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Astronauts In Florida For Space Station Mission
Michael Holve writes: "It seems the ISS (International Space Station) is slipping 1.5 miles per week closer to Earth. Seven astronauts are set to use the Atlantis to push it 19 miles back out into space until mid-July, when the Zvezda module arrives, which was meant to keep the ISS in orbit and provide living quarters for three astronauts."
This brings to mind one thing: why didn't they put the proper modules up to maintain orbit first?
;)
It would have saved them time and money (and would have avoided an extra launch to reposition it)
Will we see any more stuff like this on the International Space Station? Or will they start using solely the metric system to prevent what happened on Mars?
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
One Two Three
:)
PUSH!
Hope they brought enough people to push it back into orbit
I'm wondering because I'm trying to imagine pushing anything that large 19 miles on Earth, and I can't.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
This would a a cool place to advertise.....hopefully they have some sort of agreement not to allow this. Maybe just have the country flags on it. Oh well, it might be just a small spec anyways. Wonder how many hunters will try shooting at it.
OK....now something relavent. Why don't all the astrnonauts in it just count to 3 and all run to one side. It works for tilting a school bus. Maybe there's some sort of internation confusion with it. "Do we run on three? Or is it 1, 2, 3, run?"
Basically, all the screens have been updated to make it easier to deal with and reduce the load on astronauts for other tasks.
Wonder if someone will port Linux to the Shuttle... ;>
Another cool thing about this mission is that Atlantis will have a new cockpit. They're replacing the cathode ray tubes and the gaugues with flat panel monitors. Makes the cockpit 75 pounds lighter and uses less power. Sposed to make it easier for them to recognize key functions, like altitude, velocity, the fact the windows crashed, etc.. They're going to be doing a bunch of repairs, replacing batteries, fans, fire extinguishors, smoke detectors, and air filters. The batteries have been failing one by one since they've been up there.
or haven't you heard? That was a bid deal back in the old days (~1997) when almost no one had heard of Linux.
--Lenny
1. They need to put in a little more "What If?" scenarios into the planning for just such situations, when the project doesn't go quite the right way or in the right order, especially when you are dealing with resources (other countries) that may fall behind.
2. It seems that one of the overriding goal of the ISS is more of the nature of world peace/cooperation, symbolically. The symbolism of the mission may be almost as important as its success, and I guess in that case, more allowance is made for things like slipped schedules?
3. In some ways, this "improvisational" mission to help the ISS from falling back into earth is really good because it exercises the space program to be more flexible and alert, especially in relation to #1, having to deal with other countries. It also makes space flight seem more routine, making it that much easier to imagine that space flight will become widely available (to everyone) within our lifetime. That'd be cool.
A: You get out and give it a push!
Q: Whet do you do when your space-statioon falls?
A: You get up there and give it push!
The international space-station is turning into one fabulous hack. Us software geeks should pay serious attention to the developments on the space-station not because it's "cool" or anything but because it represents one of the largest projects humanity has ever undertaken next to the construction of Operating Systems.
//
An old prof. at my U. loves to point out that MS Windows, the Great Pyramids, and the Great Wall, all share approximately equivalent numbers of person hours in them. So, he asks... what makes the great wall and the pyramids stand for centuries and Windows crash almost daily?
The answer is (according to my prof.) that by the time of the pyramids and the great wall, construction was a technology that humans were very familiar with. The project was huge but the tech was well known. Software and space-stations are brand-new, and therefore a certain amount of instability will be inherent in the project.
(* microsoft flame & linux chest-beating omitted *)
What intrests me in the space-station aside from the coolness factor are "patches" like the one posted in this article. NASA is slapping together a mission to prevent catastrophic falure of the project... its a hack. A quick and dirty fix until other team members get their act together. I've seen this millions of times in software-engineering projects.
Open-Source is an intriguing way of dealing with enourmous projects. I think that NASA could stand to learn a few lessons from OS development... as well as OS building from NASA. I find this an intriguing problem set... enormous projects in a short time with huge unknowns... and no one pays attention unless you make a mistake and blow something up.
BTW:
Anybody got numbers for the person hours spent on any given linux distro?
--// Hartsock
Live to Code, Code to Live!
Now I'm free.... free fallin'
I gotta remind myself to look on the shuttle pics when they're up to see if they're running Napster up there. Is copyright law interplanetary?
What you may not know is that I am on the International Space Station. They have placed me here to keep me safe from my half klingon/half brother who will soon hatch from his human shell and consume the earth in its entirety.
You needn't fear, as using my top-notch Cuban Communist education, I have placed the ISS on a targeted trajectory with Havana.
On Friday April 28, at 0400, I will crash into the Cuban Capital Building, killing Fidel Castro and liberating the oppressed people of the once-free nation.
On impact, Castro's Beowulf Cluster of Quad G4 Boards running Linux will be destoryed, releasing Hianny from the conspiratorial Cuban mind control machine, thereby neutralizing the treat and making the world safe again.
Thank you.
As Shuttle astronauts scramble to keep the International Space Station up, a team of Nasa navigation engineers came out with some new findings that brings new urgency to the shuttle launch.
``We're incredibly happy to be here,'' said mission commander James Halsell, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. ``It's our understanding the vehicle is in fine shape, but if it drifts any lower in it's orbit, it'll be whacked by Iridium salelites.''
An unnamed source close to the project said that a team of hackers calling themselves "Team Slashdot" have hacked the trajectory of the Iridium satleites and put them into the International Space Stations path.
When asked for comment, an unidentified slashdot team member said only: "first..post..grits..pants..natalie..taco". Crypygraphic experts from around the world are working on decoding the message to find it's hiden meaning.
___
You're pretty much wrong. Most on-board computers are still about 20-25 years behind today's bleeding edge simply because NASA (and its sister agencies elsewhere) is really hesitant to bring in anything but the old, "tried and true" technology. What you really heard was probably that NASA's ground control has been switching to Linux en masse. Yes, that's right (been there, seen it). Not for the on-board stuff though. At least not for most of it. There have been a few press releases as to the otherwise, but it's not nearly as widespread as you seem to imply.
// zyqqh
You're pretty much wrong.
n -announce/msg00043.html
Nope. I'm right. Check out:
Debian in Orbit on Space Shuttle!
http://www.debian.org/News/1997/19970708b
Debian Rides Space Shuttle!!
http://www.educ.umu.se/~bjorn/mhonarc-files/debia
Most on-board computers are still about 20-25 years behind today's bleeding edge
This I realize. I wasn't trying to imply that all of the space shuttle's computers are running Linux. They have, however, used linux on some of their experimental computers, as the above articles mention.
What you really heard was probably that NASA's ground control has been switching to Linux en masse.
Nope, I remember what I heard, and a 5 second search on Google will back me up. I recall the news stories from the time, and it was quite a big deal for the community. Back in 1997, Linux was still pretty starved for mainstream acceptance, so NASA adopting Debian in even a very limited capacity was cause for celebration.
Actually, it's funny to think back to those days. Headlines would read things like "Mid-sized company X says something vaguely positive about Linux", or "Small government agency uses Linux in a few of their firewalls". These days we have headlines like "SGI donating their ultra-high-end journalling filesystem to Linux...to release under GPL". My how things have changed...
--Lenny
I think in the long run it might prove less expensive for it to have been a U.S. Space Station. Those extra shuttle flights and delays add up.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Don't hammer them so fast. This is uncharted teritory. It's not like they can say: "You know, we learned from the *last* International Space Station we need to have more contingency plans." This is a first. With every firsts comes a lot of learning.
NASA even has another module (yet another back up plan) that they've been threatening to put up if the russians s delay much longer.
Regarding you comments:"we shouldnt be in space?"
and man should use tools. .
and man shouldn't walk upright.
and man shouldn't explore the oceans.
and man shouldn't fly .
ect..ect..
___
and man shouldn't walk upright
I think I walked upright a few times. The last time was about a month or two ago when Slashdot hadn't posted anything interesting and I got up to go to the refrigarator for some more raw cookie dough and cough syrup
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
A NASA spokesmodel is rumored to have said that "Elian's rapidly increasing knowledge of international relations will be a valuable asset to this mission. Besides, if we can get him off the damn planet for awhile, perhaps we can return to normal, run of the mill day to day lunacy."
>I'm just saying, there's better/cheaper ways to get your point across. ;>
Yeah, but not necessarily more novel.
In other news today, Taco Bell paid $6.3 million to put their now popular, Chalupa-loving dog on the side of the ISS. {Cut to multiple shots of the ad that "will never get seen"}. It will be painted on the side of the space station's mess pod. Unfortunately, due to NASA restrictions, the ad will not be visibile, even with a high powered telescope, because it must face away from earth. Here's Taco Bell spokesman, Commander Taco, with some words about this PR stunt. {insert video of spokesman talking about why they did it.} That's it for Roger 10 News, we'll see you tomorrow."
COMMERCIAL
We here at Taco Bell have always thought big, except when it came to prices, and so the biggest thing we could possibly do is to put our ad on the side of the largest man-made structure in space. But that wasn't enough so we are going even further. In addition to the large $6.3 million ad we have painted on the side of the ISS, for a price of $9.6 million, plus $1.2 million a year for the next 10 years, our chalupa-loving dog will live aboard the International Space Station. He will work and play along with astronauts of all nations. So next time you get the craving for almost authentic mexican food, remember to run for the border, because with the help of the ISS, we at Taco Bell are helping to erase them.
To be followed, in later weeks, with an announcement by McDonalds that they will be sending up a McDonald's restaurant pod to be attached to the spacestation, serving delicious McDonald's food, and also some story about how an astronaut is refusing to wear the Nike branded spacesuits that NASA requires because it conflicts with his Adidas endorsement contract.
3 cheers for capitalism!
Or why not have made the module a part of hte station itself? Everyone that modules are slow and inefficient compared to something compiled directly to the kernel. I mean, it IS an essential component of operation. Sheesh, these NASA boys must run windows or something.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
...of touchy-feely politics getting in the way of science.
Why does this have to be an international space station? Because some idiots up on the Hill and the State Department thought that it would "foster better international relations" or "develop cooperation between cultures". As if running science experiments or lofting up multiton modules had anything to do with either goal.
What this really points to is that Someone (be it NASA administration, Congress, or the Executive Branch) needs to get their head out of the '70s protest movement. "Make Science Not War" sounds pretty fscking stupid when it's costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in overlapping work and delays.
Cost: Lots of lost money, time, and equipment.
Benefit: Putting in space some extranationals whose countries don't have the resources by themselves to build their own space station.
Is it just me, or is the US getting absolutely zip out of this deal? I mean, by letting these other countries in on the project, do we gain leverage in global trade disputes, the Security Council, strategic arms treaties, or conflict negotiations?
NASA needs to learn a lesson from the corporate world: never outsource for materiel you can produce unless your own resources are tied up elsewhere. The words "faster, better, cheaper" will never be associated with the word "international".
telnet://bbs.ufies.org
Trade Wars Lives
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Free Elian? Free as in "Free Beer" or free as
in "Free Speech"?
If you haven't noticed Elian has been GPL'd for
months now. Everyone has been modifying Elian
to suit their own (political) needs and have been
distributing him Internationally.
BTW:
Is the Elian Distro being used in a DDoE
(Distributed Denial of Entertainment) attack?
I got up this morning and the Elian Channel
- All Elian! All the Time!! - was on every station.
I'm running Linux 2.2.0 on my TV. Is
there a patch out yet for this?
Disclaimer: I'm not an astronomy buff.
As much as I disagree with Perens in other areas, I don't think this is necessarily US centric. Russia may very well have the scientists and the engineering experience to design these things, but that is only one important element of the space program. They still need to manufacture. Unfortunately, manufacturing is largely a function of the economy. Not only does it cost billions, which Russia does not have, to produce these things under ideal conditions, but when Russia doesn't even have the stability or the economy for OTHER (as in the rest of the economy) production, it is going to be next to impossible to follow through on the plans. While Russia's economy under communist rule was piss poor, they were sufficiently stable and "wealthy" for such narrow objectives. Today, they are not. They lack to totalitarian rule to divert resources around arbitrarily. The limited infrastructures which they had built up are falling apart, or being torn down. For example, Moscow has had severe problems lately even keeping power lines up, because desperate people have been cutting down high power lines for the cabling (to sell presumably). Add to this problems with staffing, corruption, etc. It would be difficult to even build a modern automobile today (which is why you see very little investment of this kind in Russia), never mind spacecraft.
The bottom line is, that, if Russia can't follow through on their promises, it may very well cost as much much more be politic. That being said, there might be something to be said for this cooperation (e.g. promote pride amongst Russian people, promote mutual good will, etc.), even though it costs us more (in the short run?).
Actually, they where lent money to complete a completely *DIFFERENT* module, the command module.. ;-P
As far as them borrowing money to make improvments on Mir, I'd like to read and URL's you might have, hadn't heard about it..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
At first I thought it was a stupid idea, but I just *HAVE* to SEE that!!!! ;-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Firstly, this is a project without a mission. Lets be realistic here - this project was mostly political - unite Russia and the US in a common scientific project. Instead, it has created divisions between the two nations as dollars and schedules slip.
Secondly, even most scientific reasons forst conjured up are no longer valid. Most experimentation regarding materials can no be done cheaper on earth, and less problematically.
Thirdly, hot since "Star Wars" in the eighties has any project wasted more money without any useful payoff. I regard payoff as being valid scientific progress and wonderment for the US public.
Now we come to the discouraging conclusion - our continued neglect of this boondoggle project is requiring expensive maintainence just to keep it at the status quo.
For these reasons and other I susect that they should simply let current segments burn up and maybe take another stab at this in twenty years or so, when it can be done cost-effectively (satellite launchings are pushing the envelope for lift technologies outside of the ISS effort), and with some valid purpose.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
It's worse than that. The American modules only are using American units... all the other modules are metric.
Basic problem: space travel using chemical fuels just barely works. Nuclear-powered rockets are possible, but messy. That's why space travel hasn't progressed much in 30 years.
The ISS orbited us all
The ISS had a great fall
All the NASA Shuttles and all the NASA men,
couldn't put ISS together again.
Thank you,
Thank you very much.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes it does. To raise something to a higher orbit you need to increase it's potential energy. U=mgh, where m is the mass of the object, g is the acceleration of gravity at whatever altitude this object happens to be at (I didn't look), and h is the height the object must be raised, then U becomes the energy that needs to be added to raise the object to the higher orbit. (This equation only applies to small orbital changes, as in this case.) So as you can see, the energy required to raise the object is proportional to its mass.
It's a common misconception that gravity is zero in orbit, but it isn't. It is just that the centripital force due to the circular acceleration around the planet is equal to the gravitational pull, so any object inside of a craft experiences zero net force, or weightlessness. You can think of it as the spacecraft "falling" in a circle around the earth.
> It sounds like they threw this whole mission together rather "seat of pants" style;
> with quotes like While crews normally train together for a year or more before
> launch, this crew was only finalized in mid-February.
You don't finalize your crew before you let them work together. Intracrew social conflicts are not an option in space.
This thing was started in 1983 in Reagan's State of the Union Address. NASA quickly decided it was supposed to last for 30 years, create every kind of perfect crystal/drug/ball bearing/McGuffin possible, service satellites, be the gateway to Mars, have a crew of 8, 100 kilowatts of power and an equivalent amount of heat rejection (important and often overlooked by non-space geeks - space is the ultimate vacuum thermos that keeps heat in), a 300 foot truss that was going to have every kind of telescope pointed up and every kind of camera pointed down. It was supposed to be made from a couple of 42 foot modules (Lab and Hab (habitation)) linked in a racetrack via four corner nodes that were basically six sided docking ports. Supplies were going to be brought up (and trash down) in a 27 foot logistics module via the Shuttle. The thing was supposed to be in a 28 degree inclined orbit, where the shuttle can take a maximum amount of payload, and reboost was supposed to use excess water as propellant offloaded from the Shuttle's fuel cell system. The whole thing was to be inaugurated in 1992, Columbus' 500th anniversary for $8 billion dollars.
What a crock. And to think I got excited and wasted years of my life on this thing.
The "dream" has undergone reverse "mission creep" to where it isn't even worth doing anymore, but nobody has the guts to say that. Forget 4 nodes and two 47 foot modules and crew of 8 - they turned the 27 foot logistics module into a "lab" and are using one node (the one up there now) to hook it to Russian junk that couldn't pass a NASA safety review if its life depended on it. (Wait a minute - astronaut's lives DO depend on it!) With the 27 foot logistics module "reassigned" and the 47 foot modules "reconsidered", all supplies are to be delivered via Soyuz/Progress to the new 57 degree inclined orbit - max payload ability for Russian launches, but the Shuttle has to leave stuff at home and burn a hideous amount of extra fuel to get there. On the news they say "the shuttle delivered a ton of supplies" as if that were a big deal - the shuttle was supposed to deliver over TEN TONS of supplies per flight in the original orbit!!! Since resupply logistics are now the stranglehold on the project after the STUPID decision to move the station's orbit to allow Russian participation, there is going to be effectively NO science over the 10 (not 30) projected life.
And as far as reboost to overcome atmospheric drag goes, well gee, at the 57 degree orbit we can't afford to lift 100 KW of solar cells, so we can't support water electrolysis to obtain reboost propellant, so we can't use the Shuttle's fuel cell byproducts, so let's just take that water that cost $10,000 a pound to lift to this God-forsaken orbit, bring it all back to Earth, and open a spigot after landing to let it drain out on to a concrete runway at Kennedy Space Center. Instead, let's change the reboost fuel to hydrazine and fly it up as part of the resupply weight budget (already reduced by a factor of ten, remember)! Who cares if the highly toxic exhaust freezes all over the exterior of the space station and sticks to an astronaut's space suit during a space walk and kills the crew when it vaporizes back in the crew modules after the spacewalk? The crew is only 3 now, not 8.
NASA has been working on Space Station for almost 20 years now as an officially sanctioned project and it is a criminal embarassment as to how little engineering has been accomplished in the past and how little science will be accomplished in the future. The cost overrun is beyond comprehesion over the past 20 years and is deliberately obscured by NASA by always referring to the overrun from the last rebudget exercise, not the beginning of the project.
Worst of all, it bodes terribly for our future in space. This millstone around our neck will soak up all of our energies for the next decade until we deorbit the thing into the Pacific with a sigh of relief. Only then will we start thinking seriously about a moonbase / Mars mission that will stay put and grow with each pound we launch to it instead of continually slip down into a firey re-entry and destruction unless we send up an equal mass of reboost propellant every year to fart away.
When I was a kid, I watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and thought I could set foot on Mars - or at least some American my age would. But if NASA manages a moonbase or Mars mission the same way they've done Space Station, I'll be in my grave before another human sets foot on another world again. And she probably won't even be American. D'oh!
I love the 6502. I learned machine code on it as a teenager in the late 70's. But I don't believe any 6502 version was ever space qualified. [I do recall a lot of talk about it in the 80's, though] Maybe there is a "6502-like" CPU, but I'll leave that determination to the CPU experts.
Space Technology ia an area of special interest for me. Here are the CPUs that I use in "back-of-the-envelope" speculation and planning.
AFAIK, the most powerful fully space-qualified CPU is the RAD-6000 SC (rad-hardened IBM/6000 single chip RISC computer akin to a R6000 workstation) used on the Mars pathfinder, the IMAGE satellite (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration) and several other projects. As a guess, the GNU CC-supported MIL-SPEC 1750A (16 bit PDP-11-like CPU ca. 1979) is the most popular CPU in use right now for 'power apps', and 80C85 and 80C86 are quite common among NASA craft currently in space.
I had some links to lists of space qualified CPUs (don't know if they were comprehensive) but they are all dead now. If anyone has the link to the space-qualified hardware list, please post them here.
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Actually, there's been a TREMENDOUS amount of planning that has gone into this project. (After all, they had 20 years of space station plans laying around before they got greenlighted for ISS!)
... who cares? They CAN'T say anything.
... say ... probes to Mars that don't crash and burn.
The problem lies not with planning, not even with NASA, but in the fact that ISS is a foreign-policy tool intended to help the Russians keep their technical class employed and explicitly NOT selling nukes to Iraq. All other considerations are really secondary. As for your points:
1. What-Ifs? NASA has made detailed consideration of the what-ifs, but they are bound here not by the technically feasible but by the politically possible. It was suspected years ago that the Russians might fail to launch their module, but NASA was prevented again and again from doing anything about it by the political ramifications of embarrassing the Russians.
2. Slipped schedules are practically CAUSED by the diplomatic requirements of the mission. Since NASA delivered a plan that had the Russians as a critical mission component, which is exactly what Congress did NOT want but what the Clinton administration DID, the Russians were in the catbird seat as far as schedule. Slip slip slip
3. You're right about the improvisational nature here, except that the people going had already trained for a FULL 2A mission, now they will merely do part of what they had trained for. Space flight is less routine this year than in any year since Return to Flight, with just 4 or maybe 5 missions, mainly because post-Challenger, the shuttle was (sensibly) stripped of its satellite-launch mission; and now, with ISS, it has become pretty much the ISS van line. From a space science standpoint, this is an enormous waste of money and resources that could be better spent on
Don't look to NASA to provide that ride to space. Look at the new launch concepts being developed (www.rotaryrocket.com, www.kistler.com) and what they might achieve in reduced launch costs. This is the way that the average joe might get to space one day.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}