This very system was responsible for the failure of the first shuttle launch. It turns out that there was a 1⁄64 chance that the clocks in the primary system and the clocks in the BFS would fail to synchronize on startup, and the very first scheduled launch hit the jackpot: the clocks didn’t sync, and NASA had to scrub the mission, and spend weeks figuring out what went wrong.
Interesting, I didn’t know that! Wikipedia says “A launch attempt two days earlier was scrubbed because of a timing problem in one of Columbia’s general-purpose computers.” and NASA says “Launch April 10 postponed due to timing skew in orbiter’s general purpose computer system. Backup flight software failed to synchronize with primary avionics software system.”, but this article explains the problem in extreme detail.
This very system was responsible for the failure of the first shuttle launch. It turns out that there was a 1⁄64 chance that the clocks in the primary system and the clocks in the BFS would fail to synchronize on startup, and the very first scheduled launch hit the jackpot: the clocks didn’t sync, and NASA had to scrub the mission, and spend weeks figuring out what went wrong.
Interesting, I didn’t know that! Wikipedia says “A launch attempt two days earlier was scrubbed because of a timing problem in one of Columbia’s general-purpose computers.” and NASA says “Launch April 10 postponed due to timing skew in orbiter’s general purpose computer system. Backup flight software failed to synchronize with primary avionics software system.”, but this article explains the problem in extreme detail.