Slashdot Mirror
Home Improvement
Matthew Moyle-Croft writes "On the ISS the Astronauts have been hard at work building
a kitchen table away from the prying eyes of mission control."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I have to see a picture of this table... Anyone know where to find one?
A picture can be found here.
These are the same units... Study harder
This is a clear violation of the ISS's EULA. The astronauts are not legally able to use these parts in a fashion to circumvent their original use. And since there were Russians involved, this could quickly become a issue of national security as know-how and other intellectual property has crossed international borders. Good luck fending off the lawyers, Shep. We're all on your side.
"I spend most of my day with a tool in my hand..."
You just don't say that at an interview, do you?
Specialization is for Insects!
Let's hear it for us Generalists!
ttyl
Farrell
BBS SysOp, Novell Admin, OS/2 pro, Linux Guru, Unix Adept, Practicing Druid (ADF), Calligrapher, Home Music Studio owner, Musician, SF Faan, SF Convention organizer, etc.
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
The space station's current handyman is NASA astronaut Jim Voss, a 52-year-old retired Army colonel. ... "I spend most of my day with a tool in my hand," ... Voss said recently from the space station.
/. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.
Hehehe... He said Tool.
The real Threed's
--Threed
Note that your cost figure is an order of magnitude too high. NASA's FY 2001 budget is on the order of 14.253 billion (see reference below). It's proposed FY 2002 budget is 14.511 billion. The latest census reports that there are roughly 281 million Americans. Doing the math, that averages out to $50 and change.
t _s ummary.pdf
0 0c n64.html
NASA Budget
ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/budget/2002/budge
Census figures
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2000/cb
the table is made from aluminium and duct tape
and then
If the table was made from a more conductive metal for magnets, or covered in some velcro-friendly fluff, fine.
Ever considered that maybe the duct tape was sticky side out?
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Does a table in a zero G environment really make sense? It says "kitchen" table, so I assume they want to eat off of it. I don't know, I've never been in space, but it just doesn't seem to make sense to me.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
So you're a troll, but I'll bite anyway. The future of humanity depends on our ability to leave this planet (we'll have to do it sooner or later, and leaving it to the last minute is a plan that's doomed from the start). Our ability to leave the planet is solely dependent on how much we spend on space research (barring intervention from alien races, of course :-)
Thus, it's
better to sacrifice a few starving people now to
save humanity in general. Or at least, that's the
theory. I'm personally not convinced that the
survival of humanity would be a good thing for
our galaxy. I'm sure other lifeforms would do a
better job of preventing galactic pollution, and
not overtaxing available resources...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
"Smoking anything would be problematic in space, first of all, there is no convection, so smoke doesnt rise, it would just kind of cluster in a ball around the lit tip of your cigarette until it goes out. "
Better tell the Russians - _Dragonfly_ made it pretty clear that the Russian cosmonauts on Mir had both cigarettes and vodka available.
sPh
Nicholas Chauvin, who all these years I had thought to have been an actual person and officer in the French army who had a blind, unthinking loyalty to, and belief in the superiority in all aspects of, Napolean (the first one), turns out, apparently, to have been a character in a play. Real or fictitious, he still felt that way about Napolean, and it is that quality of "(country, race, sex, religion, etc.)X is (insert superlative here), and any and all evidence to the contrary won't convince me otherwise." which has come to be known as Chauvinism.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
if the bottom falls out of the space program
Hey, it won't matter -- in 0G, if the bottom falls out, you'll just float there...
Just junk food for thought...
Hmmmm, I have this vision of a torous filled with water, fitted to a hollow axle of some sort, with a bowl mounted to another tube on the spin axis with a pipe extending into the water. Some kind of tube leads to the hollow axle. Spin the wheel, light the bowl and party on! Gyroscopic effect might make it kind of hard to pass though...
Just junk food for thought...
You got to do it yourself. I am glad to see that the people up there are resourceful these are people who are paving the way of the future.
Because that's the name of the ISS. "International Space Station" is really just a description.
Seeing as how MIR was the first space station, wouldn't this be Space Station Beta?
Bullshit. Mir wasn't anywhere near the first space station. Besides, Alpha is a name, not a counting scheme. Mir is only one in a line of Russian space stations (Salyut 1, launched in 1971, to Salyut 7, launched 1982, abandoned 1986) and NASA had Skylab (launched 1973, abandoned 1974). That makes Alpha space station 10.
None of the earlier stations lasted as long as Mir however. We'll see how long Alpha will keep running.
Don't you wonder why they don't make the packaging and holddown clamps out of something that can be stored and made into something useful after the contents are deployed. Does all this extra mass at $10k/pound to orbit really have to go into a Progress and jettisoned?
--
Good point.
Bill Shepherd is a US Navy SEAL, which are our most highly trained special operations forces. Military people are very mission oriented, and do whatever it takes to accomplish the mission.
There was a good article on CNN why military veterans make good IT workers that explains this.
I'm biased though, as I was in the US Air Force. My personal motto is "adapt, improvise, & overcome."
Space a "preservative"? Have you ever seen any hardware after it's been in space a while? Thermal metal fatigue will eventually cause superstructure failure. Space debris (99% of which is naturally occuring) will contantly pepper it with tiny holes and slowly destroy its equipment. Solar radiation will eventually destroy its computers. Space, unfortunatly, is no preservative. Without maintenance and repair teams constantly refurbishing the craft, Mir would be destroyed in less than a decade.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
I kind of have the opposite impression - NASA seems to prefer pre-planning everything and running under strict ground control where possible, whereas the Russians (thanks to their experiences on Mir) seem to have more of a can-do, fix-it attitude. Remember how NASA went on and on about how dangerous Mir was, but the Russians just shrugged and kept it together with chewing gum and determination?
Now, if NASA would really let its astronauts be hackers, that would be great. And it sounds from the article that they will be training more of the station crew for similar tasks, so maybe that will become the norm rather than the exception on the ISS.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
B.A. Baracus
MacGuyver
The entire cast of Blue Peter (UK joke!)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I do work in the satellite communications industry - so my original post was not really meant to be taken too seriously.
If it came to practicalities, I suppose it would be possible to use Shuttle/ Soyuz to have boosted Mir somewhere close to the orbit of ISS as I understand has been done to ISS.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
If they'd left Mir up there then they could have cannibalised it for useful things e.g. tables, scrap metal etc. Then when any member of the ISS crew felt an attack of the A-team/MacGuyver 'must build something!' episodes coming on, he/she could've just uses the shuttle as a space bus to go from one to the other.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I agree. While it was nice to see how everyone worked together up there and built something they could feel "ownership" in, I got the impression that the whole article was a chance to dig at Russian space control. NASA praised the table, while Russain Space Control said it couldn't be done? Aren't these guys supposed to be working together? Granted, CNN is reporting to an American audience, so I can understand playing up the American angle a little bit, but this seems like it's poking fun at Russian Space Control a little too much.
Damn straight! Red Green can do wonders with duct tape. I once saw him make a Lazy Boy out of duct tape.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Not only did the build a table, they built - and I quote - a "fully functional table". D'you think they meant that in the same sense as Data is fully functional? How would that work?
They should send up a bunch of LEGO. It would have great theraputic and social benefits. They could also use it for "customizing" the station if necessary.
And I thought fixing my sink was challenging.
They just need a blonde, British pixie as the commentator and they have got a show. I bet Bill Sheppard could beat the "Brothers Long" any day
of the week. Although that hovercraft episode was pretty awesome, you have to admit.
Sheppard could have justified the time and labor required to build the table as a way to save the expense of carting the junk back to earth. They should build a whole extra addition on-to the space station with scrap metal and empty gas tanks.
What would make it not stay on the table?
Think about it.
The two elementary particles of the universe are duct tape and baling wire. You can make anything out of the two of them.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
During the Apollo program, NASA spent millions developing a pen that would work in zero gravity. The Soviet solution was to use pencils.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Actually, I now find that it is just that - a story
t m
See http://www.snopes2.com/business/genius/spacepen.h
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Umm, now, i've never tried to hit off a bong in 0g, but it seems to me that with no gravity, instead of getting the smoke to bubble up through the water and into your lungs, you'd just get a mouthfull of bong water.
And nobody likes bong water.
-ben.c
Not even talking about the table (why would they need a table?)
NASA and the astronauts both said that they need more "Hands On" folks.
This, in the era where we are removing things like shop classes in our schools, because we don't need them to get into college. The "I'm not going to work with my hands" mentality
Most school systems in the US no long teach any shop. It's a shame.
Joke is, some of the BEST academic schools out there still require you to take drafting or CAD classes. Maybe you can figure out HOW to build something
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
> "They've got a fully functional table now
> because he built the thing," Curry said.
I know americans really like to overplay things, but this is just awkward. First, it's not "he built the thing" but rather "THEY built the thing" and second, what's that crap of a "fully functional" table?
This reminds me of those great products sold on TV: "I can't believe it, it's a fully functional table! I can put things on it! Wooooohoooooo!"
But at least our hero - the table - won't collapse under heavy weight.
CMBurns
Actually there is LOTS of gravity there its just the table is falling away from a "cup" at the same speed as the cup is falling towards the table. This is a weightless environmented not 0 G.
If there were no gravity there it would not be in oribit! it remains in orbit because of its forward momentium, the forward speed counter acts the amount the ISS has fallen towards the earth.
How the deorbit things is to just slow them up, The gravitational effect of the earth then wins.
James
"That way they can stick their lunch trays to it."
And do they also duct tape their food to their lunch trays?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
...they just didn't say which side of the tape was facing outwards.
If It Was Me, I'd probably put most of the tape sticky-side-down, with the occasional strip reversed. Most of the table would be smooth, with occasional places of stickiness built-in. Definitely sounds like a useful workbench, when a 2mm screw floating loose could wedge in some panel and kill you.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
No, actually, you should say "There's plenty of gravity but since the station is in freefall, the astronauts don't feel its effects, because the station is accelerating due to gravity just as much as everything on it is." Remember your science indeed.
I'm sure other lifeforms would do a better job of preventing galactic pollution, and not overtaxing available resources...
:)
We're probably, on the whole, no more or less concerned with pollution than other races. You have zero information about them, so why would you say something like this?
Or did it just sound like a nice PC thing to throw in at the end?
You would not believe how involved the process is to get something certified to fly. The people who work on projects tend to work on their own piece of the project, and how it will fit into a mission. However, 99% of the flight certification process revolves around safety - AS IT SHOULD.
If that means that people aren't reusing materials optimally, that may be disappointing, but it's much better than creating an unsafe environment. Space, without our help, is one of the most inhospitable environments for humans. Huge amounts of time and effort go into safety precautions.
Personally, I can see why the ground crews would have balked at the table making enterprise. Those "spare parts" that they used were there serving a purpose, most of which was safety related. Simply removing them w/out consulting the people who built them and determining their purpose may have the unintended effect of making something unsafe.
Right now NASA seems to be applauding the ingenuity of the american who created fashioned the table. I wonder how they'll react if the things used end up creating some sort of safety hazard. Remember how critical NASA was of MIR with all of its safety problems.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
I thought the same thing. An American and two Russians build a table, and the US media makes it sound like the American did all the thinking and planning and had the brilliant crafty initiative.
Maybe that was the case, but I don't know how CNN would have known. It was built in secret, after all.
Not if you inhale vigorously :)
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
it's a revelation to me, that this even holds on the mighty ISS.
They should package everything they send up in Legos!
the tally of the spare parts used plus labor puts the cost of the table at around 1.2 million dollars.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Now all they need is a kitchen sink
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
This is a further example of what is meant by the term "hacking", which NASA seems to exemplify. Don't have what you need, hack something together out of what you have.
The Deep Space 1 mission, and the piloting fix applied mid-mission, is another great hack job.
Uh? Nice grade school physics there. What you no doubt meant is inertia, not momentum per se. And you forgot to add is the correlary: a body in motion will continue to travel in the same direction with the same velocity, absent external forces.
Let's see why the correlary is so important. I challenge you to set a coffee cup down on a table without imparting any "bounce" to it. (In other words, try to set it down without making any sound - the clearest indicator that the thing would bounce in space.) Not easy, is it?
Now try it again, but this time also make sure that you don't impart any angular momentum to the cup. (Or, as a better illustration of what I'm talking about here, try to set the puck down on a air hockey table so that it doesn't move after you let go.)
So, Newton was right (down to a scale where relativistic forces take over), but it doesn't help make this table any more useful.
Please define "down" in a microgravity environment.
What if the table top was made out of metal and the duct tape was just used as a nice cleanable covering? That way they can stick their lunch trays to it. I bet they took those frames and duct taped them together. This way they can roll the table up. If you say this won't work, then look at camping tables now available. Those are made out of slats and they roll ontop of a frame that was originally folded together. In space, since gravity isn't available to hold the tabletop to the frame, they could either use velcro, or a nut and bolt contraption to hold the table top down. Since the slats taht made up the table are metal, the trays that have magnets on them will just hold to the table.
Gorkman
Yeah, and without removing those brackets the O2 generators would be unavailable and people really would die. Though the article did not specifically mention it, I gathered that these bracket were shipping restraints that were removed when the O2 generators were delivered.
In order to survive the launch to orbit everything that goes into orbit is somehow secured to the spacecraft. People are strapped into their seats, small items are stowed in compartments, large items are bolted to the frame. This is as much for the benefit of the spacecraft as anything else; loose cargo flying about during multi-g acceleration can really ruin an astronaut's day.
I figure the brackets used for the table were shipping brackets from the launch of the O2 generators, and the foam used for the muffler was packing material from some other shipment.
(Side note: when the fire broke out on Mir, one of the many problems in fighting it was that the restraining brackets had never been removed from the fire extinguishers. They had to waste crucial seconds finding a wrench and freeing the fire extinguishers.)
Bah humbug. I'm beginning to see why they changed the station's name from the iss..
Linus has,in fact,grown,and explosively-JonKatz
...looks like they didn't bring everything up after all ;)
---
"What, I need a *reason* for everything?" -- Calvin
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
"away from the prying eyes of mission control." is misleading. It was not that mission control was disapproving of such a project. They couldn't bring up a pre-made table because the Russians felt it was a low priority and would cost to much to put in orbit.
So, they guys up there built one themselves and unveiled it to mission control as a suprise. They also did it so that they could work together on something, since they are separated into workin on their own national's modules.
We'll be building a spice-rack out of Sputnik
here's my handy tip for smoking in a no smoking area.
.oO0Oo.
Use a vaporiser to light the weed
breath it all in in one go and blow the excess smoke out of the window or in this case - into an airlock.
shouldn't be too hard
I wonder if they send the sniffer dogs in before take-off?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Quote from story 'I spend most of my day with a tool in my hand' ... God it must be lonely up there
... does buttered bread still land butter side down in zero gravity?
A table - great idea.
Let's just hope they don't progress to the spice rack or bookshelves, as nailing them to the wall may prove a bit of a liability....
M.
Why are they referring to ISS as Space Station Alpha? Seeing as how MIR was the first space station, wouldn't this be Space Station Beta? They must have short memories.
Mind you, it just reminded me of the Rastafarian space station in Neuromancer (you know, the one where hash smoke is piped through the air conditioning, and dub music is on all the speaker systems.)
I think all you Americans ought to come back home right now !!
There was me thinking that chauvanism was being condescending towards women, but fortunately I took a second to check with m-w to find the first definition is:
excessive or blind patriotism compare JINGOISM.
That'll learn me.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
Someone needs to smack CNN for not including a picture when one obviously exists.
There's no gravity, no down, no chairs... Maybe if you had a velcro surface and everything had velcro stuck to it then the table would serve as a repository but no, it has a duct tape "top."
What does the phrase "finally had a table on which to eat, cook and work..." mean in outer space?
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
This quote from the article was very interesting:
All three command-and-control computers in NASA's Destiny laboratory shut down during space shuttle Endeavour's visit in late April, temporarily crippling the space station. It took hundreds of flight controllers working round the clock to bring the computers back up to a minimum level.
Didn't NASA spin that story as a problem with one of the servers as it was happening last month? The reports at the time were like "A small glitch. Not much of a problem." but according to this it was a BIG problem. Well, it's CNN after all and as far as I'm concerned neither they nor NASA can be counted on for accurate information.
Great! After the backdoor that microsoft built for them now they have a table too! I wonder when they'll start on the patio...
ISS, IIS... who can see the difference?
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
The next thing for the, of course American, astronauts to figure out is how to make a bong without gravity. I mean, you don't want the water to float into your weed and ruin it, especially because im sure its hard to find up there. Also, what would happen to the bubbles, they would pop and you would end up inhaling a whole bunch of microscopic drops of bong water. I think they will need a little more creativity than they did with the table.
Before anyone else says it again... Stuff in space just doesn't randomly start flying around because of zero gravity. "A body at rest tends to stay at rest", so therefore if you want to set something down, it would be quite handy to have a table. If you just let go of something it will probably be moving, if you set it on a table however... In addition to all of that, it would be nice to have something that was familiar to sit and eat at, even in zero g I'm thinking I'd like to have a meal where it would be similar to what I was used to on earth.
They'd build a still first. If they haven't already.
Well, if they were not funding the defense contractors with the ISS they would have to do with weapons. The former, even if useless, is better then the latter.
Of course, perhaps we could have gone to Mars instead. That would have better.
The duct tape - they placed it sticky side up.
I remember that quote a bit differently...
If you can't duct it... fsck it...
You are a dumbass. I almost never succumb to an ad hominim argument, but in this case, it's apparently true. First: Learn to do math. Next realize that the United States doesn't have a lack of resources (like food), but a resource distribution imbalance (rich people and poor people). There is enough food to feed everyone... On this planet... From the corn/beef/pig/chicken in Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas alone... Whether that is good or bad is debatable, what is not debatable is whether the money we're spending on this space station could be put to use feeding people. If we were in the business of feeding people we'd be doing just that. The evil capatalist "technocracy" that you speak of is what is responsible for every major health care advance of the modern era.
As for claiming a moral highground, I recommend you take pause. Why are you reading slashdot? From a computer no less? When according to you, all of your resources should be spent feeding people.
They use more duct tape
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That makes me wonder if the Russian news coverage is something like:
Following the corrupting influence of American astronaut Bill Shepherd, our two cosmonauts aboard the ISS, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko, have been dupped into helping in a plot to sabotage the station's safety systems.
The trio, who surely wouldn't have partaken on this foolhardy venture if they were under the command of a Russian commander, have disassembled the important aluminum frames that hold the solid oxygen generators in place. Without these generators, people on the space station could certainly die. Why were these unnecessary risks undertaken? In order to build a kitchen table. This represents the true extremity of American commercialized excess.
It was only through the quick-thinking of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev that true disaster was averted. When Bill Sherpherd suggested that they use the airlock door as a table, Sergei stepped in and said such an action would be totally unacceptable.
Furthermore, in order to prevent intervention in this dangerous undertaking, the group chose to hide its actions from Russian ground control. It is the belief of the Russian Space Agency that this secretive nature is a direct result of using an American who was once part of the special commando force, the Navy Seals. It is likely that the Russian cosmonauts also feared for their life and thus had to keep quiet about the mission.
(Seriously, though, I got the impression that they actually built the stuff from packing material rather than stuff that was still being used. But I couldn't resist attempting to spin things the other way.)
Did you try anonymizer.com or safeweb?
Try this:
http://cexx.org/anony.htm
"Next on Bob Villa's Home Again, we'll be travelling to the ISS to visit the first off-planet furniture factory... The technicians here spend hours laboriously arranging spare parts to build a variety of tables, chairs, and barca-loungers..."
Or maybe Junkyard Wars... "Ok teams, you have 10 hours to build... a table."
I think it is definately a good sign for the space program in general, especially since it's generating good publicity. Also, perhaps they could find some new sponsors? "This wing sponsored by Home Depot..."
I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
Reminds me of my college days and my first appartment, Replace aluminum scrap with "Cable Spool" and mission control with "landlord" and I have been their and done that. Though the gravity that was naturally provided made mine a bit more pratical to use....
Papa Legba come and open the gate
"Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation." -- Johnny Hart
Taxes are robbery by the state. Axing NASA and all these stupid government programs like the war on drugs would be a hell of a better way of running the country.
But which force works up in the ISS?
Momentum: A body at rest stays at rest.
They probably also use more tape, velcro, etc. But if something is put in place, it stays in place.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
On another topic: are ISS crew members addicted to Black and White?
Duct tape is like the force, Luke: it has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
when the americans spent millions on developing a "space pen" that forced the ink out the ball in zero g, the russians went straight ahead and used their super fanciful technical solution.......
a pencil !
-------
Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
-------
Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
I think all you Americans ought to come back home right now !!
Being mexican I really don't want to go back to mexico. Besides I didn't take a ship over here...the river isn't that wide!
As we all know, The force of ignorance is capable of overriding the laws of physics.
Yeah but can you imagine playing 52 card pick up in space?
"It's because they're stupid. That's why everybody does everything."- Homer Jay Simpson
NASA is costing each and every US citizen around $742 EACH YEAR, and yet the people on the space station cannot even follow orders ?
0 3-HQ.html:
Ok, you are clearly trolling but i still want to set the record straight.
From http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/facts/HTML/FS-0
NASA has the smallest budget of the major agencies in the Federal Government. Its budget has represented less than 1 percent of the total Federal budget each year since 1977.
The above link also mentions a total budget of 14,035 million dollars. This amounts to about 56 dollars per US citizen per year. Not quite your quoted number of $742 per year.
Remember to use the Preview button. and now say it 3 times ...
1
ahh. 3tims2
3
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
OK, since they have a table on the ISS, how does the stuff stay on the table?
Here on the bottom of the gravity-well, 9.81m/s make sure the cup stays on the table if i put it there. But which force works up in the ISS?
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
This paves the way for Son of Kitchen Table.
I am a Russian engineer. I was working for joint high-energy physics experiments in Fermilab, USA in 1991-1995. There was a number of situations, when we had to fix something or to come up with a solution to a problem under tight time and budget constraints. Usually, it was Russians who solved the problem in a non-standard way, without waiting for lengthy approval or purchasing process, going instead to the heap of old scrap for parts and materials.
This tradition comes from the days of the centrally planned Soviet economy, when aproving and purchasing something might take 1-1.5 years(!), especially in non-military fundamental science area. We had to reuse everything, sometimes in very interesting ways.
Okay, I'm willing to think "outside the box", and I say it's sticky side down. Besides my wanting to impress the Australians, this is space, after all.
Anybody want a peanut?
Well it seems that one has a vit of a problem here. If the duct tape is facing down then the top is smooth, while if it is all facing up, then it doesn't sitck to the table (what a mess...). The idea of simply securing it around the sides would probably not hold up to much stress, so I would suggest an alternate strategy-- two layers of duct tape (how I would do it). The lower layer would look like this:
Interspersed bands facing opposite directions...
Where the ones on tip are facing down and the ones on the bottom are sticky-side-up. Then a second layer would be applied above, perpendicular to this layer, sticky side up, and held in place by the bands of of sticky duct tape. It would not need to be very sticky, just enough, so it would probably last for quite a while.
Anyway, just a thought.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I have to say that whilst ppl's posts have generally been humourous (note the "u"), all that occured to me is the terrific amount of money that is sent in space projects, and how much of a waste of money it must be if astronauts have time to go constructing tables and other assorted "luxuries" for their time in space. Projects like these cost millions of pounds, but it appears that the astronauts must have so little to do that they have to occupy themselves in tasks such as these.
And, considering that the table was set up in Russian living quarters their part, probably, was not just to keep their mouthes shut. But, anyway, is it NASA or Russian Space Programm who desperately need some good publicity after the Tito's flight?
I bet someone on the I.S.S. will fashion a "tobacco water pipe" out of odds & ends before too long.
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
- Dan I.
This is pretty funny, and cool. Now they need to get a fourth up there to play euchre.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
The article mentions the use of duct tape, but the didn't mention which side is up.
You can tell a college man, but you can't tell him much.
"Honey...check out what I did with the communications dish! It was so wimpy, so I direct-fed it power from one of the redundant power feeds. Now you can microwave popcorn anywhere in Colorado!"
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I admit it was kind of underhanded, but the request for a link to a picture just seemed too tempting to resist. For reasons that should be obvious, I didn't feel like checking to see whether the link worked. I was hoping very much that it was too ridiculous to be real. In case you missed the joke try goatse.cx.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
The men drilled holes, bolted the pieces together, covered the top with duct tape and, after weeks of working on it a bit at a time, finally had a table on which to eat, cook and work.
Has it occurred to any of you that are questioning the use of a table in space that you might not be thinking "outside the box" when you read this? What is the (probably incorrect) assumption that you made about the tape?
The tape is probably stick-side up. This type of thinking is why they're up there and most of us are just reading an article about them.
This is a problem that goes back to Shuttle-MIR. The Russians do things a bit differently than the Americans, and there is friction on both sides. Now that most of the Mission Control is in Houston rather than Russia, there will be more friction with Houston.
People are starving on Earth because of politics and transportation.
It also worth noting that NASA's budget *would not cover the budget of the State of California's HEW department*.
They've got a fully functional table now because he built the thing," Curry said. "He's a Home Depot kind of guy."
... nothing? Expect to see the Home Depot logo soon, on a moon near you.
This is all very top-secret, but Curry has just leaked NASA's financial dependance upon the home depot. You think our national buget surplus came from
___________
| E |
| H E T |
|T M O |
| O P |
| H E |
| D |
-----------
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
Now I know why there is no ASCII art on /.
That's three times today I've lost info due to HTML, when will I learn?
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
Now that NASA is considering billing the Russians and that Tito dude for wasting astronauts time and endangering the ISS, I wonder if the Russians will respond in kind??
One thing is for shure. If the furniture designer had been a Russian we would be in the middle of a regular shitstorm of NASA critiscism.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Well, orbits aren't exactly stable. Even at the altitude most spacecraft orbit at, there's a tiny bit of air friction that would slow them down enough to come down when/where we don't want them to. Keeping it up would require fuel and resources, which cost money. Plus, in the future, who would want to dock with and enter this rusting junkbucket that could fall apart?
Is it just me or the report more or less forgot to talk about the role of the Russian cosmonauts?
They probably spent as much time as the American guy, and probably had as much initiative... isn't CNN a bit chauvinistic in this?
Claric
--
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
Next thing you know, it's going to be a fridge out front, an old rusty Space Shuttle up on blocks in the yard, then there goes the neighborhood...
"Hey, just open the porthole, Boris"
(Image ended up in my mind probably from "The Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle :)
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
You'd think that if the astronauts on the space shuttle were able to think of using container frames as table parts, the people down here might have been able to think of a way preparing to do that.
Considering the enormously high cost per unit mass to send things to space, I would hope that they would be maximizing the materials (plan to have packing materials fold out into other useful items, etc). Enough waste material to do things like building a table that's "too bulky to send up" or a muffler sort of scares me.
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
This may be a relatively small example of it, but the most important part of the space program is the determination and inginuity of the men and women we send up there.
If something goes wrong up there, there ain't no repairman you can call to fix it. You have to rely on your wits, nothing else.
As for hiding things from the controllers on the ground, it isn't exactly anything new. During the Apollo missions, the astronauts snuck up such essentials as a golf club, golf ball, and pages from Playboy magazine.
Mmmmm....space porn.
On the slippery slope to insanity,
-- If any of the above made sense, I assure it was purely by accident.
Apparently we send these guys up there just to keep the ISS up and running. What good does it do? Where are the technical breakthroughs? Only proves again that humans in space are an unnecessary expense.