Every day, the shuttle crew wakes up to find that their onboard printer has spit out a dozen pages of information called the “execute package.” It contains updates to their daily schedule, new or altered procedures, and anything else they need to know for the day. And each morning, the flight controllers on the ground try to put something funny on the front page. Normally, it doesn’t actually end up being that funny, but hey, they try.
Yesterday the shuttle/ISS mated stack had to “deboost” itself — in other words, they had to lower the vehicles’ altitude very slightly — to avoid a potential collision with another piece of orbital debris. The military, who does the tracking of all the debris in orbit, identified the offending item as a 4-inch piece of a Chinese rocket body launched in 2000.
And of course Yao Ming is a Chinese Rocket — a Houston Rocket.
I think this may be the first piece of execute package humor that has truly made me laugh.
