Freon leak on U.S. part of ISS?
Please consider donating to Behind the Black, by giving either a one-time contribution or a regular subscription, as outlined in the tip jar to the right or below. Your support will allow me to continue covering science and culture as I have for the past twenty years, independent and free from any outside influence.
A news report today says that an accident in the U.S. portion of ISS caused a freon leak.
The report also said there was a leak of ammonia, and that he crew is not in danger from either leak.
The report is also very vague and sparse with information, and appears to come from the Russians, since it also says that the leaks suggest “systemic problems in the operation of the station’s U.S. segment.”
Please consider donating to Behind the Black, by giving either a one-time contribution or a regular subscription, as outlined in the tip jar to the right or below. Your support will allow me to continue covering science and culture as I have for the past twenty years, independent and free from any outside influence.
A news report today says that an accident in the U.S. portion of ISS caused a freon leak.
The report also said there was a leak of ammonia, and that he crew is not in danger from either leak.
The report is also very vague and sparse with information, and appears to come from the Russians, since it also says that the leaks suggest “systemic problems in the operation of the station’s U.S. segment.”
ISS ,the spruce goose of LEO, a hundred billion dollar boondoggle.Has anything useful ever come back from this colossal affirmative action disgrace? Other than the fact that long term zero gee is really bad for people, Freon leak? Not surprised,, considering that all they seem to do is PR interviews , float around and goof off. The important thing is that , FINALLY , THE half -women astronauts , at long last , have hair with body , just like the TV commercials. They can also pass the pencil test.Get to leave the bras at home. The only mission for the ISS is to burn money and make affirmative action mission critical.
I’m not seeing this discussed on NSF, and they are usually all over anything ISS related.
That interfax link isn’t working for me, but here is a cached version of the story: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kZT84zY_EH0J:www.interfax.com/newsinf.asp%3Fy%3D2017%26m%3D10%26d%3D25%26id%3D786392+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Orion314 asked: “Has anything useful ever come back from this colossal affirmative action disgrace?”
Yes, plenty has. Unfortunately, the cost of putting ISS into space is so large that the price of each experiment conducted so far, amortized over the cost of the station, is in the tens of millions of dollars. The real question is: what will it take to make this expensive monstrosity worth the cost?
If you already did the math, you already figured out that it will take 10,000 experiments to make the per-experiment cost only $10 million. Does that make it worth the cost?
President Bill Clinton might say that it is already worth the cost, because it kept rocket technology from falling into hostile hands after the Russians partnered with us. But that partnership only added to the cost of the station, and rockets have fallen into the hands of hostile nations anyway. If it hadn’t been a boondoggle before, it certainly became one at that time.
Oh, and because Clinton added to the cost of the station, cost-saving decisions were made to reduce the scientific usefulness of the station and reduce the maximum crew. Because a fixed number of man-hours are needed for station operations and maintenance, the result is far less available astronaut time to perform experiments, and so a reduction in the number of experiments performed.
Although it is useful, it probably will never become cost effective.
I don’t know what these stupid politicians are thinking, when they willy nilly muck with expensive space hardware and carefully thought out plans. Hopefully the National Space Council will prevent this kind of thoughtless mucking around, and hopefully commercial space will start to use space efficiently and effectively.