What kind of upgrades did Shuttle Columbia receive?
Well Ben, it had a lot of modifications done to it. The primary one is what we call the MEDS M-E-D-S, which is a Multi-functional Electronic Display System. It really is just a glass cockpit. We used to have old-style gauges and meters in there. But we are trying to bring it up to date with what you see in most airliners these days, and glass cockpit is the term they use. You also may remember that Columbia had a wiring problem on one of its last missions before the major down period. So what we did was we went in and inspected 95 percent of all the wires inside Columbia and replaced actually about 210 miles worth of wiring which actually is a significant percentage but not as much as you might think. There is a lot of wire inside each orbiter. We also removed about 1,000 pounds of structure we did that by replacing some steel with aluminum pieces – before Columbia was built rather strongly since it was the first orbiter built. We actually took some of the structure out and didn’t have
