WORDS OF WARNING

In America the Aerospace Safety Advisory Board warned that NASA was too tightly focused on short-term planning for Shuttle flights and was ignoring the long-term safety planning implications of such a narrow focus. The Board warned, ‘‘Unless appropriate steps to reduce future risk and increase reliability are taken expedi­tiously, NASA may eventually be forced to ground the system until time-consuming improvements can be made.’’ With the Shuttle suffering technical difficulties and foam shedding from the ET on practically every flight, it would only be a matter of time before the Board’s words would be proved to be prophetic in the extreme.

April began with a hunt for unexplained vibrations detected by the SAMS. The Expedition-4 crew entered and left their sleep stations four times while the experiment’s controllers at Huntsville monitored the vibrations picked up by the experiment. Acceleration data was down-linked to Huntsville from one of the MAMS low-frequency sensors. The high-frequency sensor was disabled at that time. The crew continued to take samples from the ADVASC experiment and stored them in the Biotechnology Refrigerator for return to Earth on STS-110. They were also preparing to deactivate the PCG-STES Unit 10.

On a lighter note Bursch described how they entertained themselves on such a long flight,

‘‘We have some foam balls that we try to throw the length of the station and really haven’t been too successful so far. But that’s kind of what we do for fun. Of course, we play with our food, like every good astronaut. Carl’s great on the keyboard. He has a keyboard up here that he plays. And we watch movies.’’