[WWI] Disaster Contest

[Chris Banyai-Riepl]

OK, so there I was, doing my thing on STS-97, and I had a bit of spare time.
I had packed a special box of stuff to work on, and I dug out the project
(either a Nieuport or a Pfalz, can't remember which, but it had to be one of
those, because at that time we all thought Strutters were CDL.  This'll make
sense later) and started working away at it.  Things went well, despite the
ribald comments from Joe and Carlos.  About three days into the mission,
though, things got really bad.  See, I decided to dig out my airbrush and
spray on some Alclad on the ready-to-paint model (see, that's why it had to
be something that was silver...).  Ventilation wasn't a problem, I thought,
because, well, hey, with those big doors open, what's the problem, right?
Plus, we were at that point firmly attached to the station, so there
shouldn't be any issues.  I forgot about the BBs though.  Of course, just
shaking the paint up in zero G is challenging enough, but when the BB broke
the bottle, and all that Alclad floated around the main bay of Endeavour,
well, Brent went into conniptions.  Luckily, nothing shorted out from little
balls of metal paint held in liquid suspension, and after some rather tense
moments (not sure if one could actually BE keelhauled on a spaceship, but I
came close!), I managed to clean it all up.  NASA was understandably
embarrassed by the whole situation, and quickly underwent a massive covert
operation to purge my name from all records of STS-97, and carefully
airbrush/crop me out of all official photos.  I have heard that an
astronomer in Kazakhstan managed to capture an image of the reflections of
the Alclad, though, which apparently created quite a visual reflective bloom
for a short period of time.

Okay, that might be a bit of a stretch, but I have no disaster stories.
See, you have to BUILD models in order to have disaster stories.  Right
Matt?  :-)

Sincerely,
Chris Banyai-Riepl
Publisher
Internet Modeler
http://www.internetmodeler.com