You all remember how the world went into shock as the millennium closed in as many feared that clocks would go haywire at midnight and the entire world’s computer infrastructure would collapse as they hadn’t been designed to operate after the year 2000. Well, the world didn’t come to an end and the millennium bug was hardly noticed at all, but now it seems we’re closing in on the next “millennium bug”, namely in the year 2007. NASA has now had to postpone the launch of its Discovery space shuttle until after new year, just because they are afraid that the computers on board will start to make a mess when the dates go back to January 1st.
“The problem, according to Hale, is that the shuttle’s computers do not reset to day one, as ground-based systems that support shuttle navigation do. Instead, after December 31, the 365th day of the year, shuttle computers figure January 1 is just day 366.”
That NASA hasn’t been able to solve this any better than to postpone the entire launch is pretty amazing, but as the saying goes; better safe then sorry. If the launch is delayed it would mean that our first native (read Swedish) astronaut in space, Christer Fuglesang, will have to wait until January 2007 instead of December 7, 2006.
