Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs
bbc.com358 points by janpot 11 hours ago
358 points by janpot 11 hours ago
I found this interesting: NASA RELL (Robotic External Leak Detector) [1].
"NASA’s Robotic External Leak Locator (RELL) is a robotic, remote-controlled tool that helps mission operators detect the location of an external leak and rapidly confirm a successful repair.
… Two instruments working in sync give RELL its ammonia-detecting superpowers. … Mass spectrometer & Ion vacuum pressure gauge"
I’m imagining the robots from Silent Running 1972.
I’m imagining a pool snail
“What is my purpose?”
“You crawl around outside and smell for astronaut wizz.”
One thing that’s rarely discussed about spaceflight is that for the foreseeable future, it will have to happen without the animals that humans rely upon on Earth. I think this will expose just how strong that reliance is in some areas.
> After multiple inspections and sealant applications, Nasa reported in January that pressure readings suggested a stable configuration had been reached - though there remained uncertainty about whether the leak had truly been sealed or whether air was simply escaping elsewhere.
I'm clearly not understanding what they're trying to say here. If _one_ leak was sealed, but the air was "escaping elsewhere", it would still be a leak, causing pressure readings to drop.
I read it as an inability to measure the leak rate immediately after the repair. If the rate is slow, measuring it takes time.
It's an almost 30 year old nearly 500 ton structure subjected to radiation, bombardment by starstuff and debris, the stresses of docking and undocking, of boosts, and of constant heating and cooling as it passes in and out of the sun. Getting a clear picture of the comings and going of gasses is probably not easy.
Also in 2021, Nauka (the cursed Russian module) arrived on the station, and accidentally fired thrusters while attached, fighting against the attitude control of the station, flipping it around 540 degrees and putting a lot of stress that the station wasn't designed for on all the structural parts.
Are there things that happen on board that increase the pressure - eg fermentation whether it’s experiment or in humans?
It could be that the instruments were looking at the differential pressure. E.g. the pressure in that section compared to another. A leak elsewhere would throw off the comparison.
Maybe someone who knows more about the ISS than I do can answer this:
Naively, I would assume that there are airlocks between the different sections of the ISS. I would also assume that they would close these airlocks while doing the kind of work they are doing to repair the leaks.
So, assuming I'm right (and my assumptions might be wrong,) why do the astronauts need to shelter?
There aren’t even doors between sections. Airlocks are serious things, there is one or two for station for EVA. There are multiple hatches for docking spacecraft.
One of the innovations of ISS is larger docking adapter with bulkhead that is removed after docking. Russian section still uses hatches. All of the cables go through the docking adapter or hatch which makes impossible to close door or quickly disconnect.
There are doors (called hatches) between the segments. Each segment flew up separately and pressurized. So there are actually two hatches between each segment, since there’s one on each.
If things go wrong, they're already in the vehicle supposed to bring them back. It might be upsetting to be 3 locked doors away from your best way to come back home
This is the right answer - if it goes wrong they are already placed in the escape vehicle, sitting in their space suits.
[flagged]
Is there any rocket-builder without a history of blowing things up?
Saturn 1 and 1B didn't have failure I think ? Tho that's just one model
Made by Chrysler. They had plenty of failures with the Juno I and Juno II launchers.
Obviously not. Blowing things up is the reason for rocketry to exist and its historical basis.
A fun fact about SpaceX:
Remember our esteemed national American hero, and spiritual father of SpaceX, Wernher von Braun.
Wernher wrote a book about Mars referring to "The Elon", an imaginary Mars governing body.
The father of Elon Musk claimed that Elon's name came from there.
Well at least, that's what he claims. Reality doesn't matter if you have billions and power. History can be rewritten.
The publishing-houses print history books. The rich own the publishing-houses. Q.E.D. The rich control the history books.
Why did you feel the need to post this comment?
>Why did you feel the need to post this comment?
Maybe parent feels like rocket science is a field that should have few launch failures?
I can't give you a quantitative answer since I'm usually focused on new research rather than what company/nation did said research... but their stuff does seem to blow up on the launchpad more often than NASA's :-)
Pop quiz, how many rockets has SpaceX launched in the last 5 years? How many have blown up the launchpad?
NASA does not produce any launch vehicles. It produces payloads and buys launch services from others.
Unless you count test artifacts, an actual catastrophic failure of a rocket on a launchpad (or even in flight) has been rare in the last 10 years.
Trivia question. When did NASA last launch a rocket not built by a commercial entity
Because he suffers from MDS and as such can not but complain endlessly about anything which Musk has started. It is an unfortunate affliction for which the only cure seems to be extraction from whatever environment the sufferer inhabits and removal to another environment where there are no other sufferers, then slowly acclimatising to this new environment until the sufferer is again able to consider the person causing the derangement objectively.
It is unfortunate because it totally misses the mark in this instance. SpaceX does have a policy of testing early and testing often which has created quite the number of spectacular 'rapid unscheduled disassembles' but their record with regard to passenger vehicles is thus far unscathed, most likely because they have 'tested Dragon early and often' so as to find failures before the vehicle was put into service.
> Because he suffers from MDS and as such can not but complain endlessly about anything which Musk has started. It is an unfortunate affliction for which the only cure seems to be extraction from whatever environment the sufferer inhabits and removal to another environment where there are no other sufferers, then slowly acclimatising to this new environment until the sufferer is again able to consider the person causing the derangement objectively.
Pot, meet kettle. It sounds like both of you should go outside and touch some grass.
I really detest Musk but Dragon has had a really good track record.
Falcon 9 is also the most successful vehicle ever flown.
The modern zeitgeist of not liking someone in one area so now everything associated with them must be bad is insufferable.
... and returning is mostly by gravity.
Yes, well, that and by aerobraking in the atmosphere where all that potential energy the capsule gained during launch has to be shed. There's plenty of reentry videos from Starship tests which show what happens to vehicle parts which are less protected by heat shields.
Well, I won't claim to know the answer, but "please do not move between different airlocked sections while this work is underway" sounds a lot like the definition of "shelter" to me
In this case, per the article, "shelter" meant "shelter in a capsule capable of returning to earth and put on the spacesuits that you wear during return to earth".
I.e. leaving the actual ISS structure entirely.
I would guess they're worried about breaking something, but thanks for the clarification (and apologies for not having RTFA)
Repairing a leak with an uncertain cause could be at high risk of catastrophic decompression if it was caused by certain types of corrosion or stress.
There are normally-open air-tight hatches between modules. Various utility connections and air ducts are normally run through the open hatches so it would take a bit of work to disconnect these connections before they could be closed.
Not exactly something you want to be doing under time pressure.
What’s the reason against separate conduit for utilities?
If such a conduit would connect two sections that the hatch is meant to isolate, you would have to make the conduit and everything running through it airtight, even under a catastrophic loss of air. If the conduit didn't seal as well as the hatch, which is meant to withstand hard vacuum on the other side of it, it would defeat the purpose of the hatch.
They just didn't have enough of reserved general purpose connections for future use. I guess this woild be especially the case with the Russian modules, which were literally surplus Soviet manned space army outposts(such a thing do not make a lot of sense, they did it anyway).
Those would need to be connected during docking and sealed separately anyway if you wanted to seal the hatch. More failure points.
Just a guess: Harder to build and operate with more failure modes and less opportunity for intervention.
You'd still need to pull out the utilities and close a now second hatch in the conduit to seal the thing. What would be the point?
> Naively, I would assume that there are airlocks between the different sections of the ISS.
There are not. The airlocks on the ISS are either docking modules for spacecraft, for spacewalks, or for deploying satellites.
The crew shelters in the vehicles so that in case of an emergency they can evacuate immediately.
I think the service module is both structurally and functionally critical. If it is failing and you do not know why, catastrophic failure is presumably possible, not just some air loss. A hole or crack in the module is now apparently double the size it was until recently, that is a trend that presumably could continue to rapid unscheduled disassembly.
Compression loss can lead to a decompression of sorts if I had to guess... it is a vaccum out there. The force from a decompression can yield a chain reaction or strongly disrupt the entire station.
Can't they just get things out of the module and paint it fresh? Maybe with some special paint, or with several layers of a paint?
Obviously they can't, it looks like an obvious solution they couldn't have missed. But I wonder why it is impossible to do.
For every complex, difficult and hard problem, there is a simple, easy and wrong solution.
Paint obviously is not the right tool for making seals air tight.
> For every complex, difficult and hard problem, there is a simple, easy and wrong solution. > Paint obviously is not the right tool for making seals air tight.
So my obvious solution is obviously too obvious to be right, and obviously the right solution is not obvious.
The sad thing, is you are just reiterating what I've said already, without providing any useful answer. "Paint obviously is not the right tool" is a statement that not just not obvious for me, it looks simply wrong. They search for microcracks and use a sealant to seal them. Sealant is not a paint obviously, but in the same ballpark.
It is not obvious to me that there is no specialized type of paint that would be appropriate.
Doing the whole module sounds like a lot of mass though.
It's hard vacuum on one side. There's a reason the word "hard" is used to describe it.
A few years ago a Soyuz was improperly drilled during manufacture. This was patched with a super epoxy... and then began leaking air on orbit. Paint won't seal what a super aerospace epoxy failed to seal.
> There's a reason the word "hard" is used to describe it.
Because it's more extreme.
Do you think a soft vacuum of 0.002 atmospheres of pressure would be notably easier to prevent leaks into?
> A few years ago a Soyuz was improperly drilled during manufacture. This was patched with a super epoxy... and then began leaking air on orbit. Paint won't seal what a super aerospace epoxy failed to seal.
Wasn't the fix on the ground a secret patch by the person that drilled the hole? I don't trust that to have been done properly.
And then when they noticed it was leaking... they used the super aerospace epoxy. Which was labeled as temporary but as far as I know it's still the fix.
Also that was a serious hole, 2mm wide, not a microhole like you'd try to fix with paint.
The odds of the leak being on a surface that can be painted is low. Most likely it's in a gasket or seal that has degraded
Flexseal obviously
You're being sarcastic, but I would like a technical explanation of why this would not work.
Delta P
Delta P is one atmosphere or less, like 15 PSI. Lots of stuff can handle 15 PSI.
Now, will it immediately off-gas and embrittle on exposure to vacuum? Different question.
How about glue?
Bubble gum? Like do they chew space bubble gum that they could then smoosh in the holes?
In college, we'd use toothpaste for the holes left from nails in the walls we hung up our posters with.
Isn't the main problem finding the hole and not what should be used to fill the hole?
Just spray Fix-a-Flat everywhere.
Or coat the outside with a soapy water solution.
They need Matt Damon, a chopped up wooden crucifix, and some silicone caulking
They need Phil Swift, "To show the powerful adhesion of flex-seal, I sawed this space station in half!"
Don’t try this if your toothpaste is the blue or green minty flavoured type. You’re welcome.
We actually did this in my freshman dorm room, as the paint color almost exactly matched the original Crest "green".
Duct Tape, the answer is always duct tape
Found the scrub who doesn’t know about gaff tape
I don't think you can be an astronaut on the ISS without being a handyman, and the handyman's secret weapon is duct tape.
They did use space tape (Kapton) and epoxy for that weird case with the hole drilled in the ISS.
Some problems i can see with that:
It might be hard to access the actual pressure hull from the inside (there's probably insulation and padding on top)
If you use paint, you somehow have to get rid of the solvent in it when it dries, which might be a problem when painting a whole module
Air filtration is one of the hardest things do deal with in space.
I don't know what solvents would do, but I remember that astronauts' bone density loss in space means there are challenges around managing the significant amount of calcium captured by the air scrubbers in the ISS.
Wouldn't the calcium go out in your urine?
Yes. It was the urine processor that had problems with excess calcium, not the air scrubber.
https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/f8ca865b-1...
Do they literally sweat their bones away? I can imagine how it would work on molecular level via sweat / breathing, but I would expect >99% to be simply pissed and shat away.
If you mean on the outside, paints that apply well in vacuum and microgravity probably need to be developed and tested first.
If you mean on the inside, it'd be a lot of time and disruption to devote to maintenance on a station that's already having to spend an increasing amount of time on maintenance instead of science.
The modules have a lot of stuff that has been wired between them over the years, all that would need to be sorted out, consequences understood and more before ever starting the work, and by then it'll be time for the ISS to retire anyway.
> well in vacuum and microgravity probably
Wouldn't all paint works well in microgravity? If it didn't, I would think you wouldn't be able to apply it to your floor, walls, and ceiling, with the same paint.
I think it's hard to say. Water sprayed at a ceiling doesn't congeal into a ball the way water floating in microgravity does.
Paint that would fall to the ground if it didn't stick to anything on Earth, would just be floating around in microgravity. Any dissolved gasses or moisture can usually passively sort themselves out due to their differing masses, but again, not in microgravity.
Yeah, the application system is probably the tricky bit, rather than the paint.
> Any dissolved gasses or moisture can usually passively sort themselves out due to their differing masses, but again, not in microgravity.
This is a solved problem with the ECLSS system [1], required from humans releasing ~3.3 lbs of water per day, and exhaling gases that must not accumulate or form dead zones, and normal VOCs scrubbers [2] due to most modern materials releasing them.
I suspect it would be more of a "how many extra filters do we send" type problem and cycling the collected water a couple more times.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-concentrations-o...
Not OP but I’d imagine the big problem with microgravity is not after application but during application. No idea the scale of that problem but obviously open cans of liquid paint are not realistic (not that anyone was suggesting they were)
yeah, why can't they just make astronauts wear goggles, then stop the fans, and tell them to squirt some superglue in the air to let it clog the hole?
Put a bit of spare sheet metal over the hole and let the pressure differential hold it down. For added safety affix a post-it not with DO NOT REMOVE written on it in all capital letters and underlined. They can even use those special zero-g ballpoint pens they spent eleventy-billion dollars inventing back during the johnson administration.
But they still haven't located the leak. My blob of glue idea solves that by automatically permeating into the cracks.
wait, do they have to have matched CTE and k to the existing material... hmm
Do you know what causes superglue to harden? Do you think that will be found in a vacuum?
Oh come on you can't be serious.
Clearly this needs some JB-Weld :P
Flex Seal would be my suggestion. It works as seen on TV
"To show the powerful adhesion of flex-seal, I sawed this space station in half!"
Cardboard's out. No cardboard derivatives.
Paper?
No Paper. No string. No sellotape.
> But I wonder why it is impossible to do.
Because, space. It's hard. Unbelievably hard.
Does someone know if push come to shove, do they have a ready to go escape pod or ship to go back Earth anytime in an emergency? How many backups do they get?
The rule is that at all times enough return vessels must be docked to the ISS for everyone on board.
These are usually the same vessels they used to get up to the station.
This has the consequence that if they need to re-dock one of the vessels (for whatever reason) all the astronauts that would normally use that vessel must board it for that menuvre. Just in case it fails to dock again.
And they don't normally have spares.
IIRC, this is a good video on the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=82YHM12n2JI
There is spare capacity on the Crew Dragon for an extra astronaut or maybe two on return. They'd rather not have to use it but NASA took steps to enable it when Soyuz MS-22 suffered a coolant leak in 2022 and had to be returned empty.
For every human onboard ISS there is always place in the docked spaceship. Exceptions: when spaceships break, replacements are usually sent - like, when Soyuz lost coolant or Starliner was considered too unreliable. While waiting for replacements, those ploblematic spacecrafts still serve as lifeboats, except maybe Crew Dragons can carry more people than those 4 they usually carry...
Crew Dragon can do 7 astronauts, but NASA only wanted SpaceX to build it for 4.
The contingency for the Starliner astronauts in case of an emergency was to strap them down in the cargo area. Which wouldnt be optimal, but better than certain/likely death onboard the ISS.
They should keep some FlexSeal up there !
Super thin margin stuff like space flight only "works" because they cross their Ts and dot their Is. There's probably no danger here, the repairs will probably go fine and be uneventful, but you gotta treat every situation like it's the real deal because otherwise it'll get you when it does happen.
Agree to precautionary principle. Disagree to certainty of fixing because this is a long standing leak which just doubled in intensity: either it got bigger, or there are more. Either way, we have no reason to be optimistic a bigger leak problem has a faster MTTR or even triage.
Who is the "they" in your post? The ISS is a bit interesting because its a cooperation between NASA and Roscosmos.
Nasa said the segment had suffered from cracks and leaks
I expected better from the BBC.
Hmm? If you mean the capitalization, that’s BBC style.
That sounds weird. They write "Nasa" mid-sentence too, yet keep other acronyms (ISS) intact.
Some style guides distinguish between an acronym (Nasa, say the word as it's written) and initialism (ISS, say each letter)
Yes, including the BBC’s: https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsstyleguide/all#:~:text=our%20style...
That certainly explains it; this particular acronym is even called out distinctly in the style guide.
But "Nasa" still looks weirder to me than "NASA" does.
Like writing "The Scsi bus went Awol" instead of "The SCSI bus went AWOL" also looks weird.
The NYT respects acronyms, but only up to four characters:
Why Nascar, Not NASCAR?
Auto racing fans chafe at our rules on acronyms. Here they are, from our stylebook:
acronyms. An acronym is a word formed from the first letter (or letters) of each word in a series: NATO from North Atlantic Treaty Organization; radar from radio detection and ranging. (Unless pronounced as a word, an abbreviation is not an acronym.) When an acronym serves as a proper name and exceeds four letters, capitalize only the first letter: Unesco; Unicef.
We limit the uppercasing to four letters because longer strings of capitals are distracting and tend to jump off the page.
https://archive.nytimes.com/afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/...
Or at least, that used to be the rule. I can't find anything newer about their style on their site, but here's a recent article (not published under the Athletic either) that uses "NASCAR":
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/sports/autoracing/kyle-bu...
What happens if there is disagreement about whether something is an acronym or initialism? For example, Europeans usually treat ESA as an acronym and US Americans as an initialism. I just searched the BBC and it is inconsistent, sometimes ESA, sometimes Esa. Perhaps representing their own uncertainty.
Do they have things like Oxygen Candles or can those not be used in space?
They were definitely used on Mir- in 1997 one caught fire, blocking the crew's access to their escape Soyuz, though they put it out.
It looks like NASA helped redesign it to be safer, creating the modern Solid Fuel Oxygen Generator (SFOG) system still in use on the ISS as the backup.
Yes and I believe they do regularly use them on the Russian side, at least.
They were also the cause of a fire on Mir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_EO-23
Candles are useful when oxygen has been consumed because of respiration or a fire. They're not useful in a leak.
Conservation of mass: if a cubic meter of air escapes, that's 1.25 kg, and you need at least that much in candles. (You actually need 2 kg because the candle isn't solid oxygen)
There's ultimately 1.2 t of atmosphere on the ISS. This will also result in a pure oxygen atmosphere, which is dangerous. You need nitrogen.
I think you're double counting; you need 1.25 kg of oxygen and nitrogen combined to replace 1 cubic metre of air.
1.2t of candles doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount of extra payload if they would really be valuable in an emergency. The ISS weighs 400 tons and a napkin estimate says it has had 1000 tons of resupply missions. The candles have a shelf life of 10+ years.
You need 1.25 kg of gas. Candles don't consist solely of oxygen, the ones the Russians use utilize lithium perchlorate (LiClO4). When they finish burning, you are left with a lithium chloride ash (LiCl), which will be 40% mass of what you started with.
It works out to be more efficient, at least in terms of mass, to send up large tanks of compressed gas instead.
I thought it had a pure oxygen atmosphere to prevent the bends? Why is it dangerous?
NASA used pure O2 in space until the end of the Apollo program, but the Shuttle and later used the same air we breathe today, 1atm 80% N2/20% O2. Note that in space, the pure O2 was at 0.4atm, so roughly twice the oxygen partial pressure, but only slightly more dangerous than the air we are breathing now. (You need about 0.4atm to keep your lungs from collapsing, so that's the lower limit.)
Why the difference? It's a question of what risks you were most afraid of. Even today, every single spacewalk is done at 0.4atm pure O2- trying to do a spacewalk at 100kPa even the strongest man in the world would have trouble bending his arms- so before a spacewalk the astronauts need to spend several hours pre-breathing pure O2 to get all the nitrogen out of their bloodstream before they can do a spacewalk. The Apollo program thought it was safer if the astronauts could do a spacewalk at literally any point in the mission, so that's what the spacecraft was designed around.
On the other hand, for long duration spaceflight, introducing a different pressure and atmosphere is just another potential source of health problems. Even today, the largest source of information on how human bodies last under 0.4atm pure O2 is the three Skylab missions from 1973-1974. And so the Soviets- who were always more interested in space stations than the moon- and NASA during the Shuttle era went with the atmosphere that seemed like it offered less health risks for people staying on a space station.
Okay, so what about the Apollo 1 fire? To speed up testing, Apollo 1 did two tests at the same time: the Plugs-Out Test, where the astronauts were in the spacecraft with everything running and practicing their countdown, and the Overpressure test where they pressurized the spacecraft to 1.4 atm (to mimic the pressure differential in outer space). And they did it with pure O2. So you had all of these electronics running in an environment at 1.4atm pure O2. And that was incredibly dangerous, in a way that actual spaceflight, a mere 0.4atm O2, was not. But it was just a test, another in a long string of them, and no one involved ever really analyzed it as a potential hazard.
After Apollo 1 a few things were changed: one was that they did the Plugs Out test and the Overpressure test at different times, and a lot of stuff was turned off for the Overpressure test. Another was that the Apollo capsule at takeoff was 1atm 80/20 until a couple of minutes into flight, when it dumped the cabin atmosphere overboard and replaced it with pure O2 at 0.4atm. That's why the astronauts carried little packs in their arms in all the pictures of them getting into the spacecraft, that's the pure O2 tank that they were breathing off of until they could switch to the atmosphere in the cabin after it was replaced.
They breathe a normal mixture of O2 and nitrogen at 1 atmosphere of pressure. A pure oxygen environment is horrifically dangerous if fire ever breaks out.
Apollo I disaster suggests pure oxygen atmospheres are to be avoided.
And the 1961 fire that killed cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko in an altitude chamber. The Soviets covered it up until the 1980's, so NASA made the same mistake.
it was already cancelled and they can return back to normal operations
BBC were reporting 1 of 2 leaks are apparently fixed so it was at least a partial success.
Imagine something like this happening halfway to Mars and zero chance of escaping, getting any help or parts sent to you.
Recently started an embedded hardware/software job. Shipping firmware to the manufacturer feels like that for the device classes that have no internet.
My first week on the job they told me they're about to manufacture 20k units and can you please fix this bug in the firmware by Friday?
I've never shipped anything to real customers in the wild before, so let me tell you how insanely stressed I was to open the firmware and find a 10k lines of C contained entirely within a single switch statement. I think they used some no-code tool to graphically design a state machine then plopped the generated code straight into the device.
Nearly the same experience. Had to fix an issue in a boot loader. It came down to improper setup of the memory controllers ECC engine. It would correct and ignore a single fault. If you managed to get two faults it would raise an exception that was not handled and the boot would fail. For the customer this meant that a reboot might randomly brick the unit until you go in and manually power cycle it.
Just convincing them that their problem boiled down to a single incorrect bit was difficult enough but then having to, in a day, build and successfully operate a test harness to prove the fix worked was the real stress.
I do not miss embedded engineering.
Anything special you noticed about the deployment processes involved with that versus more typical software engineering work?
Software can be updated and patched, even if you have to manually email customers a bespoke exe that pokes bytes into a compiled dll.
Generally firmware can't be updated by the end user because there is physically no way to do so without returning the hardware. (Unless an update mechanism is specifically implemented in hardware, obv)
Pucker factor goes way up because if you ship a bug, there's no way back. If you aren't careful, you can break physical devices which can have consequences anywhere from thousands of RMAs to burning down a user's house depending on the hardware and how bad you fucked up.
The deployment process itself is about the same. Tests and more tests, including testing on prototype and/or pre-production units. Hardware testing can get wild depending on application, but I don't think any SWE would find it too surprising. Then you email a binary to your manufacturer and pray
I can’t quite imagine, even shipping on prem stuff is much harder than the cloud. Especially when people can mess with stuff
The Zvezda module has been in orbit since July 2000.
I don't think any crewed interplanetary mission is going to last that long for the foreseeable future.
There have been quite a few instances over the years of Zvezda requiring repairs that would have been impossible without resupply from Earth.
I suppose that they were counting on the capability to resupply, otherwise they might have carried more contingencies from launch, but still.
Ideally your Mars transit vehicle hasn't been taking 90 minute heating and cooling cycles nonstop for 26 years.
Well one side will be facing the sun and the other will be facing the void, so there might be similar issues.
There'a maneuver called a "BBQ roll" where you basically set the craft to doing a barrel roll in order to prevent any one side from overheating. I image that could help some.
IIRC during transit you'd want as much mass between you and the Sun (as shielding), and as small of a cross section facing the Sun. Probably also to reduce heat reaching the propellants.
So in a cylindrical ship you'd want to have one end pointing at the Sun most of the trip. This is, of course, very different in effect on the hull compared to the repeated expansion and contraction of heating cycles.
That's not necessarily true. Even spaceships in LEO will perform temperature-driven rolls so as to distribute heat and radiation. I have to assume that long-term ships like interplanetary transport will do the same.
Interesting thought. Isn't it possible to design around this?
Surely this was considered when building the first modules.
Of course you can, but "needs to survive 26+ years" was very likely not part of the original design goals. The designers of the time probably wouldn't have expected the dysfunction to be so deep that 26 years later, only the Chinese can seem to stick to a plan.
You can design around a lot of stuff but what you encounter in orbit will ultimately laugh at that bandage and eat it away. AtOx, hard UV, and radiation levels you don't get on Earth just have their way with everything in orbit over time.
You don't get the AtOx going to mars but you have everything else which will utterly take its toll on a traveling craft.
Sort of like what happened on the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. Engineers on the ground were able to devise a makeshift fix to adapt the control module airscrubber filters to fit the lunar module so the astronauts could shelter in the LM for several days before getting back into the CM and coming home.
Yeah I was thinking about that, the big difference being that you are months out instead of hours/days, if a return to Earth is even possible.
I'm not sure distance matters. They're still stranded with virtually no possibility of rescue from the ground. Apollo 13 was extremely lucky that the hull wasn't breached, the spacecraft could still be controlled, that some very smart guys on the ground were able to devise the fix using bits of stuff known to be on board, the filter could actually be made, and, most of all, that it worked.
There is less debris around on the way to mars and this is a known and worsening for the ISS due to its age.
A top (arguably, the top) metallurgist who studied previous failed parts told me it's corrosion of the Russian alloy used.
Corrosion is a hard problem in living quarters (ie moisture and salt) in space (sealed with no gravity)
In microgravity, everything gets everywhere. My mother worked on NASA funded research for diagnostic spit tests to determine chronic versus acute stress, which previously required blood draws, which are a less than optimal choice in space. It's all very stressful.
I was wondering about this as well. In theory, there are also some metals and compounds that react with each other with just simple contact which result in some kind of amalgamation which can result in disastrous structural loss. Veratassium recently did a video on this kind of effect[1]. Could this be happening here?
Are you referring to galvanic corrosion? That's well understood and I'd hope not an issue in spacecraft manufacturing.
It seems as though the leaks are always in the Russian section? Perhaps this is why. Humans are the weak link. Damn breathers.
1980s Soviet metallurgy isnt known for corrosion resistance. Now the whole skin is made of that metal.
Don't forget the module we're talking about was built in the 80s originally intended for MIR 2. It's been in service since 2000.
Debris from what? Satellite debris get in that orbit?
Most of the things that will be a common danger (that is too small to track) are tiny pieces of stuff. Think paint chips and sand grain sized objects. These can be from things that came off rockets and ships, and things we've left behind like experiments and satellites. When these tiny things intercept you at many kilometers per second it can be dramatic.
Anything larger, say a lost screw driver, would punch thru the ISS like it wasn't even there leading to some ugly consequences.
I did an internship at NASA. What they told me is that anything larger than a golf ball they track while anything smaller than, I think they said a penny, is too small to do damage. The problem is debris that's in between the two. In that case they only get a relatively short warning (it's been a while but I think it was on the order of a couple hours).
The ISS can dodge debris by adjusting the height of its orbit.
Bits of spacecraft falling off (Challenger's windshield was famously cracked by a paint chip), debris from satellite collisions, even anti-satellite weapons tests.
Debris from space. Lots of rocks are constantly falling from space from all over. Sometimes they're big and make pretty lights in the sky as they fall, often they are practically invisible.
A bit of a tangent, but the fictional book "Children of Time" takes this to wild extremes. Really fun read
A little off-topic - the movie Stowaway (on Netflix) is a good movie about journey to Mars.
Seems like these structural integrity problems are always inside the Russian section. So if you're on a Russian mission to Mars, yes it would be reasonable to be worried. Otherwise this seems like a non-issue.
This is just not true. There have been leaks due to micrometers in just about every section of the ship at one point or another. A quick search pulls up examples of US modules having issues, especially around interfaces and seals. NASA had a whole investigation between 2018 and 2021 about the recurring issue.
This is just wrong. All serious issues that turned out to be safety concerns were in Russian modules. The 2018 leak you refer to here was in a Soyuz capsule and the 2021 leaks were in the Zvezda module (same place they are this time). In between there were also minor leaks in the Zvezda connection tunnel.
If you count the Soyuz leak, then the Boeing counts too! That was far more serious than anything you listed.
Two astronauts stranded for nine months taking the ISIS supplies intended for others. This is after they safely docked, which was considered risky at the time.
You brought it up. I have been talking about structural issues with long term core modules. And that is clearly a Russian issue.
I think you're confusing me with the OP, which in fairness I didn't read.
Nothing in the Russian space program in the last few decades have been as dangerous as Boeings little fiasco. Yes, the modules have long term problems, but they're built by the Russians because they have the most experience in space living quarters.
Look at space mission fatalities, the least Soviet/Russian one was in 1971 and that includes the 90s.
Thats 55 years
The US since then has had two shuttle disintegrations, the latest in 2003 when the US gave up launching astronauts for a few decades.
Space is hard.
The Boeing mission was scrubbed out of an abundance of caution. IIRC, nothing bad actually happened.
Maybe we can use the goop from those self sealing bike tires to have self sealing space station modules
Unless your spacecraft is built by Boeing.
We had two astronauts stranded in space for the better part of a year just last year!
>Otherwise this seems like a non-issue.
Except you forgot to mention an epic leak in Destiny just three years after it was attached to the ISS: "At its highest rate, the station was leaking about 5 pounds of air per day overboard." [0] Imagine that happening on the 4th year of American Mars mission.
Also, if you on American mission to Mars, it would be reasonable to worry about cooling system dying mid-flight requiring three spacewalks to fix it: "We'd lose cooling capability to half of the electronics on the U.S., European and Japanese part of the space station." [1]
Ah yes, the well traveled and highly tested human mission to Mars.
The 10 non-Russian modules have been in vacuum for a quarter century and have done just fine despite facing more debris than in interplanetary space. So yes, this aspect is well tested. This stuff is literally part of the reason why the ISS exists in the first place.
The hubris of forgetfulness; to think that until Elon showed up the West couldn't even put a person in space anymore.
The Soyuz, the MIR, the human space records, the Venera program, closed cycle rockets, all have no equivalent in the West. Even their version of the shuttle was superior (it flew 100% autonomously).
I don't like Musk, but he single handedly saved the Western space programs.
This sense of national pride based on long past achievements will always be bewildering to me. Do you really think a country that is actively engaged in a full scale open land war and whose economy is in shambles is able to maintain (much less build) a venerable space program? Elon might have saved the American tax payer from the senate launch system jobs program, but the majority of the global space industry is and always has been in the west. Russia has been an afterthought since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it shows in everything they have done in space since.
"This sense of national pride"
Im Italo-American. The closest I ever got to Russia was my cousin going to Moscow to, and I quote: "learn new things, like how to snort vodka"
It seems to me that you are projecting your dislike of the government of Russia into your evaluation of their engineering merits.
They landed drones on Venus, and on the Moon before Apollo 11
Well, they managed to rebuild their launchpad ahead of schedule and launched this big boy not long ago:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
They've also got some new passenger jets certified and about to enter production (MC-21 and SU-100).
"Do you really think a country that is actively engaged in a full scale open land war and whose economy is in shambles is able to maintain (much less build) a venerable space program?"
Don't blame Russian space failures on the war.
Roskosmos was robbed blind by the likes of Dmitry Rogozin long before 2022. The Angara heavy launcher project has been started in the 1990s and still reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever. The Vostochnyi cosmodrome has been a black hole in red numbers for some 15 years etc. Things were "meh" even during the times when oil was 140 USD per barrel and Russia had no sanctions going against it.
I remember reading about the ISS in the May 1998 issue of Popular Science, a full issue about the station. They were getting ready to launch the first module. Every time bad news happens, I think about this part (from a PDF I hang on to):
>> "SOMEDAY, THE international Space Station will descend, but if you're frightened at the prospect of a million-pound hunk of metal falling out of the sky, take heart. NASA does have a plan to decommission the space station eventually without creating havoc. The European Space Agency is planning to build three expendable space vehicles by 2003: two of them will ferry propellant, the other will force the station to land in a designated area. Called an automated transfer vehicle (ATV), the craft will be unmanned, similar to the Russian Progress resupply vehicle but larger, with enough thrust to nudge the entire station down in a single piece-a cheaper and safer alternative to hauling pieces of the station down in multiple trips. Roughly 90 percent of the station will be cinder by the time it reaches Earth's atmosphere; a Pacific splashdown is the plan.-Gunfan Sinha"
As of 11 minutes ago, the headline is now the opposite of that submitted:
> Astronauts told to return to International Space Station after sheltering over air leak repairs.
We've updated it above. Thanks!
(Submitted title was "Astronauts on ISS told to shelter as repairs under way to fix air leaks", no doubt because that's what the article said at the time.)
Oh, so it's a live blog with updates and a dynamic headline.
It has "Live Updates" in big bold text as one of the first and most prominent lines on the page so... yes? Is that a problem?
Publications have had live-updating articles for things ongoing for years. This seems both entirely reasonable and normal, and I'm not sure what the concern or issue is.
I read their comment as a simple “oh ok I understand now” type of clarification, not a complaint.
As per submission guidelines:
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
So, even if you use original title, once "Live Update" article changes, it might seem that submission did not use original title.
The point of the rule is to not editorialize, not to keep an always-updating title.
Given that the title was highly accurate at time of submission perhaps a moderator will update the title further but the submission seems to be inline with all the guidelines. This is actually also a case where I think it wouldn't be unappreciated to deviate a bit from the article title to something like Live Updates: Astronauts on ISS told...
100% and it has regularly happened in the past as live updates change the current state. Things like service status/degradation is a big one that comes to mind which is almost the same.
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Probably better to link to the article, rather than a thread that has 0 comments.
https://www.reuters.com/world/nasa-live-international-space-...
"The air leaks escalated on Friday from a pound of air per day to two pounds, according to a senior NASA official who asked not to be named.
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev were using a saw to break into an area where they believed they could access the crack leaking air, the NASA official said.
NASA officials disagreed with this method, the NASA official added, prompting mission control in Houston to order safe-haven procedures."
Why would I steal a link from someone who submitted a story first and take credit? I know it's normal behavior in tech to stab everyone in the back but...
Is this another potential OceanGate scenario (SpaceGate?), where one day the ISS just blasts apart suddenly and without warning and the occupants are ejected into the vacuum of space?
There are of course potential failures, but not quite as violent as oceans gate. There is 1 atm of pressure difference between the inside and outside of the ISS. At titanic depths the pressure difference between inside and outside of the submarine was approximately 400 atm.
Thats why the ISS can have small leaks like this that are a problem but not catastrophic like they would be in a deep sea submarine.
The differences in engineers for space versus the ocean are fascinating. You'd think space stations and submarines would be interchangeable because they both deal with pressure differentials, right? Wrong. They'd fail in fascinatingly different ways within minutes or hours in the opposite environment
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Dear Lord! That's over 150 atmospheres of pressure!
Fry: How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Well, it's a space ship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.
Zvezda has been leaking since 2019. That doesn't seem sudden and without warning to me. I imagine its going to continue to leak until the ISS is decommissioned.
The return of the leak was relatively sudden. They had done temporary fixes that brought stable pressure for a while, and when it reappeared, the leak jumped back to 1kg/day quickly.
is this a play for the space x ipo? we need a new iss?
How the air leaks there, from whom side is the problem is, from astronauts side's or the company's?
It's really hypocritical for the US to cooperate with Russia on space, even take their help on repairing the ISS, only to sanction them and even their trading partners for buying their oil.
It's a hot take but I do think the US should be more appreciative of Russia's longstanding contributions to the ISS and other space projects of international cooperation and factor that into sanctions decisions. We do need their help as much as they need ours in space, and the fact that they are still helping us despite our treatment of them speaks volumes about their leaders' character.
I have to say worrying about the provenance of writing has made me a grumpier reader.
For example: "The space station is made up of Russian and US segments, and there are modules from the European and Japanese space agencies too." It feels like this sentence is inserting some points, but is lacking in authorial intent. Is the intent to say the station is largely Russian and US, or to say the station has more than two partners? Probably an okay sentence, but still feels like a stone in the shoe.
Seeing nothing wrong with it. If journalist follows inverted pyramid, it starts with crucial facts and at the end it can be mostly supplementary information. Seeing this is about "International Space Station", this adds context to why it is called "international" for an ordinary person.
I think it's an attempt to express that the station consists of only two segments: Russian (ROS) and US (USOS), but the US invited its allies to work together on its segment. So parts of the USOS are made in Europe, Canada and Japan, and generally lifted to space by the US, usually on the Space Shuttle.
(All this was pretty lucid of the US, but obviously the Russians did no such thing on their side. The Japanese even managed to get an ISS resupply mission launched on their own vehicle, which is no small achievement, and the ESA did a bunch of good science. And what would space be without the Canadarm :-)
>but obviously the Russians did no such thing on their side
Why obviously?
The USSR invited cosmonauts from all over the world to fly and work at the Salut-6, Salit-7 and Mir stations.[0]
That's France, Britain, Austria, Japan, India, Soviet block countries, Mongolia, Vietnam, Syria and Afghanistan.
USSR, yes. But the ISS was launching during a time when USSR no longer existed and Russia was fairly isolated. Hence, "obviously": US at that time had many close allies, but Russia had only a few, and not as technologically advanced.
Yeah, this is their "live reporting" feed, where updates and context get posted about an in-progress event.
I don't think you'll find that type of language in the more traditionally published/edited articles.
It's complicated. The US Orbital Segment of the ISS consists of modules funded by and built in the US, ESA/Europe, and Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Orbital_Segment
Several of the US modules were built in Europe by Thales Alenia Space and were transferred to the US in exchange for the US launching the European modules on the Space Shuttle.
A big motivation behind the creation of the ISS was an attempt to use scientific collaboration to promote peace between the two big opposing super-powers during the war, the URSS (basically Russia's communist empire) and the USA and to focus both nations resources into peaceful space research that could benefit the whole mankind.
Several other countries contributed, in an attempt to include other nations, but for all practical purposes it is an American/Soviet(Russian) project from a more civiled age of international competition. I think its appropriate the article remind us of this. A lot of people wasn't born them, and have no idea that once science had less borders.
I don’t have a dog in the fight but it’s super scary to think about for the astronauts and their families. This issue’s been going on for a while now. Surprised that there’s not more AI or robotics that could be utilized for such cases.
Rumors are that Elon gets spaceX to buy tesla so tele-operated Optimus robots do the hard space work from now on. Not a bad idea per se but I’m not educated on the topic. Curiosity has me asking if we really want humans to go to mars or in space at all.