In preparation for the arrival of a new crew, the astronauts on ISS took a short ride yesterday, moving their Soyuz capsule to a different docking port.
New quality control problems that have popped up in Russia might delay its next module to ISS by more than a year.
The company building the new module is the same one that builds the Proton rocket that has had serious problems in the last few years.
The investigation into the spacesuit leak in July is now awaiting the return of equipment from ISS.
The station astronauts removed a cooling system pump and small contaminants found in the garment’s Primary Life Support System plumbing. The old fan pump separator and the preserved contaminants, including a 1-cm. piece of plastic, will return to Earth aboard Russia’s TMA-09M crew transport late Nov. 10 with Parmitano, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg and ISS Russian commander Fyodor Yurchikhin. The hardware and contaminants will then be flown by NASA transport from the Kazakh landing site to Johnson Space Center, where a Mishap Investigation Board (MIB) hopes to quickly complete its probe of the worrisome incident.
Though it appears they have narrowed the problem to a small number of components, the need to return these components to Earth illustrates an overall design flaw with the space spacesuit. When the shuttle was flying regularly these components were easy to return to Earth, which is why NASA designed its suit for maintenance on the ground. Now that the shuttle is gone, however, it is difficult to get components returned, which makes spacesuit maintenance difficult if not impossible.
Spacesuits need to be repairable in space. If you are orbiting Mars and one fails, you can’t call in a repairman from Earth to fix it.
Cygnus has undocked from ISS and will be de-orbited tomorrow.
The winners of the “What would you send to ISS?” contest have been announced.
The contest was asking for proposals from the public for science research. Though the winner’s proposal, imaging the auroras in real time, is interesting, I think the runner-up who proposed building a nanosat factory on ISS to be far more exciting.
Among other things, Sarah Brightman talks about her planned trip to space.
Posted from New Mexico.
Bureaucracy in space: In a new book, astronaut Chris Hatfield describes how a bureaucratic tangle with the space doctor bureaucracy almost grounded him before his ISS expedition.
“The secrecy and paternalism really bothered me. They trusted me at the helm of the world’s space ship, but had been making decisions about my body as though I were a lab rat who didn’t merit consultation.” The “they” Hadfield refers to are members of the Multilateral Space Medicine Board (MSMB), a body of representatives from the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia who judge the medical fitness of astronauts to go on missions. ….
The bureaucracy wanted Hatfield to undergo an emergency operation to make sure everything was okay. He refused,
triggering what Hadfield describes as a “Kafkaesque” journey through “a bureaucratic quagmire where logic and data simply didn’t count.” … “Internal politics and uninformed opinions were what mattered,” he says in the book. “Doctors who hadn’t ever performed a laparoscopic procedure were weighing in; people were making decisions about medical risks as though far greater risks to the space program itself were irrelevant.”
I find this interesting in that, of the astronauts I have interviewed over the years, I can’t remember any who had good words to say about the official government doctors they had to deal with, both in the U.S. and in Russia.
Except for a troublesome fan, the first Cygnus cargo capsule to dock with ISS is performing perfectly.
The fan has been a minor issue. The astronauts have simply turned it off periodically when it started to act up. What is really important is this:
The next Cygnus – along with its Antares launch vehicle – is already being processed at Orbital’s Wallops facility, with a target launch date of December 15, with an available launch window through to December 21.
An eleven year old’s experiment in brewing beer in space will fly to ISS on the next Cygnus cargo flight in December.
The tiny brewery is set up inside a 6-inch-long (15 centimeters) tube, filled with separated hops, water, yeast and malted barley — all of the key ingredients used to make beer — and will be delivered to the station by the commercial firm NanoRacks. An astronaut aboard the station will shake up the mixture to see how the yeast interacts with the other ingredients in the beer. “I really didn’t expect this from the start,” Bodzianowski told KDVR, a Fox affiliate in Denver. “I really just designed my experiment to get a good grade in my class.”
Cygnus was successfully berthed with ISS early Sunday morning.
I just got back from a long day hike, so I am now catching up on what was apparently a very good day for commercial space.
NASA has released more details about Sunday’s schedule of Cygnus’s rendezvous and berthing with ISS.
Posted just outside of Dallas, halfway to the Smokies. In case you don’t know, Texas is a big state. It takes a loooong time to drive across it. Even though we spent about 10 hours in Texas today, we still have several more hours of driving to reach Arkansas tomorrow.
