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ISS Oxygen Generator Fails for Good
billyj4 writes "A balky Russian oxygen generator broke down on the International Space Station, but its two-man crew has a reserve air supply that would last about five months, NASA officials said Friday.
The station's primary generator, which has been operating in an on-again, off-again fashion for months, stopped working last week and the station's crew has not been able to fix it.
Mission managers say the unit has failed for good. Consequently, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and U.S. astronaut John Phillips will be relying on reserves until replacement parts arrive at the station in late August."
None of the articles mentioned seems to say, so I'm left to sit here and think "the machine just broke, not worth trying to fix?" That hardly seems right. And why can we not send up a replacement machine? We've got a few months to do it, and I hope we weren't stupid enough to only build one of them.
A friend of mine works at NASA JSC. He has been telling me design nightmares for years. Last week he was saying within a year it will probably be deorbited. Design by committee does not work for space exploration.
If they are relying on reserves then they are more vulnerable to an accident or something. With an oxygen generator they have a supply of new air they can rely on to slowly but constantly build their reserves back up after an accident where oxygen is used (fire) or lost (micro-breach?).
I wouldn't like to know that I have a very finite and exactly known amount of oxygen left at my disposal with no chance of more until some guy I have no influence over decides my situation is desperate enough to warrent more. That and knowing I can't do anything at all about with all of my fancy training and experience.
Frylock: "We should have cloned twenties, Jackson wouldn't have given a fuck."
Slightly off topic, but since as I understand from this post there's someone up there, I'm asking myself about the possible problems the crew might have with the latest very strong solar emission. Sort of a billionth Xray machine exposure?
-- "If A equals success, then the formula is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." - Einstein
The oxygen will last for 5 months, but what about the booze?
I imagine the morale of those aboard the station, and of those tapped to rotate onto the station is pretty low. The actual space station is a half assed effort at space colonization, and a money pit nobody wants. It was concieved in the Reagan era and in a spirit of Glasnost (or whatever the buzz word was at the time) as some kind of international gesture or that would herald in a great age of space exporation, or at least international cooperation. But there was no real goal or purpose in building it other than building it, and all the countries that began work lost interest in finishing it, but no one wants to be responsible for killing it off entirely. (I'm too lazy to look up references, but there are modules that were never completed, and perhaps were never even started)
The loss of the use of NASA's shuttle was the biggest blow, since resupply by soyuz is barely adequate for the current crew, and there is no hope of actually putting a working crew up there without it. Expect the station to be abandoned by the time the shuttle is finally retired, that is, if the shuttle ever flies again.
I suspect that the only way to get a permanent presence off planet is through private efforts--i.e. companies that hope to make a profit from space. If I weren't destined to die a virgin, I would like to honeymoon there.
More music, fewer hits
How many and what type of plants would it take to convert the carbon dioxide exhaled by the astronauts and convert it to enough oxygen for them to survive? Would they still need periodic deliveries of fresh oxygen or would the plants provide enough? Can they keep enough plants alive in space to do this?
One of my favorite old science fiction films is Silent Running, with Bruce Dern. The premise was a little implausible, but the idea that we could be completely self-sufficient in space using biodomes (minus Pauly Shore) is still pretty cool.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
This may sound obvious, but what does an oxygen generator really do?
What does it create oxygen from? If it takes it from compressed tanks, then it really isn't a generator at all. That would be like calling my gasoline tank a petroleum generator. Does it recycle oxgen from the air? Does it create it from some other source? We don't actually have a device to make O2 from CO2, do we?
Why don't they build a greenhouse up there?
Actually, a biosphere seems like the next logical step for the space station.
Make the greenhouse a disk:
You'd have to be careful about mixing in animals, though. It'd be tragic if the animal population got out of hand.
A greenhouse would serve to keep the astronauts from getting too loopy, too. "Gardening", even hydroponically, would probably be a welcome change from the other crap they have to do all day.
Speaking of crap, a garden might be a good way to recycle other human byproducts.
sigs, as if you care.
Apart from your amusing typo, that is a very good point. I'll never get the people who are insistant that everything is "good to go" for a year long mission to Mars when things break left and right just here in orbit. And it's not just ISS - Mir broke all of the time, and if we had used Skylab enough, even more things would have likely broken more than they already did.
There's still an awful lot of learning going on. With such limited product runs and such extreme environments, even with rigorous testing problems occur. One of my favorite examples is the problem that they were having with unexpected torque being applied to the station. It took them a long time, but they eventually figured out that the problem was the Russian space suits. They vent gasses through a single vent; this creates a very tiny but extant net force. On most space missions, including those on Mir, it was unnoticable, but when working on ISS's most outward parts (at the time, over 70 meters long - it'll be more than 100 meters long when it's done), it became significant (Mir was only 13 meters long)
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
Yeah, there's really no telling. I was recently reading Heinlein's account of his trip to the Soviet Union back in the Bad Old Days, and there's an interesting anecdote about this very subject. He was there quite a while before Gagarin's flight, so this was pretty early on in the race. One day he's talking to a Soviet Air Force officer who boasts that the previous day's space launch was manned, and that they were the first into orbit. For a whole day, everyone was talking about how they were first into space. Then, suddenly, the official party line changed. It was only an unmanned test flight. And also, they'd lost contact with it. Nothing to see here, move along. Who knows how many of those there were, and how many were actually unmannned...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Diatoms and phytoplankton make up about 1% of Earth's biomass, and are responsible for about 50% of Earth's photosynthesis, so they'd undoubtedly be what you'd need. Assuming a 20% solar efficiency at oxygen generation, 5% energy loss through the protective layers around them and the water, an incoming solar radiation density of 1.4kW/m^2, and 237.13kJ/mole for splitting water (i.e., 237.13 kJ to make 1/2 mole of O2 (8g)), and human consumption of 1 kg per person per day (with three people), To achieve 3kg/day oxygen production would require (3000/8)*237.13=89MJ of energy, i.e. 25 kW/h, i.e. a constant conversion power of ~12.5kW (we'll ignore Earth's shadow, and assume heliostat). Factoring in inefficiencies, we get 12.5 / (0.2 * 0.95) ~= 66m^2. Assuming a specific mass of 15 kg/m^2 (it needs to shield radiation and contains water full of phytoplankton deep enough to absorb all light - this is probably an underestimate), and ignoring heliostat weight requirements, that's about a metric ton of weight. Or, you can send up 20 kilograms of solar panels and perhaps 10 kilograms for the generator. Which seems more realistic to you?
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.