ISS Gyro Fixed Via Spacewalk

Teahouse writes "After a failed attempt last week, the ISS Astronauts finally got to fix the external gyroscope circut breaker in the station. Tests are being run today, but it looks like the ISS is back to having attitude stability with redundancy. This is particularly significant with the Shuttle being grounded for an extended period because the ISS would have had to use thruster fuel to keep the Station's solar panels pointed in the right direction without the gyroscopes, and no guarantee when more fuel would be arriving."

Comments

Problems with the Shuttle-centric approach?

[A. Pizmo Clam]

I'm sure a lot of people are going to use this malfunction and (necessarily) hazardous repair as an indictment of the current investment in manned, shuttle-based spaceflight.

However, until NASA has a better platform, they will probably continue to use the shuttle.

Perhaps if the open source movement were to desing and implement a shuttle replacement, we might have a working replacement faster than if NASA were told they have to come up with a cheaper faster replacement.

For those thinking of suggesting that Soyuz would work, might I remind you that every Soyuz capsule is a one time use vehicle. Even when everything goes right, it doesn't get re-used. It has no airlock, so either everyone gets suited up, or no-one does a space walk. It has no payload capability, so no sattelite recovery. It has no manipulator arm, so you can't rely upon it for doing sattelite maintenance as the shuttle crew has.

The shuttle may not be perfect. It was designed for a set of missions that have very little to do with what it is doing now. (The military provided some of the specs to support black projects, few of which have ever been attempted.)

The Civilian side of the project was to haul people and material to and from the space station that was being desinged by NASA, which was not the international space station. It was also decided to use it to deploy sattelites as well once the capacity of the payload bay was defined.

As a jeep, the shuttle has done an ok job. If you think we need a better design, I am all for it. Start working on that better desing, and give us status reports as you find the time.

Re:Another space station dying of neglect?

[character_assassin]

It's kind of arbitrary speculation to claim that the Bush "Mission to Mars" initiative is "just to give the impression of superiority over the Chinese." The US doesn't define itself relative to China, and only recently quit defining itself relative to Russia. Now, this may be more arbitrary speculation, but I think Bush's Mars initiative has more to do with Reaganesque feel-good-about-America vaporware. Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing started on one of Karl Rove's cocktail napkins, which is probably as far as it will ever get.