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What is the secret to safe space flight? Never launch a shuttle on December 31 or January 1st.

The worry is that shuttle computers aren’t designed to make the change from the 365th day of the old year to the first day of the new year while in flight. NASA has never had a shuttle in space December 31 or January 1. [...]

“Under some weird circumstance … if we have an ‘Oh my god,’ and we have to be up there, I am sure we would figure out a way to operate the vehicle safely,” said Steve Oswald, a vice president for Boeing Co., the parent company of the builders and designers of NASA’s shuttles. “It just wouldn’t be flying in the normal certified mode that we are used to flying.”

That statement taken from a recent CNN Science & Space article. You would think our computer worries concerning the fabled computer malfunction during date changes would be resolved by now.