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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."
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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?
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
"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.
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
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
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
... 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.
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.
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.
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.)
"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.
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
As we all know, The force of ignorance is capable of overriding the laws of physics.
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.
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.
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 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.
I believe this is the first major section, hence it is Alpha. Next section to be attached would be Beta, and so on. It doesn't have anything to do with being the first station in space.
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.
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
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...
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.