Tag: ISS

Why things break in space

3:22 pm

Updated and bumped: I will be discussing this story on the the John Batchelor Show tonight, February 17, Friday, 12:50 am (Eastern), and then re-aired on Sunday, February 19, 12:50 am (Eastern).
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Someday, humans will be traveling far from Earth in large interplanetary spaceships not very different than the International Space Station (ISS). Isolated and dependent on these ships for survival, these travelers will have no choice but to know how to maintain and repair their vessels whenever something on them should break.

And things will break. Entropy rules, and with time all things deteriorate and fail.

Each failure, however, is also a precious opportunity to learn something about the environment of space. Why did an item break? What caused it to fail? Can we do something to prevent the failure in the future? Finding answers to these questions will make it possible to build better and more reliable interplanetary spaceships.

ISS is presently our only testbed for studying these kinds of engineering questions. And in 2007, a spectacular failure, combined with an epic spacewalk, gave engineers at the Johnson Space Center a marvelous opportunity to study these very issues.
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The Russians now say the next manned flight to ISS will be delayed a month, until the end of April, due to defects found in the Soyuz capsule.

7:01 pm

The Russians now say the next manned flight to ISS will be delayed a month, until the end of April, due to defects found in the Soyuz capsule.

The story suggests some confusion over what caused the cracks, either defects to the capsule itself or a mistake in the testing process.

A commission set up to probe the setback said violations of the testing procedure caused the damage to the reentry vehicle incident, earlier reports said. Either excessive pressure was applied by the personnel, or the shell of the reentry vehicle had defects or was improperly welded up.

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Because of technical problems with the Soyuz spacecraft it appears the Russians are going to postpone the next two manned launches to ISS.

9:29 am

Because of technical problems with the Soyuz spacecraft it appears the Russians are going to postpone the next two manned launches to ISS.

So, in one breath Americans whine about how we are dependent on the Russians to get into space, while in the next breath they lambast the only Presidential candidate (Gingrich) willing to aggressively do something about it without spending billions of dollars. You would think they’d at least be interested in what he had to say.

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Germany’s space chief sees big battles in Europe over funding for ISS and Ariane

12:09 pm

Germany’s space chief yesterday said he expected big battles in Europe over future funding for ISS and Ariane.

Ariane is a serious problem, as it is expensive and a money-loser, despite dominating the commercial market in recent years. And worse, it will be difficult to make Ariane competitive in the future:

ESA in 2010 hired an outside auditor to review the current Ariane 5 system to look for ways to save money. Its principal conclusion was that very few savings were possible without scrapping the forced geographic distribution of industrial contracts that preserves the political and financial support needed for the Ariane system.

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Over-the-counter osteoporosis drug appears to keep astronauts from losing bone density on long space flights

10:14 am

Big news: New research on ISS now shows that the standard over-the-counter osteoporosis drugs used by millions on Earth appears to keep astronauts from losing bone density during long space flights.

Beginning in 2009, the group administered the drug to five long-stay astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), including Koichi Wakata, 48, and Soichi Noguchi, 46. The five took the drug — an over-the-counter bisphosphonate used to treat osteoporosis — once a week starting three weeks before they lifted off until they returned to Earth. The researchers then monitored the astronauts’ bone mass over time and compared the results to those for 14 astronauts that had never taken the drug.

The results showed that the 14 who had never taken the drug had average bone density loss of 7 percent in the femur, and 5 percent in the hip bone. The five astronauts on bisphosphonate, however, only had average bone density loss in the femur of 1 percent, and even a 3 percent increase in the hip bone. Calcium levels in their urine, which rise the more bone mass is lost, were also very low.

If these results hold up, they might very well solve one of the biggest challenges faced by any interplanetary traveler. Up until now, bone loss during long weightless missions never seemed to average less than 0.5 percent per month. After spending three years going to and from Mars, an astronaut could thus lose about almost 20 percent of their bone mass in their weight-bearing bones, and would probably be unable to return to Earth.

Thus, a mission to Mars seemed impossible, unless we could build a ship with some form of artificial gravity, an engineering challenge we don’t yet have the capability to achieve.

If these already tested drugs can eliminate this problem, then the solar system is finally open to us all. All that has to happen now is to do some one to two year manned missions on ISS to test the drugs effectiveness for these long periods of weightlessness.

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The first in orbit tests of Robonaut halted because the robot did not carry out its commands as expected.

12:04 pm

HAL lives! The first in-orbit tests of Robonaut were halted today on ISS because the robot did not carry out its commands as expected.

NASA robot operator Phil Strawser said joint movements in the weightless space environment have proven to be different than those performed in normal gravity on Earth. Consequently, software used to operate the robot needs to be “fine-tuned,” he said.

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