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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."
A balky Russian oxygen generator broke down
I thought Balky was from Meepos?
riiiidiculus!
Sure NASA says the parts are coming, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Oh No He Didn't!
Oh Yes He Did!
Ha ha ha, but seriously, I hope they don't die.
Frylock: "We should have cloned twenties, Jackson wouldn't have given a fuck."
.. I guess they ran out of duct tape
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
It stated in the Article snippet that they have 5 months of oxygen. How is that stressful?
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Its a good place to try out tech that might be
used in a more exciting mision.
with Mega-Maid.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
With the shuttle nearing obsolescence and this kind of substantial problem on the ISS, it shows just how fragile our space program(s) still are.
We need better, sturdier-designed equipment if we are going to make a serious go at space exploration.
Imagine if something like this happened on the way to Mars... Saturn... HD 2638 b...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
... the last food supplies only contained chili beans. Poor guys.
Wanna bet that if their Vodka generator would brake they could fix it ?
Da. Just remove the brakes and it vill vork again.
And I guess we had the Mir?
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
...but I would be sleeping in my spacesuit!
You're thinking of Mir. Skylab was operated by the US.
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 the reserve oxygen supply starts running low, I'm sure they'll send up the space cowboys. Those guys can do ANYTHING.
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
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
First they ran out of supply line(2003), then they ran out of food(2004), and now they are running out of oxygen. What will the next thing be? Will they run out of orbit?
There's the problem. They should have operated it in an off-again, on-again fashion. Then when it finally got stuck it would be on.
But was it a rectangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols?
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
If you want to see the Space Station, it is making nice evening shows in the US right now. Just go to Heavens Above through your city in and watch it pass over.
It is as bright as the brightest star out there (Jupiter, yea not a star but you get it)
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Russian parts, American parts, all made in Taiwan!
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Somebody Send Us Up The Parts!
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?
`_
/ \
O O
|||/
|\/|
\__/
Hey there, partner! It looks like you're running out of oxygen!
What would you like to do?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
Here... I'll fill in the rest of the obligatory unfunny stupid jokes so that we can get on with our lives and have an intelligent discussion on the subject of the ISS:
Obligatory old Korean joke: Only old Koreans get stuck with no oxygen on ISS.
Obligatory underpants gnome joke:
1. Run out of oxygen.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Obligatory beowulf cluster joke: The oxygen generators: If only they'd had a beowulf cluster of these.
Obligatory MS joke: The oxygen generator must have been powered by Microsoft.
Obligatory Apple joke: The oxygen generator was useless because it only had one button.
Obligatory all-your-base joke: All your oxygen are belong to us! Someone sent us up the parts!
Obligatory Strong Bad joke: SUFFOCAT'D!!!
Obligatory everything else joke: The thought of Natalie Portman, petrified and naked, while they eat hot grits poured down each others' pants should help them to stave off suffocation, or at least be happy about it.
Wouldn't it be better to say that it fails for BAD?
While I agree with the statement to be the best of my knowledge, I would remind you to be caucious in accepting claims from any Soviet Government Department. I'm sure they would not be very forthcoming if they had lost people in space back then, hell if they overstate production of boots by a factor of 8 then they might lie about something really important too.
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
If the ISS is a useful science tool and it is part of the long-term aim of landing a man on Mars, wouldn't it be more interesting to tell the astronauts that there was no replacement on the way and that they would have to solve the problem themselves? This is after all, the situation they would encounter following a similar failure on a Mars mission. This would be one way of finding out which systems on ISS are genuinely essential, and which could be stripped down and the parts re-used for maintaining life-support.
Cohaagen, you got what you wanted; you must give those people air!
The FedEx tracking number?
Hey, I know this is /. but good grief! You really should RTFA.
Do you honestly think that a mechanical generator is the only way they have of breathing up there? In fact, there is 140 days' worth of O2 stored in a tank AND there are SFOG generators as well, which are also known as a "candle" - light it up and it generates oxygen.
And, even failing that, it's not like they'll die - there is always a Soyuz docked at the station to allow an emergency return.
A month down the road:
...
"Hey, guys--bad news. Turns out we were using the consumption rates in gallons of oxygen per minute, when we thought we were using liters! Heh, sorry about that."
"Guys? Hello?"
--Ribald
Disregarding your BS about Kyoto (just how many rainforests do you think there are in the USA, anyway?), I'm pretty sure that the rainforests, which cover a tiny percentage of the earth's surface, are not a "primary" source of oxygen. In fact, I had always heard that algae produced far more oxygen than larger plants, although I can't find a link to back me up.
Oh dear lord.
From the Wikipedia:
On June 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was to be negotiated, the U.S. Senate passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". Disregarding the Senate Resolution, on November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Aware of the Senate's view of the protocol, the Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol for ratification.
The Clinton Administration released an economic analysis in July 1998, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisors, which concluded that with emissions trading among the Annex B/Annex I countries, and participation of key developing countries in the "Clean Development Mechanism" -- which grants the latter business-as-usual emissions rates through 2012 -- the costs of implementing the Kyoto Protocol could be reduced as much as 60% from many estimates. Other economic analyses, however, prepared by the Congressional Budget Office and the Department of Energy Energy Information Administration (EIA), and others, demonstrated a potentially large decline in GDP from implementing the Protocol.
The current President, George W. Bush, has indicated that he does not intend to submit the treaty for ratification, not because he does not support the general idea, but because of the strain he believes the treaty would put on the economy; he emphasises the uncertainties he asserts are present in the climate change issue [10] (http://www.alternet.org/story/11054/). Furthermore, he is not happy with the details of the treaty. For example, he does not support the split between Annex I countries and others. Bush said of the treaty:
The world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. This is a challenge that requires a 100 percent effort; ours, and the rest of the world's. America's unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change. Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.
China emits 2,893 million metric tons of CO2 per year (2.3 tons per capita). This compares to 5,410 million from the USA (20.1 tons per capita), and 3,171 million from the EU (8.5 tons per capita). China, currently exempted from the requirements of the protocol, has since ratified the Kyoto Protocol and is expected to become an Annex I country within the next decade (at which time it would no longer be exempted). The US Natural Resources Defense Council, stated in June 2001 that: "By switching from coal to cleaner energy sources, initiating energy efficiency programs, and restructuring its economy, China has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions 17 percent since 1997".
...for doing everything on the cheap, rushing through everything while taking forever to do it, and letting the public's whimisical and capricious nature guide our space program.
We are not now, but someday will be at the point where if we don't get off the planet in a sustainable format, we won't be able to at all after that point due to lack of resources: technological, social, and energy. Imagine an Earth with a planetary population of fifteen billion, schismatic fighting over resources, and no cohesive will to even try to see common ground for the survival of the species.
That day is coming and in that world, how do you expect to do the major housecat herding job it would be to get enough of the wealthiest and advanced nations on the same page for a space colonization effort?
Instead we dilly-dally with the attitude that "it's only moon rocks and photo ops" and "we need to deal with problems right here". We won't have a right here to deal with if we don't make the human race an ongoing proposition. Top down forcing of changes in human behavior have never worked and all the fanatical self-righetousness of the environmental movement isn't catching on and won't ever.
We don't change under pressure very well and need the breathing space and serenity to do it. Try kicking a cigarette habit while simultaneously remodelling your home, refinancing your mortgage, getting two vehicles fixed, having sick family in the hopsital, and having a full desk at work. Now try it when you have three months paid leave and no problems on your plate.
So we need to get off Earth in a meaningful sustainable format right now, make sure that any event down below won't take out the species, and use what we find out there to better our lives, and we need to do it now.
Instead, we're using Russian O2 generators with known issues, and doing things without much more advancement than what we used to go to the moon in 1969. It's 2005 and you'd figure a planet that can make civilian houses nearly air and energy tight could do as well with environmental support on an orbiting tin can.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
One thing that always bugged me on Star Trek was that if any alien started draining the power supply, life support system would always be the first things to go. The ISS is a tin can compared to the Enterprise, yet they somehow manage to have a 5 month supply of air just floating around. Meanwhile, the Enterprise still has more than enough power to run phasers (which must use unbelievable amounts of power to disintegrate stuff), shields (which must use as much power to absorb that energy), impulse engines, warp drive, etc.
I know, I know, "suspension of disbelief." It just seems like it would be more plausible if life support was always the LAST thing to start failing, instead of the first.
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.
Please, please mod the parent way up.
..."? We can not let that happen!
A news item like this without "In Soviet Russia
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
LOL and of course it got mod'd offtopic to make sure nobody sees it anyhow. Mods have little to no sense of humor these days. :)
The world according to SComps
Ever wondered how oxygen generators work?
We're working on it on two fronts:
1. More experiementation to study the effects of low-g and zero-g on plants: Plant Research Unit
2. Miniature greenhouses for growing salad crops and recreation for the astronauts: Vegetable Production System
Disclaimer: Yes, I am affiliated with the above links.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Disaster a year away if ISS is abandoned
Numerous potentially fatal problems during construction
ISS Flying with 800 safety problems, some potentially fatal.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
There's a little patch up in Northwest Oregon around Astoria that gets 70 in. of precipitation a year. Part of the Olympic Penninsula in Washington gets 160 in. a year (try a winter there,) and a small swatch along the Tennesee/North Carolina border gets up to 90 in. annually. Southeastern Alaska gets hosed during the winter months, as the mossy vegetation attests, and the rainiest spot on Earth is Hawaii's Mt. Waialeale--440 inches annually. All of these environments qualify as rainforests, though all except the one in Hawaii are temperate.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"