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ISS Airlock Installed
Dada writes: "The crews of the space shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station successfully installed the 'Quest' airlock to the ISS. The Canadian-built space station arm actually worked!"
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You mean like all those uppity Canadians? Thank god!
;)
(Born and bred in Canada, myself
This is supposed to be an International Space Station. If everytime a module goes up we have to bash each other, or everytime a problem happens we have to single out what country made it, we're never going to get anything done. I'm really suprised rabid nationalism has lasted for this long. It really doesn't make sense in the 21st century for us to be constantly lambasting each other over the stupidest things. It's one thing to poke fun at each other for a good natured laugh but people actually take some of this shit seriously and harbor resentment towards other nationalities because of it. I don't have any problems with Canadians or any other country that isn't openly at war with my country. We're all states on this big blue planet... we really should learn to cooperate a little better than bickering children.
What made you think this one was so special that you had to single it out as "actually" working?
I think that with all the publicity failure gets nowadays, and the rare reporting of success, anything even remotely spectacular that gets reported is considered amazing.
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Have you read my journal today?
It's not made in Turkey or Egypt. In fact, it's not made anywhere anymore since the line was shutdown and is now going to be retooled for the LAV-III AFV.
Remanufactured M-1s and M-1A1s are sold to Turkey and Egypt.
The X-38 hasn't been scrapped. It just had another very sucessful test flight.
s t. flight/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/07/10/X38.te
"It was an outstanding flight, probably the best one we had," said Alan Brown, spokesperson for NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center. "It went off without a hitch."
Unlike the space shuttle, the X-38 flies without wings. Instead, it uses the largest parachute ever constructed, with a span of 143 feet and a total surface area of 7,500 square feet.
Until the X-38 is in place on the space station, Russia will provide a Soyuz space capsule to act as a crew-return vehicle for astronauts."
Because it didn't work and had to have software patches.
1 07 15fd4/
e .d elayed.02/index.html
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/station/stage7a/0
"After extensive troubleshooting, the most significant problem, one that intermittently affected operation of the arm's shoulder pitch joint, was traced to a glitch in a diagnostic circuit. Software patches were uplinked to mask out any such false signals and other contingency procedures were developed to handle virtually any arm problem that might develop."
As it was, it did work and NASA said as much.
""Those Canadians really know how to build great hardware, I'll tell you," Helms said of the Canadarm2 space crane."
There were some questions about the arm, so this one was special and it is new that it actually worked. The mission that is up there now was delayed because the arm was having issues.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/05/30/shuttl
"During tests by space station crew members, Russian commander Yury Usachev and U.S. astronauts Jim Voss and Susan Helms, a backup electronics box near the arm's elbow failed to work properly. Efforts to fix the problem with software patches uploaded by ground controllers have failed."
"YOU are the weakest link. Goodbye"
WHOOOOOSSSSHHHHHH!!!!!
ARGHHHHH!!!!!
Now that they have the airlock, at least they can have a designated fart zone which they can later vent to outer space - problem solved!!
Geez, NASA thinks of everything! :-)
The M1-A1 Abrahms tank is the one with depleted uranium core armor. It is manufactured only in the US. The M-1A Abrahms tank does not have the depleted uranium core armor. It is manufactured in numerous places, including Egypt and Turkey. I used to live in Egypt, where my father worked with General Dynamics on a contract supporting Egypt's M-1A tank facility.
--Be human.
The Canadian-built space station arm actually worked!
Canadians have been putting robotic arms in space for YEARS. What made you think this one was so special that you had to single it out as "actually" working?
Though I'm sure if something screwed up, you would have been quick to "blame Canada".
-Vic
I think he meant Canada as in British North America... though the French Canadians fought also.
You're correct that Canada as it is known today didn't exist. But the people who fought the war would later be formally declared Canadians in 1867; our ancestors kicked some American "dumb ass", to use your own word.
Here's an interesting link:The battle (burning) of Washington
Interesting parts as follows:
Indeed, the United States were humiliated.
Erm, they needed this airlock... From a BBC news story: "Up until now, whenever astronauts on the ISS have needed to go outside the platform, they have had to go through a docked space shuttle. Unlike the orbiter, the station does not have a proper airlock to allow astronauts to safely make the transition from a pressurised environment to the vacuum of space."
1 439000/1439568.stm)
(From http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_
The airlock!
The airlock!
The 2,398,298,456th story airlock!
High, low,
Low, high,
Throw 'em out the airlock!
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Did you know that 'Igloo' is simply the Inuit word for 'house' or 'home'?
Most of us live in Igloos...
Just a valid point here, but the reason we don't have our own shuttle/etc is NOT because we are 'less advanced' it's because we have 10x less population, and therefore, nowhere near the excess cash needed to run such a program.Remember, Canada might be the size of the US, but our population is much smaller.
Quit getting so damn defensive every time some American says something inflamatory.... it makes you look terribly insecure.
If people want to think Canada is a frozen wasteland, GOOD. Believe me, if many people realized what a paradise it is, we'd be overrun with migrants from the US.
... that the ISS was launched /without/ a way of doing EVAs. I mean, just think of the potential problems...
James F.
It's not much of a suprise since as I recall the problem with the Canadarm 2 was a backup system anyway, baring any major problems the arm would of worked wthout the fix, but of course in a space environment a piece of equiptment without a backup system is not a good idea, especially with the costs of sending any replacments parts and not being able to get a multi-million job done.
;), but hey I'm sure a lot of Americans do to every time a shuttle launches!
Of course there were probably a lot of Canadians (including me) that were crossing their fingers
You wouldn't do this on the current space station. It is orbiting earth, and has an 'up' and a 'down' (ie, it has a face always pointing towards Earth) and several aspects fo the station depend on this relationship.
If you start spinning something on the station, the station (or major parts of it)could not twist or rotate (think gyroscope) without severe stress on various joints unless you made it so it does not turn at all as it spins around the earth.
-Adam
This sig 80% recycled bits, 20% post user.
That's what YOU think. We just waited for you guys to spend tons of resources fighting the British, then when they were defeated and weak, we said "Oh yes, we want sovereignty too, may we have it?"
Given that the Brits had already had enough of "those crazy Americans", they said, "Yes, yes. Get out of our faces!"
We let you poor suckers fight our war for us! I call that tactical genius! ;-)
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Bah! The only thing you'll get is Ontario and Quebec. The rest of us will beat the living hell out of you! :)
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> I can see how all the canadian /.'ers out there would be offended by such a laim attemp at humer
Speak for yourself. Most Canadians couldn't give a shit BECAUSE the American/Canadian humor is more like friendly siblings teasing one another.
Launch a shuttle, with minimal crew, and leave it up there for a few months, until the next one comes, and send it back.
There were some rumors that NASA wanted to idle a shuttle, this would be a way to do it.
But yes, NASA needs more funding for these continuing operations.
This is the last time, I promise. The karma points dangling in front of me made me do it.
A moderator that hasn't seen the boilerplate before won't think it's redundant because to her it will be original. Ditto for a lot of viewers. If you've read this before, scroll onward. The real sin is not redundancy, it's off-topic. This isn't off topic.
Actually, I am very much in favor of using extraterrestrial resources to enable vastly cheaper spaceflight efforts. Again, the near-term concept farthest along in this vein is Mars Direct. See also Gerrold K. O'Neill's work, The High Frontier...dated, but not refuted. America's and NASA's political interests have diverged from these paths, and I hope they or someone else will return to them.
Actually, only the third time, and over something I feel very strongly about...I'm not trolling!!! But I'll be a good little boy and try to be original from now on....
Amen.
This won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle!
What about using two Soyuz capsules? That's the obvious solution but the Soyuz has a limited lifetime on orbit and has to be exchanged fairly regularly. That's why Tito was able to get to space as a tourist recently...it was a Soyuz changeout mission and they really only need a crew of two to fly that. The problem is that to have crew escape for 6 (ie, two Soyuz) then you have to fly twice as many changeout missions and the Russians are stressed out trying to keep up with the changeout missions they are currently assigned. Plus in order to dock two Soyuz capsules at once would require another docking node, and nobody wants to pay for building that and taking it up - $1 billion at least, $500M to build it and $500M to launch it on a Shuttle mission that isn't available - they are all booked on previously scheduled construction flights. Plus if you had two Soyuz capsules docked it would tremendously complicate Shuttle ops around the station - mission rules call for keeping clear of the Soyuz capsules both spatially on orbit and schedulewise during their changeouts. It could be done, but the problems just snowball when you look at the two Soyuz option...
When I started working on Station in the mid-80s, the dreams were high. We were going to provide ultra-pure water, on-orbit X-ray machines to analyze fragile protein crystals grown in zero-G that would never survive reentry, animal cages and discection capabilities (imagine handling mouse litter and blood drops in orbit!), freezers and microscopes and video links, centrifuges to grow wheat in lunar gravity levels and corn in Martian gravity levels - plus all the solar cells and heat radiators to run all of this stuff - run by astronauts living off of a closed life support system that would be a dress rehersal for a Mars mission.
Well, the ugly reality of $10,000 per pound to orbit reared it's ugly head, the Cold War ended and the project had to include the Russians, the mission orbit was changed to let Russian rockets barely get there at the expense of halving what a US Shuttle could get there from a Florida launch, the life support system is basically scuba tanks of air and there's no lab equipment to speak of or crew time to run it if there was any. I guess the only thing left to do is turn a module into a film backdrop for recording fantasy dreams....
I hate to say it, but I can hardly wait for NASA to declare the Space Station a rousing sucess, bring the last crew home and deorbit the damn thing. Only then can we get on with establishing a lunar base or doing something like Zubrin's Mars Direct where we escape the tyranny of having to drag up every single pound of stuff we use at hideous cost and start using extraterrestrial resources instead.
The Canadian-built space station arm actually worked!
Eh? What are you saying abut [sic] Canadians, hoser? Eh?
And do they get a discount if they use it more than 60mins a month?
Give me a break buddy. "We should just turn Canada into a State"? What makes you think you have the right to force your will on another country? No, let me guess, something to do with a large army, nuclear weapons, and country music no doubt.
Go back to polishing that gun rack in your pickup.
it seemed to be only half about going to Mars. The other half seemed to be another diatribe against the space station. Maybe I didn't read far enough, but I haven't thrown the book away, only set it aside. Zubrin seemed to have as big an anti-space-station blindspot as those he accused of having a must-use-space-station blindspot.
My frequent watchword in my posts is, "Be careful what you ask for," and I invoke it here, too. If the space station is declared a success, and then de-orbited in less than 10 years, everyone will see the truth just like they saw that Nixon's "Peace with honor" was nothing but bugging out of Viet Nam. (I'm not debating what we should have done, just trying to properly name what we did.)
Whether you like it or not, we're into the ISS for a pile of money, and it's reputation is going to rub off on all manned spaceflight. Shutdown and deorbit the ISS in less than 10 years, and you may as well shut down manned space in the USA.
Some of you applaud that goal, thinking robot science is better. Well, there's little point in running a NASA-like organization for robot science. If NASA manned space is shut down, I suspect NASA itself would be effectively shut down, and then we'd wander for the better part of a decade trying to figure out a way to do robot space science. Not that it's that hard, but that we don't have mechanisms or organizations in place to do it.
Besides, you won't energize generations of kids to go into science based on robot missions.
I'd rather see us find more sensible missions for the ISS we have up there, and adapt it to them. For instance, why do we constantly fold our robot science probes up into tiny cylinders, and then get mad when they don't unfold right. (Antennas, anyone?) Imagine taking a standard B-size truss, bolting a standard outer-planet antenna on it, bolt one of a standard series of engines on, bolt on the custom science package, give it a dynamics test (spin-test for balance, essentially) and GO. Zubrin wanted direct launch to Mars, bypassing the space station. But it's THERE, and is no longer a serial expense, so why not use it? That doesn't mean orbital assembly necessarily. But I suspect we could go a long way toward assembling a Mars mission built out of a few smaller spacecraft docked together, using near-ISS as a staging place. Perhaps the ISS isn't the best orbit for this, but at least it's not polar.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Of course our space arm worked! That's one of our "niches" in space so far, and we do it damn well. Oh, and thanks to the rest of the world for building shuttles and stations to put the things on ;-)
Freedom: "I won't!"
How well would you sleep tonight knowing that your bedroom could also be used as a "makeshift airlock?"
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
"The Canadian built space station arm actually worked!"
What is that supposed to mean? Of course it worked! Admittedly, NASA has had a few difficulties with space station components, but all have worked more or less as intended. When you're spending several thousand per kilogram to send something up into space, you're damn well gonna make sure it works before sending it up.
Incidentally, did anybody ever tell you that all the shuttles manipulator arms all came from Canada? I'm sure whatever company it is up there has the knowledge from making those for our birds.
Also, our A1- Abrahms main battle tank is made in Canada, as are Fords Crown Vics, and a few other cars. They all work very well.
Sure, our neighbors to the north may base their national pride on the notion that they aren't the USA (despite the presence of sears, mcdonalds, burger kings, shopping malls, SUV's, and many other things that make it seem like a slightly colder (and occasionally french speaking) New Hampshire, but let's not knock their manufacturing capabilities.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Maybe we could leave the Enterprise up there. No, seriously. The Enterprise is a test shuttle that has flight controls, but is missing a few other key parts. They used it to test the glide back to earth, by releasing it off the top of the 747 they use to get them back to cape canaviral. Maybe finish off the shuttle, send it up, and leave it there for escape purposes, cause it sure as hell can hold six people, even seven. and hold a soyuz or two to boot.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Congress just recently put back $400 million into NASA's budget so NASA could complete work on the X-38 CRV (crew return vehicle). So now, with the Italians looking like they'll be building the new Habitation module (so it can sleep 7 people), and the money back in for the CRV, a full-complement of 7 people looks like a reality.
Also, keep in mind that this is currently only the SECOND crew on the ISS, and they're basically still in the "shakedown" phase where they hash out bugs/problems in preparation for real science.
Granted, I'd rather see NASA focus on Mars as a goal (much as Zubrin calls for) and I dislike all absurd bureacracy in the agency, but Pulling together 16 nations (two of which used to be bitter rivals) to build a huge earth-orbiting outpost IS a worthwhile goal. I dont like the idea of LEO space stations for research, as I see them as a waste of time. But I do love to see the entire world work towards a single goal, simply because it's unprecedented in the history of mankind, I watch to see the ISS fly over to make me feel like the future isn't some apocalyptic end where we nuke ourselves into oblivion due to political differences.
Go Lakers!
"his won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle!"
This is what the XP38 shuttle was supposed to be. Since it's been scrapped, there is no way (besides what you proposed, having more than 1 Soyuz standing by) to have more than 3 crew, as they'd have no way to escape the station.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
GREAT!!! Now we have something to throw trolls out of!
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"Three generations of imbeciles are enough." -Oliver Wendell Holmes
I think they should reconsider using one of the crazy personal space rescue systems from the 60's. It looks cheap to build, and it would probably be a blast to ride!
This won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle! Only, that the X-38 just completed a test flight. See http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/07/10/X38.test. flight/index.html for details. You must be confusing this with the X-33 that was cancelled... (Altough that may be picked up again by the USAF, as well).
Why don't they just lower a long, long ladder down to earth, ala Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner?
--- c r o w a n "That's one small step for man . . . STOP POKING ME!!!!"