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Astronauts Lost Tools in Space, Forced to Improvise
Ant writes "Neatorama and Popular Science share a CNN story about Russian astronauts repairing the International Space Station (ISS) with improvised tools because they lost the real ones.
How? 'It's a lot like your house,' said Paul Boehm, lead spacewalk officer. 'You set your car keys down somewhere and hopefully you find them again later when you try to remember it.' Uh, yeah, but we're idiots -- you're astronauts. Nonetheless, nice to see the Do It Yourself (DIY) spirit at work in space."
I lose my tools all the time -- "where did that damn socket set go?" I've been forced to use all sorts of things - pliers, my wife's spatula set (don't tell her), and my son's toy dinosaur. Betcha none of those astronauts would have thought of THAT.
Clearly I am much more intelluhgent then those NASA dudes. And don't even get me started on that Bo Villa guy. If I had 527 different types of wood vices like him, I could HAND CARVE my own six bedroom Colonial..
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Was the mudguard repair (I know, no mud on the moon but I refuse to say "fender" like an American) on apollo 17. Maps and sticky tape really came in handy that time.
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Here in Konqueror 3.3.0-8 it looks much the same as it does in Firefox.
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first of all, it's not like you can take something to work, leave it in the other car, etc. If it's on the station, it's on the station still. If you didn't find it in 5 minutes, then your method for looking/putting away is failing. There should be a process, etc. etc. AFter all, you can't even "set something down" in space. "Setting down" a wrench would just make it float away, and then it would smack you in the head later on.
stuff |
I think the way to go is to have different multitools for particular jobs.
I love working on my bike, but man o man what I wouldn't give for a shot to work on the ISS. Of course getting the beer and bong onto the station could be difficult.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
You set your car keys down somewhere and hopefully you find them again later when you try to remember it.
That's the problem with earthlings going to space -- we can't deal with space-based habits that contradict our own. On Earth we can hope to find our keys where we set them down. In space they float away.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
It's an interesting study on things we take for granted when people are deprived of things like the sense of gravity and of place. Couple in the fact that humans are really crappy multi-taskers, and none of this surprises me. An astronaut is deprived of a great many senses, most of which need to be compensated for with conscious effort, which leaves less brain for other stuff.
Simple tasks aren't so simple anymore when your brain is trying to compensate for input that is no longer really there. And then they have to fight off vertigo, which is hard even for people on Earth.
All this I took for granted before a little bit of brain damage, which recoverying from is a trivial little bit of recovery over a long, long time. Sadly, I remember how easy thing were before my neurons got scrambled, everything now takes a lot of conscious effort, mostly due to the fact that I don't perceive my senses as I should, and sometimes I have to really think about things, in single file to make it through the day. Forget about making internet postings and listening to music at the same time. I cannot fathom more than one task at a time, really, when I used to be able to do many. It's constant vertigo, every second of every day, and after some months, it becomes a heavy burden.
The point being is that their brains are more than likely scrambling to make sense out of the senseless, and leaving a screwdriver out in the void is probably pretty small taters, considering everything else.
MacGyver would be proud.
For a sec, I thought they were insulting the astronauts, calling them a bunch of tools who couldn't find their way back to Earth.
Did they improvise with an inanimate carbon rod?
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
That's why I had a slightly melted rench & racket set stuck in my windshield this morning!
Nonetheless, nice to see the Do It Yourself (DIY) spirit at work in space."
DIY has been part of the space program since Chuck Yeager used a broom handle to close the door on the X-1 after breaking his arm in a horse riding accident. I think the best example is when the Apollo 13 astronauts rigged an air scrubber and used their lunar module as a propulsion system to get home after the service module blew up.
Nice to see the tradition being carried on.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
You also probably use your keys every day, making habit pretty easy to achieve and giving you a reason to have a place (counter, key rack, whatever) where you normally keep them. Your keys don't get delivered to your house along with a 1000 pounds of other supplies that have to be quickly stowed out of the way where it will fit. It's not like the ISS has a nice pegboards all over the walls like your garage with pretty outlines drawn around the hooks for the hammers and the screwdrivers.
Look at what was lost, too. These were single use items. They don't have any special place to be kept. It was a bag to hold a small sample plate (easily replaced) and a foot restraint for EVA (they had a spare). Two small, probably very mundane looking objects that are no doubt very easy to lose track of when you have two guys unloading a Progress cargo ship full of stuff that might not be used for 3 months by themselves while also continuing their regular duties of monitoring the station and the experiments running onboard.
I suppose it is a little disappointing to lose stuff in a big aluminum tube. You know it's in there, and it's undoubtably safely stowed, you just can't find it. The fact that losing two such simple objects in a structure the size of the average house but much more crowded is even a story sort of shows how well they do of keeping track of things. I seriously doubt anyone here can tell someone exactly where everything in their house is, especially if they just moved into the house 2 months ago and someone else handled most of the moving.
I do have to say, these are rather boring as far as innovative solutions. Not quite like using duct tape and urine bags to adapt the big round C02 srcubbers from the CM to interface with the little square hole on the LEM on Apollo 13 or basically stretching a tarp over Skylab to help reduce solar heating. Also, apparently the Russian cosmonaut (I forget his name), accidentally dropped a tool during the last EVA. It had enough momentum there was nothing he could do but watch it float out past the solar panels.