Nattering Nabobs Of NASA Negativity

code_rage writes "IEEE Spectrum Magazine has an article by James Oberg which enumerates some of the problems which have cropped up and will crop up during assembly of Space Station Alpha (or whatever it is called this week). The article lists many software problems, including safety related issues. Also a problem which was news to me: the U.S.-supplied Solar Arrays operate at a high voltage, which would place astronauts at risk of a potentially deadly plasma discharge during EVA. The workarounds include some Catch-22's."

Comments

Star Trek sparks

[Private Essayist]

Why should this be a surprise that there might be electrical problems? Haven't we learned from Star Trek that future space craft, when under any kind of stress, immediately give off massive sparks through the consoles?
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Solar array plasma potential dangers are low.

[Remus Shepherd]

Yes, the solar arrays on the ISS are supposed to be around 160 volts, which is a lot higher than most satellites. They've designed around it, though. The ISS is connected to the solar array via a positive ground rather than a negative one, which should keep the station itself safe for astronauts. (They still should avoid the array if possible, though.) And the plasma contactor mentioned in the article is a pretty useful item that's worked on scientific satellites for years. With the PCU working, they shouldn't have many problems.

If the PCU goes out, though, plasma charging is a problem. You have the possibility of electrical arcs...which are equally dangerous to astronauts and to the electrical equipment on the station. The torques on the station change when the ground is disturbed, possibly changing its orbit or spin. Ion sputtering (erosion of the spacecraft hull) increases...although that's probably the least of your concerns. There may be periods in the orbit when the astronauts, if they work quickly, can get out and fix things safely. That'd be tough, though, as they hit the aurorae belts every orbit and the South Atlantic Anomaly at least once every seven. You don't want to be EVA over south america next to an ungrounded high voltage space station.

But the folks who build the ISS know what they're doing, and I think they'll have the plasma environment under control. Some of the other problems mentioned in that article I did not know about and do look like a worry, but I'm sure things aren't as dire as the article writer is predicting.

(Full disclosure: I work (subcontract) for NASA on a satellite program unrelated to the ISS. Whether that makes me knowledgeable or just biased is your decision. :) )

Science is already feeling the burn...

[TOTKChief]

The payload I've been working on--and from the best I can tell, most of the other payloads on UF-1, the first of the many Utilization Flights--was bumped from its flight. Technically, we weren't on schedule, but the schedule is unrealistic to begin with.

The manifest is full of lies, damned lies, and statistics, but that's no different than any other NASA program. It's the typical NASA FUD: make the schedules unreasonable, and when the contractors fail to meet specs, blame the contractors, slip the schedule, and ask Congress for more money.

It makes one wish for the days of carte blanche, when the schedules were unreasonable, but you could at least throw enough money and brainpower at a situation to get the thing solved. People worked long hours, slept at their desks, had recreation at work, and took simple pleasure at their jobs being finally completed--then moved to another job.

You see, the geek culture today has a lot of roots in the geek culture of the '60s--but instead of Apollo and Saturn, we work on Linux and Gnome. Rather than the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union, which hid all their secrets behind an impenetrable Iron Curtain, we now fight the Evil Empire of Redmond, which hides all their secrets behind the impentrable Closed-Source Curtain.

All of which begs to ask: where's the deals with Life, and when does Tom Wolfe write a book on the open-source movement?

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Re:nattering nabobs of negativity

[ptomblin]

Coining the phrase "Nattering Nabobs of Negativity" is one of the two memorable things that Spiro Agnew accomplished while he was Vice President. The other was managing to get forced to resign his office during the middle of the Watergate scandal for something totally unrelated to Watergate.

Complex == Fragile

[volsung]

I asked a similar question while I was working on the software team at our university's satellite design lab. The electronics guru explained that, among other things (many of which have been mentioned), one of the reasons we can't slap a Celeron into orbit (or even a Crusoe if you want real power savings) is that the manufacturing process uses such small gates that it doesn't take much stray radiation to start flipping bits in your CPU registers. DRAM is already suceptible to this and needs error-correcting bits to be reliable.

The big, fat gates in a 386SX are also nice and sturdy from an electrical perspective.