data passes from there into the regular network. >Had any luck getting NASA Select on cable? NO! My cable company (Greater Media, in central Mass) was at least mildly interested, but there were two hangups. 1) Assuming they could get it, how should they distribute it. Apparently the issue here is that they would like to get it on the public access channel (citizen of the town requested it and all that). I felt that was better than nothing, but that I could not predict ahead of time when interesting stuff would be on, and 24-hr/day would be far better. This means they need to allocate an additional channel for it. This might be possible, but it requires a lot more bureaucracy (they serve several towns, and everything but the local access has to go to all the towns, I guess). 2) How to get it...Apparently they have spare receivers; that was not an insurmountable problem. The real problem was that the satellite that NASA uses, Satcom F1R at the time, did not carry anything else that they were already using, so they would have needed an additional dish. I think NASA has moved to F3R; I don't know if that has any commercial stuff on it. The other problem is that F1R and F3R are both very far west (over the Pacific?). It was not clear to be whether they could receive it here or not. Burns UUCP: ... {decvax|allegra|ucbvax}!decwrl!rhea!dvinci!fisher ARPA: fisher%dvinci.dec@decwrl.ARPA