Alice:

It looks like I was either asking for a different configuration or
asking about the telemetry I was seeing on the displays.

Everything was going fine until we hit about 1:55 in the afternoon.
Suddenly, we lost all communication with the spacecraft. Dead silence.
Nothing. We’d lost comm. And it didn’t come back.

Nine times out of ten, when we lose signal, it’s a problem with the
ground station: Something’s out of configuration, or whatever. Because
this upload was so important, we had our network operations engineers
online. We call them NOPEs: That’s their acronym. We also had our Pluto
Aces—which are the controllers there in our ops center. So we had the
Pluto Aces ask the NOPEs at the ground station in Australia to check
their system configuration. All those checks came back that everything
was nominal with the ground system.

You know that feeling in the pit of your stomach when something is
occurring, and you can’t believe it’s happening? We’d come nine and a
half years on this journey, and I couldn’t believe this—we’d never lost
communications. You allow yourself that 5, 10 seconds of feeling that
fear and disbelief, but then everything we trained for started to kick
in.

We had never recovered from this kind of anomaly before. The question
was, could we do it in time to start the flyby sequence, scheduled to
begin on July 7?

We found cots, blankets, and pillows, and someone brought in an air
mattress. There weren’t enough, so we were sharing.



Alan:

Glen, what’s up?

I’ll meet you in the MOC; see you in five minutes.

I didn’t call for any discussion of it from the other science team
members in the room. I didn’t even let my flyby-planning czar, Leslie,
weigh in. I knew for a fact that Alice’s team needed crisp direction,
with no fuzz on it, and that they needed to focus on saving the main
event, rather than the preliminary observations we were losing with the
spacecraft idled due to the reboot. I told Alice that anything beyond
getting us back on track to initiate the close flyby itself, on time,
would be a distraction.

You should have seen it. Without a single complaint, people worked day
and night—without so much as changes of clothes or places to properly
sleep or shower, in some cases for four days straight. Some people were
sleeping on desks. Some were living on just two or three hours of
catnaps per day. There was no time for restaurant meals. We brought in
people just to find takeout and keep the team fed.



Glen:

We’ve lost contact with the spacecraft.

The team just did what they needed to do. I started searching for places
for people to sleep, trying to find something more comfortable than
their office floors.



Brian:

If that is what happened, then the spacecraft will restart using the
backup computer, and 60 to 90 minutes from now we’ll get a radio signal
with New Horizons operating on the backup computer.