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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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Because it didn't work and had to have software patches.
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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."
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.