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ISS Loses Orbit-Boosting Options
An anonymous reader writes "NewScientist reports is reporting that the International Space Station has lost some of its options when it comes to altitude-boosting due to several recent failures. From the article: 'The problems began on 19 April 2006, when the Russian Zvezda service module's main engines failed during a test. The failure may have been due to a sunshade cover that was not completely open, according to a station status report.'"
When this thing finally fails, NASA should make every attempt possible to bring the ISS back to Earth in (approximately) one piece. We really need to know why all these things keep failing out there, and hopefully learn how to make them more robust. Stuck mirrors, jammed wheels, dead solar panels, useless antennae... do we even bring back failed satellites to see what went wrong or do they all just deorbit and burn? We can't go pick up the mars rover to see what's wrong with it, but the ISS is certainly within reach.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Can someone lay out what the ISS has actually done for us? It seems to be a crowded bunch of poorly-engineered tin cans floating above us and sucking up money in the process.
As the article itself states, they move the ISS when there is a 1 in 10,000 chance something will hit it, and they know well in advance if that's the case. The ISS is getting so old that I think it's starting to get ridiculous to report all of it's little breakdowns here and there. Personally I think at this point it's a money hole that's outlived it's usefulness.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
They build shitty space modules.
nothing quite like the feeling of helplessly drifting through space.
Let's rename the station to something more appropriate: ICF: International Cluster Fuck
1 in 10,000 something will hit it? what about it hitting something?
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Don't worry they have a procedure for getting these things down. It's called cross your fingers and aim it at an underdeveloped country. ;)
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That's a shame. It only had one day left until retirement.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
and not a 30-year old Taco at that....
...and kill two birds with one stone :-)
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mod parent up, it's not a troll.
Will it still have Laser and Speed Up?
Oh man, that'd be bad ass. Crash that bitch into the moon! BAM! Study that, bitches!
"No one will really be free until nerd persecution ends."
... heads up!
It's always confirmation bias!
It is done whenever there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of an object hitting the station
Does this mean that every time they see an object that might hit they're prepared to gamble the entire ISS with 10,000 to 1 odds. So if they see 100 distinct objects with a less than 1 in 10,000 chance of hitting, over the ISS lifetime, there's a roughly 1% chance of one of them hitting? Are these reasonable odds when we're talking about something that cost of the order of $100,000,000,000 to build and carries people.
-- SIGFPE
It would be a convenient shame if it fell on Iran's nuclear facilities for example.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Since NASA and India have signed the space tech agreement, it's only natural to outsource ISS to India. Think of the cost saving!
is that there is so much space junk. And 99.9% of it is from humans. We need some sort of space junk collection device to be deployed.
So, is this thing going to fall on my house or what? If not, thanks for yet another story that doesn't matter.
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But, these good times won't last long. If we don't get some help soon... the reentry show is going to make Mir look like a mere meteor.
If the ISS can't control the Progress rockets, but Russian ground control can, it sounds like the problem is simply with the ISS, so why can't they just go through the airlock and control it from inside the Progress craft? I know Progress is an unmanned craft, so probably doesn't have a pilot's seat, but it shouldn't be too hard to rig something up, just in case. They're meant to have some of the best engineers around, surely one of them knows how to splice an extra interface into the system...
Get out and push. Worked with my old Chevy.
TFA is somewhat out of date - and misses the point mostly.
Much better coverage can be found in Jim Oberg's essay at The Space Review.
1) Americans: at least some money was spent on peaceful activities 2) Russians: understood that betting on US poorly-engineered tin cans not floating at all (shuttles) is not a good idea, as it hurts planned deliveries of spare parts to the station, Russia will continue with China to explore the space. The US government seems liking the idea of nuking the shit out of this planet with Iran more than space exploration. I hope they do not seriously think of fleeding to Mars (with India) in order to avoid the effects of the nuclear winter.
I think I saw that broken sun cover when it flew over my house last week. What do you think from this picture?
Oh You POS
A chart of the height of the ISS:
Getting lower...
You are right that the probabilities are not cumulative, but the probability each individual event is so small that the total probability is nearly cumulative. The number of impacts per year is given by the binomial distribution, so if there are 100 potential impactors each with a probability of impacting of 1/10,000 the probability of at least one impact is 0.009951, close to 1% == 100 * 1/10,000
It's Skylab all over again.
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From TFA:Gee... that sounds like a disaster. A sunshade cover wasn't fully open. That can't be fixed. Right?
Now, why does this matter at all? Because the "station software was not properly communicating with the Progress hardware". The Progress is a Russian built cargo craft, but guess who wrote the malfunctioning "station software."
Did you guess that it was an American company?
Bonus points if you said Boeing.
You can read their one of their press releases if you like
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2002/q3/nr_02
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
There is no national pride in an international space station. In fact it looks like the opposite. There's also nothing new and it all looks like been there, done that.
The only time most people will care is when it de-orbits and makes a nice firework display.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Mod parent up for correct usage of Bernoulli trials and calculations for binomial random variables.
---k--
</stupid>
If the Europeans had had the technology to send robotic missions to the new world at 1% of the cost of sending manned missions, it would have made perfect sense for them to do so first.
"What the hell? Those aren't the Indies, there's no gold and spice, and all they have are buffalo and strange savages. Why bother going all the way across the ocean for that?"
Would have been a lot like how most people look at colonizing the Moon and Mars: doesn't seem like there's anything overtly useful there, so why bother going?
Of course that point doesn't apply to space exploration, but I'm just pointing out that it's not a given that exploration in blissful ignorance was going to end with the Europeans benefiting.
I don't know that it doesn't apply to space exploration. There may be, at the risk of sounding sensational, alien virii out there capable of doing our race in, just sitting in stasis on the Moon, or in the asteroid belts, or stuck to a comet. Not saying it's likely, or even a good reason to avoid going, but it is somewhat of a possibility.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
Don't send humans, send simple, tough life-forms and see what comes back a million or a 100 million years hence. From our planet a cloud of spores, little spaceships loaded of virii and bacteria, should burst forth travelling out on trajectories to collide with other heavenly bodies, just to see what grows there
Two problems... 1.) an alien race comes here and kicks our ass for sending biological weapons to their planet that wiped out half their population cause they had no immunities to it, or 2.) 100 million years from now the Cold and Influenzi races come back and go to war with the Cockroche and Ante races who've inherited the world from us.
Of course, scenario 2 doesn't worry me too much because humanity would be dead by that time, and scenario 1 doesn't bother me because I find it kind of funny to picture, and because I'll be dead by the time it happens.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
Our leaders and the Russian and Chinese leaders seem to be trying their level best to stir shit up again and start a second Cold War, and the Chinese have a space program that (comparatively) is progressing nicely. I could see us with a real second space race within the next decade, provided we don't blow ourselves all to hell sometime sooner.
I can definitely imagine the national pride issue coming back to space travel and exploration. Of course, the downside of that is that it'd be militaristic space travel, which makes our global suicide that much more likely.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
The obvious question is, who or what put in the remaining 0.1% up there?
Enquiring minds want to know!
myke
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