> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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".
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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]
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.
(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.)
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.
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...
"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...
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.