If NASA is relying on the Texas power grid, they sure as hell better have backups.
I find it hard to believe they never tested the backup system. Maybe the first time it was used for real.
They have most certainly done drills and tested the backup. This was probably the first time it was used for real.
Shouldn’t Nasa have backup pwer that pickup with zero interruption?
The incident was linked to upgrade work that was underway in the Johnson Space Center’s building.
Backup systems usually fail over during regular outages. But during work, they might have had some stuff disconnected for access or safety. Or some worked accidentally tripped something that caused a failure in a weird way. Or it was a brownout that wasn’t enough to trip the failover.
Curious why the back up power didn’t come on till 90 minutes later though… seems like to me a long time if you’re supposed to be in constant communication with a crew aboard a space craft.
The backup is in Colorado. You keep your primary and secondary at two different geolocations in case of an emergency. 90 minutes to bring a system online and communicating is pretty good.
Can you imagine? 90 minutes of being on the ISS just thinking, yeah… they’ll get back in touch, definitely. No problem. I’m not stranded here…
Lucky USSPACECOM was in Colorado and not Alabama or this would not have been an option.
