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The drama that should have been Story of the Day was playing out in orbit 200 miles above Earth on the International Space Station. The computers on board had crashed. They are "essential," CBS' Daniel Sieberg explained, because "they fire on-board thrusters, occasionally needed, to maintain the Station's position in space and keep its solar panels pointed towards the sun." The ten people on board have been instructed "to move as little as possible to avoid jarring the Station," ABC's Charles Gibson (subscription required) told us. "They will even have to minimize exercise and limit toilet flushes."
Perhaps the networks downplayed the story's prominence because of the "international" part. The "frustration after frustration" felt by mission control as it tried to reboot the computers was felt by Russians not by NASA, ABC's Gibson reminded us. Only ABC had a reporter on the scene: Jim Sciutto told Gibson that the Russian technicians, "some of them former cosmonauts," told him they had never faced "a problem as difficult and as intractable as this one." NBC's Washington-based Tom Costello traced the problem back to the NASA astronauts' connecting "a new solar unit to the Station. Russian engineers believe a power surge crippled their computers." By the end of the day, faulty switches had been circumvented and only two of the six computers were still dead.
Meanwhile ABC's Ned Potter showed us a spacewalk by astronaut Danny Olivas to fix a six-inch-long rip in the insulating fabric of Space Shuttle Atlantis, which is docked at the Space Station. Potter showed us the spacewalker's eye view from Olivas' helmetcam. "He used a surgical staple gun and some pins…looking a little like a contractor on someone's roof."
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