In 1990, I was an engineer working at the Space Sciences Division of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. We were building a payload containing several scientific instruments designed to measure airglow in the upper atmosphere. The payload was to be mounted and flown on the Earth side of polar orbiting NOAA TIROS satellite.

RAIDS instrument

Spacecraft design and development is somewhat unique. There is little margin for error, so lots and lots of testing is conducted to make sure everything works. Of course, this still doesn’t uncover all problems, as many spectacular spacecraft disasters have illustrated. I got involved in the project at about the mid point in development. Many of the major components were in fabrication and the flight software was already complete. There was little in terms of ground testing software, much of this testing was done by hand. This was not a large complex instrument, but it still required as long as three hours to fully test everything.

During the winter of 1990, there was a little down time. I had this crazy idea of automating most, if not all of the testing of our instrument. Armed with a wire wrap gun, an ISA bus prototype board, and Turbo C 2.0, I started working on the ground support interface board and software. The interface board connected the ground support equipment to an IBM PC/AT with 1 MB of RAM and a 20 MB hard drive. For testing automation, I developed a testing script language and compiler/runtime environment to execute test scripts.

Due to complications beyond our control, the experiment lost its ride on the particular NOAA satellite for which it was scheduled. The instrument, ground support equipment, and the PC/AT with all the software was packed up and placed in storage. The hope was that someday, another ride would come along and the instrument might be resurrected.

Last week, after nearly 17 years, I received an email from one of the remaining scientists on the project. It appears there is an opportunity to mount the instrument onto the International Space Station. It will be flown on a Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle and deployed on the Experiment Module Exposed Facility.

From what I was told, the instrument, ground support equipment and that old IBM PC/AT were brought out of storage and unpacked. They fired up the PC and surprisingly it booted up. The next day, when the PC was powered on again, the hard drive spun briefly, and then ground to a halt. It failed completely. Apparently, there was no possibility of recovery.

Fortunately, there were some 5 1/4 floppy disks lying around with some backups of some of the software. Oddly enough, I also kept copies of some of it also, as it was one of the first, significant projects I worked on. The floppies were still readable after all those years.

Finding a PC that could accept an ISA board was a minor challenge, and the original DOS had to be replaced with FreeDOS. Turbo C 2.01 is now freely available, which is a big help. It sounds crazy, but it just might work…