May 15 2021 9 mins 1
At T-minus 6.6 seconds, as the 120-ton space shuttle sits, surrounded by almost 4 Million pounds of rocket fuel is ready to defy gravity as its on board computers take in the command.
As its pressure sensors, pumps, temperatures are nominal the computers give the order to light the main engines and the choreography of incredible engineering happens as each of the three engines fire off precisely at 160 milli seconds apart, tons of super-cooled liquid fuel pouring into combustion chambers, the ship rocking on its launch pad, held to the ground only by bolts.
It is always an absolute beauty to watch a shuttle take off, as the time goes T-minus 0 seconds. At this time the on-board computers check all the sensor data, they give the order to light the solid rocket boosters. In less than one second, the rocket achieves 6.6 million pounds of thrust!
And the spacecraft majestically takes off its launch pad!
No human pushes a button to make this happen, there is no astronaut sits with a joy stick to set the shuttle in orbit, it's an awesome display of power of computers and software doing its job in a well-choreographed manner.
But how much work does the software does? what makes this remarkable?
In this episode, we will be discussing about how this engineering marvel defies gravity and how important and crucial for its software to be bug free or GLITCH free ;)
