Astronauts Pull Off Risky Spacewalk

dylanduck writes "A pair of NASA astronauts overcame an issue with a loose jet pack to make crucial repairs to the International Space Station, according to a story on New Scientist Space. No jet pack means not getting home if you inadvertently push yourself away from the space station and into space. That's a long goodbye that doesn't bear thinking about."

Comments

I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[MBC1977]

My compliments... I cannot imagine how tough that must of been.

Regards,

MBC1977,
(US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[Anonymous Coward]

couldn't you just send another guy out there later who DOES have a jetpack to rescue the guy without?

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[mentaldingo]

Strangely, I have. The other night I dreamt I was one of two astronauts trying to manoevre around a space shuttle without a jetpack.

OK, I also dreamt there was no airlock, and that I found my cat on board...

Anyway, I agree with you, and also tip my hat to the brave gentlemen.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[darkmeridian]

Spacewalkers must have balls of steel. Prior to an early Gemini mission that involved the first U.S. spacewalk, the crewmember staying in the craft was instructed to cut the tether of the spacewalker in the event he could not return to the craft before they both ran out of oxygen. During the spacewalk, the suit ballooned up to a point where the spacewalker could not fit into the cramped confines of their primative spacecraft. Even though the spacewalker wasn't told of the standing orders to cut him loose in case of an emergency, he must have thought of it as time ticked down. Pretty much at the last second, he squeezed himself into the craft and secured the latch. Crew and vehicle returned safely to earth and later spacesuits were made more rigid.

There are apocryphal anecdotes that the crew of the Apollo missions were issued poison pins laced with cyanide just in case they could not get into a proper reentry slot and skipped off into space for eternity. I wonder if astronauts on spacewalks are told to depressurize if they find themselves irretrievably lost in space. (Is there even a way to intentionally depressurize their suits? I guess they can take it off, right, unless this requires some help.)

Moreover, at least something good is coming out of the International Space Station: modern experience in large-scale construction in outer space. Even though the ISS is a loss in terms of substantive science conducted, I would bet it has helped a lot in the applied sciences involving in building the structure. Not quite in terms of "make spacesuits more rigid" but probably in the minutiae of designing structures and methods of assembly that are easier using actual lessons learned.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[roman_mir]

Spacewalkers must have balls of steel. - by the way in case of women, would that be tits of steel or eggs of steel? (I know, I know, they still say 'balls' of steel, but exactly which balls, the former or the latter? :)

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[introverted]

There are apocryphal anecdotes that the crew of the Apollo missions were issued poison pins laced with cyanide just in case they could not get into a proper reentry slot and skipped off into space for eternity.

The stories aren't apocryphal. I don't know if it's still there, but the Apollo exhibit at the Smithsonian's Air and Space museum used to have what was either one of the pills, or a (presumably inert) lookalike.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[siriuskase]

Ovaries, obviously. They are kinda round and are completely analogous developmentally to the testicles of a male.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[Media Tracker]

There are apocryphal anecdotes that the crew of the Apollo missions were issued poison pins laced with cyanide just in case they could not get into a proper reentry slot and skipped off into space for eternity.

The stories aren't apocryphal.

In the prologue to his autobiography Apollo 13 (formerly titled "Lost Moon"), Jim Lovell writes:

Stories about poison pills always made Jim Lovell laugh. Poison pills! Forget about it! There just weren't any situations in which you'd ever really consider making, well, an early exit. And even if there were, you had lots of easier ways to do it than poison pills. The command module did have a crank for the cabin vent, after all.

So according to him the stories are false.

You can read the book online at Amazon (go to "Search inside", do a search for "Prologue", then click on the only result you get). The first three pages are also available at ImageShack: page 1, page 2, page 3.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[igny]

During the spacewalk, the suit ballooned up to a point where the spacewalker could not fit into the cramped confines of their primative spacecraft. Even though the spacewalker wasn't told of the standing orders to cut him loose in case of an emergency, he must have thought of it as time ticked down. Pretty much at the last second, he squeezed himself into the craft and secured the latch. Crew and vehicle returned safely to earth and later spacesuits were made more rigid.

I believe the ballooned suit was a story of a Russian cosmonaut Leonov

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[DerekLyons]

There are apocryphal anecdotes that the crew of the Apollo missions were issued poison pins laced with cyanide just in case they could not get into a proper reentry slot and skipped off into space for eternity.

The stories aren't apocryphal. I don't know if it's still there, but the Apollo exhibit at the Smithsonian's Air and Space museum used to have what was either one of the pills, or a (presumably inert) lookalike.

You'll have to do better than 'there used to be one laying around'. Primary sources (statements by various astronauts) categorically deny the existence of such pills.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[Lectrik]

Leela: But we were already going top speed when we fired him.
Fry: So we can never catch up? Not even if we rub the engines with cheetah blood?

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[introverted]

You'll have to do better than 'there used to be one laying around'. Primary sources (statements by various astronauts) categorically deny the existence of such pills.

On the one hand, I share your skepticism of claims that don't cite sources that can be checked. Lack of verification and/or source information is one of the major problems with looking things up online. (Sometimes, even on slashdot.)

On the other hand, I'm not gonna hop in the car and drive to DC to check whether it's still there. (Besides, the museum closed at 5:00.)

It pretty much comes down to whether you consider the Smithsonian (or me) to be reliable. And who knows? Maybe it's something that was present on earlier flights but not later ones. (Idle speculation is one of the things at which the Internet excels. :-)

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[daff2k]

So "inadvertedly pushing yourself away from the space station" means that you can't possibly be moving slower than the top speed a jet pack would push you with?

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[Anonymous Coward]

No jet pack means not getting home if you inadvertently push yourself away from the space station and into space. That's a long goodbye that doesn't bear thinking about.

I couldn't think of a better way to go myself...

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[Firehed]

You can also bet your ass that astronauts are required to say that the pills are made up in the case that they aren't (I can't imagine a situation where they'd lie to make NASA look like it had a backup plan for, lacking a better word, incompetence). I've been to the Air and Space museum a few times and I don't recall ever seeing a suicide pill of sorts, but I can't say that I've looked for one either. But they gave one to Jodie Foster in Contact, and that's good enough for me.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[Simon Garlick]

Sheesh, it's like they'd never read Heinlein's "Space Cadet".

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[thogard]

The stories aren't completely false. They are false in saying that poison pills were issued. The true bit is there was some stuff in the med kit that could kill but that was there as a last ditch effort to compensate for unknown medical conditions in space such as bad blood pressure or incorrect respiratory rates. I expect thats where the rumors come from.

The other bit about the space race was there was a great deal of trying to show the Russians that the American space program was vastly superior to theirs and of course the Russians did the same thing. That resulted in a great deal of misinformation flowing about. One example of this is the space suit was designed to "keep the astronauts warm in space" but they were designed to dissipate heat. It gets even stranger when the Russians didn't do things the same way. The Peltier based heat pump based suit was classified well into the early 90s because they Russians hadn't figured that out even though the they would have gladly told you that their compressor based suits were vastly more reliable.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[DerekLyons]

It pretty much comes down to whether you consider the Smithsonian (or me) to be reliable.

The Smithsonian's reliability isn't at issue - it's you, as you are the one making the report. (No offense.) On the other hand, multiple astronauts have categorically denied the presence of such pills.
 
 

And who knows? Maybe it's something that was present on earlier flights but not later ones.

Who knows? I know. I've read every astronaut biography - and those that mention the pills at all, categorically deny their existence. Not one NASA document describes their existence. Not one (of many) Smithsonian trip reports I've read over the years mentions the display. On the space history newgroup we've spent years looking for information about those pills - and have consistently come up dry.
 
That's a powerful lot of negative evidence.
 

(Idle speculation is one of the things at which the Internet excels. :-)

The other thing with which the internet abounds is individuals that wrongly assume the person randomly replying to them is in fact, like them, idly speculating - and not someone who actually knows something about the topic.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[Anonymous Coward]

"You've got undestructable/nonsensitive to pain procreational glands, Human!"

"You've got balls" means: you are certainly not a woman (implying that women are not brave, which, fortunately for all of us who were born by a woman, is obviously not true).

"You've got the guts" means: your sphincters do not reflectively loosen and allow discharge when you are confronted with danger or pain - pictoresque observation (and negation) of one of the true instictive reactions to fear - to unload all unneeded weight. It is not a surprise that fierce warriors of the past wore bottomless clothess - i.e. tunics or kilts. It actually shows their hygenic awareness and high battle morrale. Because, in battle, it is acceptable to be scared and even to let your ... "posessions" go, as long as you do not break your line and flee your comrades. Either way, enemy blood washes soiled pride - so having no secrets about own feelings of fear (and uncomfortable aspects of it) was yet another fierceness booster.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[Gnavpot]

And even if there were, you had lots of easier ways to do it than poison pills. The command module did have a crank for the cabin vent, after all.

Unless "command module" is the technical term for the space suit, this would seem related to the space craft, not to the suit used for space walks. So apparently, Jim Lowell was talking about the absence of suicide pills in the cabin of the space craft, not in the suit.

(Well, I guess the suits were stored in the cabin when not in use, but anyway...)

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[CommunistHamster]

They cut the funding for the MMU (manned manouvering unit, ie the jetpack) several years ago, so there are no jetpacks in the ISS.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[Anonymous Coward]

> Regards,
>
> MBC1977,
> (US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)

Are three people allowed share the one Slashdot account?

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[uioreanu]

In a science fiction story, there's a mind test to pass: to be placed into a spacesuit with all what life requires (water/food tube etc), and abandoned somewhere in inter-stars space, left there without communication for an undetermined amount of time. Everywhere around just silent and cold stars. Feeling so out-side of humanity is an interesting challenge, and it's also interesting the solution that the author found to this test.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[segedunum]

I believe the ballooned suit was a story of a Russian cosmonaut Leonov

Certainly was. I was sitting there reading the comment and thinking "Yes that did happen, but he was a Russian".

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[dougmc]

There are apocryphal anecdotes that the crew of the Apollo missions were issued poison pins laced with cyanide just in case they could not get into a proper reentry slot and skipped off into space for eternity.

I've heard these stories too, but don't really believe them. In any event, a poison pin has at least two problems: 1) in a space suit, your mobility is EXTREMELY limited. I don't see how you'd be able to reach anything inside your suit to be able to poke yourself with it (or take a pill or anything like that.) I (seriously!) wonder if part of their training was long periods of being itched by something and being unable to scratch it?, and 2) since you can't reach yourself to prick yourself, there would have to be some sort of automatic pricker, activated somehow -- but would you really want something like that near you, just waiting for a malfunction or even a simple bump to end your life?

Yes, it would suck if you drifted away from capsule/ISS/shuttle, but it doesn't sound like a really painful death, as far as deaths go. The CO2 levels would go up, the O2 levels would go down, you'd fall asleep and you'd die. (I know your `breathe!' reflex is triggered by high CO2 levels rather than low O2 levels in your blood, and dying like this might feel like drowning, but I think I'd rather risk this than a poison pin an inch away from my skin somewhere.)

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[darkmeridian]

Francis Gary Powers, pilot of the doomed U-2, was issued a lethal dose of cyanide in case he fell into enemy hands. One of many pages. Powers did not use the poison upon his capture by the Russians. When asked by his captors why he didn't use the suicide pin, he said, "Because I want to live."

Certainly spaceflight is different from espionage. The astronauts certainly deny any such method of suicide. But I keep thinking about the contingency for a rapid-onset space illness. At the time, no one was sure whether there were alien "bacteria" on the moon. Indeed, returning astronauts were quarantined upon return. I always figured that cyanide would be a better way to go than moon Ebola or something. I'm not a big conspirationalist, though, so perhaps suicidal astronauts would just vent the cabin atmosphere. That would hurt, though, no?

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[Lectrik]

So "inadvertedly pushing yourself away from the space station" means that you can't possibly be moving slower than the top speed a jet pack would push you with?

No because by the time the person with the jetpack reaches the point you were at when they started you'll have moved further off, and when they get to that point, you'll be further off still... and so on and so on.... unless you rub cheetah blood on the jet pack, but do they realy ever not take cheetah blood to space?

anyway, i was going for the funny of both futurama and cheetah's blood... and the fact that Bender without any form of propultion should have been easy to catch up to in the planet express ship, except the PE ship seems to obey the anime physics law of "constant thrust = constant velocity" of course it's not even the ship moving, it was revealed that the ship remains stationary and the engines move then entire universe...

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[Ihlosi]

Certainly spaceflight is different from espionage.

Yes. In espionage, your options to kill yourself once captured are fairly limited, and the desired method of suicide has to be non-obvious, fairly fast and difficult to prevent. Note that "painless" is not on the list.

In space flight, it is fairly easy to kill yourself ("acting stupid" is sufficient), so you might as well go for the least painful way.

I'm not a big conspirationalist, though, so perhaps suicidal astronauts would just vent the cabin atmosphere. That would hurt, though, no?

Not if done slowly enough, and even if done quickly it would be less painful than cyanid poisoning.

Re:I tip my hat to those brave men (or women)

[infidel13]

I would think that it would be less painful to die of suffocation or asphyxia than depressurization - that's just plain ghastly.

It's not a jet pack

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA haven't used jet packs since the Challenger disaster (because of the inherent risk). It's simply his life support systems.

Re:It's not a jet pack

[WindBourne]

Take another look at the photo. One guy is on the platform on the arm. The other guy has a different pack; it is a jet pack. Most likely he had to be disconnected so had a pack.

Duc(k|t) tape

[fbartho]

I jumped in and actually read this article because I couldn't bear not knowing if they had actually used duck tape to strap the jetpack to the astronaut. The sad fact is that they did not and NASA insists that it was in no danger of actually coming free... just a couple latches on the sides had come loose and the pack was both tethered to the astronaut and relatched while the astronauts were still in space actively pursuing their mission.

Re:Duc(k|t) tape

[Anonymous Coward]

DucT tape, dammit. Stupid American.

Re:Duc(k|t) tape

[Stormwatch]

Originally, it WAS marketed as duck tape.

Re:Duc(k|t) tape

[mrchaotica]

Yes, it was (and is) Duck Brand Duct Tape. Other brands of duct tape are not called that.

Re:Duc(k|t) tape

[kimvette]

No, it's Duck Tape. Duck Tape was marketed as a waterproofing tape, and never for ducts, because you know why? It SUCKS. It dries out, oxidizes, and flakes so if you use it to seal HVAC ducts, you'll have a really good seal for a few months and then a very leaky duct after that when the tape degrades.

The ripoff/copycat brands marketed their waterproof tape as "duct tape" for a couple of reasons:

  - because the seal is initially good, folks get suckered into relying on it, not realizing that once the ducts are buried behind sheetrock that they got screwed

  - confusion between the trademarked "Duck Tape" brand and "duct tape" marketing drivel which is fraudulent to begin with (because so-called "duct tape" sucks for ducts)

If you want a real "duct tape" look at adhesive tin or aluminum tape, not the so-called "duct tape" clones of Duck Tape.

If you want to play grammar nazi at least get it right.

Re:Duc(k|t) tape

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides which Duck tape sucks. It's an inferior copy of gaffers tape.

Re:Duc(k|t) tape

[Anonymous Coward]

Duct tape is for taping ducts. Duck tape is a marketing gimick for morons like you.

Re:Duc(k|t) tape

[lunch lady d0ris]

I worked on new building duct work (it was a school), and we didn't use tape. We assembled the duct pieces with a some type of sheet metal binding piece THEN used a gray, thick paint like substance to cover that entire seal.

Re:Duc(k|t) tape

[kimvette]

Er, no. Duck Tape is NOT an "inferior copy" of gaffers tape.

They have different adhesives and are designed for different purposes.

Duck Tape would stink in a studio where you need the tape to hold fabric, props, cables, etc. in place but CANNOT leave residue behind. Duck Tape also comes in handy in race applications (hence the moniker 200mph tape)

Gaffers tape would stink in an environment where you need the application to be waterproof, which is Duck Tape's forte. Also, being designed for studios, stages, etc. Gaffers tape is available in more colors ( http://www34.pair.com/harrison/thetapeworks.com/pr ogaff.htm - note I am not affiliated with them in any way; a google query turned them up). Folks who use Duck Tape for those purposes either don't know any better or grabbed Duck Tape in a pinch because the right stuff isn't readily available - or they're downright cheap and bought a dollar-store clone of Duck Tape)

Similar look, different adhesives, different purposes.

or...

[eliot1785]

Or a short, "speedy" goodbye, if you push off in Earth's direction...

Re:or...

[topham]

Someone around here will probably do the math, but I doubt that even if you push yourself off into the direction of the earth that it will be all that fast.

I suspect you're most likely to die from lack of oxygen than re-entry.

Re:or...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Or a short, "speedy" goodbye, if you push off in Earth's direction...

This deserves a PBF link. The first snowflake of the season!

Re:or...

[guardiangod]

Well you would die eventually, but it won't be speedy.

Remember, if you are in orbit with the earth, you have angular momentum- if you moving horizontally and vertically at the same time.
I won't show you all the fancy calculations but take my words for it. When you push yourself towards earth, you will just descend into a lower orbit that is more elliptic.

If I remember correctly, however, the ISS is placed on a polar orbit that is quite low in attitude. Therefore there is a small but present air resistance. That will gradually slow your horzontal velocity down. At the end, your orbit will become more and more elliptical until gravity overcomes the angular momentum.

But you would be long dead before that due to suffocation.

PS. I know it's a joke

Re:or...

[Penguinshit]

Only if you do it with style...

Re:or...

[guardiangod]

Found an article about this:

Link

With that out of the way, let's take a look at orbital dynamics. You can't actually throw anything (or yourself) out of orbit--all you can do is throw an object, or move yourself, from one orbit to another. If you want to go to a higher orbit, you need to increase your speed in the direction you're traveling. If you want to go to a lower orbit, you need to decrease your speed. Just trying to thrust straight up or down won't work too well: Thrusting down, for instance, will lower you temporarily, but now you're going too fast to stay in that lower orbit, and you'll end up oscillating back above your original orbit. As science fiction author Larry Niven put it, "East takes you out, out takes you west, west takes you in, and in takes you east."

To get those baseballs to earth, you want to throw them back from the shuttle. Now they're traveling slower. The effect of this is to put them into an elliptical orbit, whose apogee--the point furthest from the center of the earth--is at the same height as the shuttle. If the orbit is elliptical enough, then its perigee--the point closest to the earth's center--will be closer than the surface of the earth, and the ball will collide with the earth after half an orbit or less. But if it doesn't hit the earth (and if we ignore atmospheric friction for the moment), it'll stay in that nice comfortable elliptical orbit indefinitely.

Now for the specific problem of astronauts throwing fastballs: The space station is at a height of about 390 km over the surface of the earth, for a total distance of 6,768 km from the center, and it's traveling at about 7,674 m/s. Our 93 MPH pitch translates to about 42 m/s, so the total speed of the ball is then about 7,632 m/s. Given that energy and angular momentum are conserved, it's straightforward (if a bit tedious) to calculate that, at perigee, the ball will be 6,623 km from the center of the earth, which is still a comfortable 245 km above the surface.

But this is all figured without the atmosphere. Won't friction from the topmost layers of the atmosphere cause the ball's orbit to decay, and eventually bring it down? Yes, but that would happen even without pitching the ball. If left on its own, the space station itself would eventually fall to earth, but they boost the orbit every so often to prevent that. In fact, that's why Mir was deliberately brought down: The Russians didn't want to keep boosting it any more, and they knew that eventually it would come down on its own.

Re:or...

[icebrain]

The station isn't quite in a polar orbit (which is generally 90 degree inclination, plus or minus a few). ISS orbit is 51.6 degrees.

I wouldn't call the orbit "quite low," either; 180nm (330-something km) is decently high. You still get atmospheric drag effects, but they aren't on the order of those that spy satellites sometimes deal with (those have been known to come down quite low for a couple orbits to get better imagery).

I also did a little experiment in Orbiter; "jumping" away from the station, directly towards earth, at 2m/s changes the apogee and perigee of the orbit by maybe a kilometer each. You can't deorbit yourself by jumping, at least around earth.

Rope to the rescue!

[DeeZee]

How about using a rope tied to the suit? Seems like a low-tech solution, but might end up saving a life.

Re:Rope to the rescue!

[F�an�ro]

Just my thoughts.

And if all else fails, surely they could accelerate the iss a bit in the direction of the lost astronaut, since he could onle be moving very slowly in relation to the iss.
The main problem might be not to accelerate too much and crush him.

Re:Rope to the rescue!

[Usquebaugh]

Are you nuts. Do you know how much money we have to spend at NASA to make it sound like we actually do something? Piece of rope indeed. Listen bud, we gotta have the most expensive stuff or else everybody will think we ain't the best. It's not a pretty world out there, everybody is getting in on the space game, we have to raise our costs just to have a chance of looking competent.

Of course back in the 50s it was a different time you know, it was a different time.

Re:Rope to the rescue!

[QuantumG]

All astronauts are tethered to the station on spacewalks, there was never any risk. This is just stupid sensationalism, as usual.

Re:Rope to the rescue!

[Carnildo]

Plain old rope wouldn't last too long. Between the extreme heat, the extreme cold, the vacuum, and the heavy dose of ultraviolet, an ordinary rope would go stiff or brittle within a few days at most.

Re:Rope to the rescue!

[Chmcginn]

Do they have a long enough rope? I know they carry tethers for use with tools and such, but I don't know if those would be long enough, or strong enough, to make any difference...

That does give me an amusing image, though. I can remember more than a few times I've dropped a nice new set of pliers in some ungodly-hard to reach spot on a job site. Can you imagine watching your 1200 dollar ultra-light weight tool set slowly floating past the window, a la 2001?

Re:Rope to the rescue!

[zippthorne]

Actually that's a rather recent development. I remember all the fanfare when they installed the system and thinking to myself, "Wait.. that's NEW?" That's what I got for assuming NASA has PHB teambuilding exercise ropes course technology.

Re:Rope to the rescue!

[QuantumG]

Calling a tether a rope is like calling the space shuttle a glider. Oh wait, they do that too.

Pfft.

[Antiform]

Show-off.

Re:Pfft.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, showoff is when they have no jetpack, yet they insist on doing Michael Jackson's moonwalk despite all the risks involved.

TOday's post was brought to you by the kaptchka (sp?) cautions

Frank Poole

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they might be able to find you and revive you- it just might take a millennium or so.

Re:Frank Poole

[MichaelSmith]

Well, they might be able to find you and revive you

I think you would dry out too much in LEO. That and the fact that orbits below GSO are unstable.

So not to be morbid or anything...

[Durrok]

... but you find yourself drifting in space with no hope of rescue. Do you:

A. Take off helmet?
B. Let air run out and aphyxiate?
C. Pray that the galactic president is stealing a spaceship with the Infinite Improbability Drive in it?

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Lord_Dweomer]

I'm actually kind of curious in a more serious morbid way...between options A and B, which would be the quickest and/or least painful way to go?

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[zippthorne]

I choose 'B' since i'd rather not spend my dying minute developing a painful case of the bends. And B is the same as C anyway. Since, as greater minds tham myself have said, "where there's life, there's hope."

Unless cracking the seal provides just enough thrust for self rescue... then it's a tough call.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Dis*abstraction]

I'd poke a hole in my pressurized suit on the side facing away from the ISS.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

You're a trained test pilot in that case, so you keep trying things as long as you're conscious, like throwing tools away from you to push you back (and then somehow canceling the spin -- maybe tossing them like a softball is best).

Supposedly there are cockpit tapes from test flights along the lines of "Option A completed, result negative, option B completed, results negative, option C WHAM".

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Todd Knarr]

D. Wait out one orbit and grab the station as you go by.

This is orbital physics we're dealing with. You're in a roughly circular orbit with a fairly high velocity already. That little push off isn't anywhere near enough to reach escape velocity, all it'll do is perturb your orbit slightly. Instead of orbiting with the station, you'll drift inwards a bit and then back outwards and you'll intersect the station's original orbit once every orbit (possibly twice, I'd have to work the math out all the way to be sure). Since the station's orbit's fairly short, I'm betting you'll meet up with it again before your air runs out.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Durrok]

From wikipedia:

"The space station is located in orbit around the Earth at an altitude of approximately 360 km (220 miles), a type of orbit usually termed low Earth orbit (The actual height varies over time by several kilometres due to atmospheric drag and reboosts [3]). It orbits Earth in a period of about 92 minutes; by June 2005 it had completed more than 37,500 orbits since launch of the Zarya module on November 20, 1998."

I'm not sure how much air they have in their air packs but more then 90 minutes is definetly feasible. Would be a really scary 90 minutes though wouldn't it?

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Mr. Freeman]

I really highly doubt that that's possible, if it was, you'd have to orbit a lot more than once to catch the ship.
You're both traveling at crazy fast speeds around the earth. If you push in one direction, you're only adding/subtracting a very very small amount of speed from you, you won't pass the shuttle for a hell of a long time.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Gorobei]

Parent is a voice of sanity. Mod up.

Pretty much no one commits suicide in a tactical situation - they're too busy trying to fix things. This is not to say silly planners don't provide suicide pills -- they do, but an extra 1oz of weight isn't that bad, and it makes for good PR.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Iron Sun]

It doesn't work that way. Orbital mechanics often works counterintuitively. There are no figures in this article, but it states that a good push off from the ISS would send you perhaps 3 kilometers away from the ISS, inot an orbit that would intersect with the station one or twice per 90 minute orbit. The space suits are good for 7+ hours, so provided you didn't do it at the end of the EVA there would be plenty of time to pick you up.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[sjames]

I doubt you'd feel a thing. With no air at all in your lungs, you'll only have a few seconds of fuzzy consciousness where you probably won't even be fully aware of your situation.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[asuffield]

D. Open the mission manual at page 579, "What to do when you find yourself drifting in space with no hope of rescue"

This is NASA. They have procedures for everything. They have procedures for scratching your arse in space. They have procedures for how to open the manual and find the correct procedure. Everything that happens is carefully planned and choreographed on the ground.

It's basically like making a movie, except that nobody's quite sure what the ending will be. NASA's just government-funded entertainment to most people anyway (probably including some of the NASA management).

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[LouisZepher]

D) Be grateful that life has been good to me so far. On the other hand, if life hadn't been good to me so far, as atested by my current situation, I'd be thankful that it wasn't going to trouble me much longer.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[wafflemonger]

You should consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Or if it hasn't been good to you so far, and concidering your circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be bothering you much longer.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Anonymous Coward]

From your link:

you place yourself in an independent orbit which will intersect the spacecraft orbit once or twice every 90 minutes

So it's useless. You will intersect the ORBIT (or the PATH the spacecraft takes around the earth) a little while later, but by that time the craft itself would have been speeding on and would have passed you by (or you passed it) -- now it's several km in front of (or behind) you on its orbital track. You're still screwed.

It doesn't matter if you do intersect the orbit if you're not colliding with the actual craft itself. The craft would have to make maneuovers to slow down or speed up to actually be able to rescue you.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Todd Knarr]

Nope, you'd come right back to it. For half your orbit you'd be moving a bit faster than the station, for the other half you'd be moving a bit slower (due to difference in orbital radius), after one orbit the difference would be zero. To do what you describe you'd need a significant change in tangential velocity, and your push just can't produce enough delta V to make enough of a change in average orbital radius to be a problem. Keppler makes things behave counterintuitively in orbit.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[thogard]

Keep in mind that while the station is orbiting the earth, its also orbiting everything in its local gravity well. That means the drifting astronaut and station are also orbiting each other. This is why stuff that falls off the station is such a problem since it will result in a collision at some point in the future.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Nefarious Wheel]

Not feel a thing? You'd feel plenty, as your blood boils and the capilliaries in your eyes rupture. Would take you a minute or two to wallow in freakish agony until the embolisms let you see-saw between stroke and cardiac failure before you pass out from the pain. With having the air run out (rather than "let out"), you'd have positive pressure and nothing to breathe -- CO2 poisoning would give you a headache, after which you'd pass out... forever.

Or you could simply throw a spanner or anything massive you could find, hard as you can, in the direction opposite where you want to go, and hope it's enough thrust to matter. Or simply let that long carbon fibre boom pluck you back first...

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Ihlosi]

You'd feel plenty, as your blood boils and the capilliaries in your eyes rupture.

You've been watching too many bad movies and reading too few books about physics and physiology.

With having the air run out (rather than "let out"), you'd have positive pressure and nothing to breathe -- CO2 poisoning would give you a headache, after which you'd pass out... forever.

Asphyxiation by slowly rising levels of CO2 is a pretty bad way to die. Imagine being suffocated .. over a period of many, many minutes, very slowly ...

The painless way would be to reduce the pressure to just about the level where unconsciousness sets in. No feelings of asphyxiation, no exposure to a vacuum. The lights just go out.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[SpanishArcher]

Well, let's take for granted that you actually can poke a hole in the suit, i'll give you 2 reasons because you might not be able to do it properly: 1. The suits have a sort of backpack with radios, oxigen and other stuff, and you are likely to be travelling away from the iss on your back, assuming no tumbling (see point 2). The backpack it's not accessible using your bare hands (i.e. no tools long enough to get there) 2. Tumbling. As you can't just "turn around" if you are stuck in scenario 1 above, you can't stop from tumbling. Do you have a office chair? Sit on it and spin it. Then, in the first 5 seconds (enough to consider mechanical friction and air drag negligible) try to stop it or reverse the motion without grabbing anything or setting your feet on the ground. A hole in, say, your chest area, in that case would cause a approximately even thrust in every direction (dependent from the tumbling). Nope, that's no that easy.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[CharlieG]

No supposidly - I have heard (once) a tape like that, and it was more like "I've tried A, NG, I've tried B, NG, I've tried...(radio cutoff)"

I used to know someone who worked for the NTSB (obviously NOT test piolts) - he says you know what the most common last words of the pilot is in a plane crash? "Oh shit"

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[CYDVicious]

D. Isn't that what the zipper on the bum is for? Just procure an opening and squeeze some excess exhaust to propell you in the general direction to intersect your desired destination. E. There's always the, reroute your oxygen flow tube and use as a propulsion tool...granted if you can't control the flow rate of the tube you could over shoot or veer off course pretty easily, unless it's a movie. F. Poke a tiny hole in your suit...and fly around like a baloon that's releasing all it's air.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[johnny cashed]

Or maybe you get someone to hop in the Soyuz and come pick you up? When NASA tested the first "jetpack" in space, they could have always maneuvered the shuttle to pick them back up. I'm sure it is easier said than done, but I would think that using the Soyuz to go get an untethered astronaut would be high on the list of things to do.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Lord Ender]

You radio to ground and get the suit engineers to tell you the best place to puncture your suit so that some air escapes and pushes you toward the ship.

If your question is: Whether suffocating or having your chest explode/blood boil is more painful, I think it is obvious that suffocating is better. Think of how many people die while sleeping due to gas leaks. There is no pain there. So you make yourself pass out (like a little kid mad at Mom) and go painlessly.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[zippthorne]

I guess one question is what is the limiting reagent in the space suits? CO2 scrubber or oxygen supply? 'cause Hypoxia really wouldn't be that bad a way to go. You just get more and more unable to function until you pass out.

Assuming the suits are rebreathers. It strikes me as tremendously inefficient weight-wise to carry 8 hours of gas in an open circuit system. Not to mention the delta-v from venting problem.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[sjames]

Not feel a thing? You'd feel plenty, as your blood boils and the capilliaries in your eyes rupture. Would take you a minute or two to wallow in freakish agony until the embolisms let you...

A minute or two? You'll be fully unconscious within 14 seconds. It will take longer than that for your blood to boil or to suffer significant capillary damage. A suit is pressurized to 5 psi. The partial pressure of oxygen at 1 atmosphere is about 3.3 psi. Much below that and you pass right out. Due to the way consciousness changes with insufficient oxygen, most people don't even realize they are passing out until they're too fuzzy to do anything about it.

Of course, an even better method if all hope is lost is to just shut the oxygen feed off.

Re:So not to be morbid or anything...

[Ihlosi]

If your question is: Whether suffocating or having your chest explode/blood boil is more painful, I think it is obvious that suffocating is better. Think of how many people die while sleeping due to gas leaks. There is no pain there. So you make yourself pass out (like a little kid mad at Mom) and go painlessly.

Ouch. That's a quite big misinterpretation of the facts.

a) Your chest (and your head) explodes and your blood boils in the intellectual vacuum of Hollywood movies only. Not in a real vacuum.

b) There are different types of suffocation. Roughly, there's suffocation due to lack of oxygen, and suffocation due to excess CO2. The former is quite painless, and is what happens in case of a gas leak or exposure to vacuum or atmospheres with too little partial pressure of oxygen. The latter causes extreme discomfort and an overwhelming feeling of asphyxiation, since the breathing reflex is mainly triggered by the level of CO2 in the blood. Especially if the level of CO2 rises slowly.

yikes!

[lawpoop]

"That's a long goodbye that doesn't bear thinking about."

Hell, if I accidentally pushed off, I'd just blow the suit at that point.

Re:yikes!

[ColaMan]

I'm fairly sure that if you were drifting away at 2km/hr, the rest of the crew could unhook the shuttle quickly enough to pick you up before your air ran out. Or use one of the soyuz capsules to go out and give you something to hang on to while they redock.

I know if *I* was one of the guys on the station and someone did get unhooked, I'd be in the shuttle/soyuz flipping switches and closing the hatch pretty quick.

Re:yikes!

[Anonymous Coward]

I know if *I* was one of the guys on the station and someone did get unhooked, I'd be in the shuttle/soyuz flipping switches and closing the hatch pretty quick.

I'm pretty sure it isn't like firing up your playstation and grabbing the controller.

Re:yikes!

[MichaelSmith]

I'm fairly sure that if you were drifting away at 2km/hr, the rest of the crew could unhook the shuttle quickly enough to pick you up before your air ran out.

If the suit has a purge valve like the apollo suit you could use it as a cold gas thruster. In theory, anyway.

Re:yikes!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you blow your suit right, you may just be able to get enough thrust to get back to the station.
It would make the headlines world wide for sure.

uhhm, rope?

[RelliK]

This may be a stupid question, but haven't these NASA guys ever heard of the "rope" technology?

Re:uhhm, rope?

[R3d M3rcury]

To paraphrase my old days in the Rocky Horror Audience, "If I pay billions of dollars for a space station, I expect to see some rope!"

Actually, along the side of the Space Shuttle they have "retractable tethers." When the astronauts go out into the cargo bay, they can attach themselves to a 50 or 85 foot long tether and not have to worry about falling off. A minor problem on the last EVA around the Shuttle was that they had trouble getting the tether to retract, so they had to keep an eye on it and make sure it didn't get wrapped around something it wasn't supposed to. It slowed them down a bit...

Which do you think would be faster, climbing the mountain with all the assorted safety gear and ropes, or taking a jetpack to the top?

Remember, they can't be out there all day. If it takes them two hours to climb--with the ropes--to the thing they need to fix and two hours to climb back, that's four less hours they have to actually do stuff. Don't forget, they probably also have to haul tools and perhaps a replacement device. That would make for some pretty slow going if they had to climb the whole way with safety ropes.

Here's a question I have, though, that perhaps someone could explain: They keep leaving the ISS's "Quest" airlock (did they pay for advertising rights or something?) and climbing down to the Shuttle cargo bay to get their stuff. Why don't they just go out the Shuttle's airlock?

Re:uhhm, rope?

[ScrewMaster]

Yes, but they discarded it because you can't push on a rope.

Re:uhhm, rope?

[StikyPad]

Who knows.. It looks like they took their pictures with a camera phone, meanwhile I hear they pee manually, so it seems they're all over the map technology wise.

Re:uhhm, rope?

[cyclone96]

Here's your answer (for what's it's worth, I work for NASA).

The shuttle airlock is in the cargo bay at the base of the docking system. It's literally the tunnel between the vehicles. In order to go out the shuttle airlock, the hatches must be closed between the vehicles and both crews have to go back to their "home" spacecraft (since otherwise they'd be isolated from their rides home). Obviously we don't want the entire shuttle crew hanging out all day in the orbiter when there is work to do on ISS. Additionally, the folks doing most of the robotic arm work in ISS are actually shuttle crew members (since they can be trained on flight specific tasks very close to the mission) and they need to be able to go between the vehicles.

Quest doesn't suffer from this problem since it's hanging off the side. Additionally, depressurizing the shuttle airlock sometime introduces some control system challenges because it loses it's rigidity somewhat and it's part of the structural backbone of the vehicle, so that's nice to avoid.

That being said, the capability remains to go out the shuttle airlock if need be.

Re:uhhm, rope?

[morningstar8]

Mod parent up as informative, please.

Re:uhhm, rope?

[foo12]

... don't we all prefer to pee manually? It's not something I'd like to happen automatically.

Re:uhhm, rope?

[scuba964]

Yep, it is stupid....
From previous comments..."All astronauts are tethered to the station on spacewalks, there was never any risk. This is just stupid sensationalism, as usual."

Pretty hard push....

[Chmcginn]

There's no way a person could push hard enough to get themselves into atmosphere before they froze/suffocated. Everyhing up there is already moving at about 30,000 kilometers per hour - that's what sets their orbital distance at 350 km. Even assuming you pushed off hard enough to go 30 km/ hr relative to the station, that's still a total change of less than .1% in orbital momentum.

It really doesn't matter what way you push off - down or 'back' (oppostite orbital direction), you end up going lower & slower, up or 'forward', higher & faster. You're still screwed, either way, but it won't be quick. (Well, unless you pop the suit open. That's quick.)

Re:Pretty hard push....

[eliot1785]

Maybe I'm showing my ignorance of physics here, but wouldn't it be irrelevant what their orbital speed is? I'd think the only thing that would matter is their velocity towards or away from the Earth's gravitational center. If I'm driving a car and I throw a baseball out of the window at 20 MPH, it will move toward the side of the road at 20 MPH even if I am driving 100MPH forward. It will just do so while also moving forward at a fast rate.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Andy Gardner]

Well, unless you pop the suit open. That's quick.

You would be suprised

Re:Pretty hard push....

[zippthorne]

Good points all, but not quite correct. Orbital mechanics is screwy. If you push off forwards, you go higher, but you actually have less angular velocity in the higher orbit, so the thing you pushed off from will pass you. If you push off backwards, the opposite happens. Pushing up or down also doesn't do what you'd expect.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Retric]

Without going into hardcore math the idea is that in LEO your horizontal velocity is 17,000 mph and you orbit the earth every 90 min. So while going down at 30mph might seem a big deal within 45 min the are are on the other side of the earth and that 30mph down becomes 30mph up. Looking at some basic vector math slowing down gives you the most bang for the buck but 17,000 mph vs 16,970 is not going to cut it.

PS: A comet and the earth both orbit the sun and while they might cross the same point in space but they do it at different speeds.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Andy Gardner]

Maybe I'm showing my ignorance of physics here, but wouldn't it be irrelevant what their orbital speed is? I'd think the only thing that would matter is their velocity towards or away from the Earth's gravitational center.

Remember your in orbit. Ideally the velocity towards earth would be 0. If you want to go lower you thrust retrograde (backwards) and the opposite point of your orbit will reduce.

Now if you thrust in towards the mass your orbiting, well im actually not quite sure what would happen but intuitively i dont think you would lower your orbit.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[19thNervousBreakdown]

I'm no physics expert, so feel free to discount this, but I'm pretty sure all you'd manage to do is make your orbit elliptical. I imagine there's an "orbital escape velocity" where if you push hard enough you'd manage to hit dirt, I just don't a person's legs would be enough.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[cptgrudge]

Excellent. We now know that all those hard vacuum hijinks on Star Trek, Farscape, etc, are not totally wrong.

I can now sleep easier at night. Thank you.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Chmcginn]

Yeah, looking at that again, I think I oversimplified. I wasn't going into the fact that the amount your speed goes up doesn't make up for the longer distance you have to travel, so you actually fall behind... Or the fact that it's going to add to or subtract the eccentricity of your orbit, depending on whether you're pushing up or down at the apogee or perigee....

But it's been about five years since I took that class, and I didn't really want to go see if I could search my textbooks out of the attic...

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Chmcginn]

Hmmm. So a couple minutes of painful suffocation, followed by unconsciousness, or a few hours of some unpleasant emotions, and then slowly passing out when the 02 in the suit runs out, and the CO2 starts building up...

Bleah. I would like to go for option #3. I don't know what that is, but there's got to be one...

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Rebelgecko]

3. Profit!

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Anonymous Coward]

#3 is called poison.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Anonymous Coward]

This might work if the freefalling astronaut is roughtly in front of or behind the vehicle, wrt the direction of travel:

Apply a short burst in the direction of the vehicle.

If behind the vehicle, this will slow the astronaut slightly, putting him/her in a lower (and therefore faster) orbit. When the astronaut catches up (from beneath), apply a burst of equal duration in the opposite direction, slowing down and rising to a higher orbit, rejoining the vehicle.

If in front, the burst will speed up the astronaut, raising to a higher and slower orbit, allowing the vehicle to catch up.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the linked article closely you will note that the one astronaut subjected to less than 1 psi pressures in a vacuum tank here on earth passed out after 14 seconds - hard vacuum sucks the gasses OUT of your blood as they pass the lungs, and the time it takes for this flow of oxygen-less blood to travel from the lungs to the brain is about 14 seconds.

So option 3 would be to open the suit and exhale... Unconscious in 14 seconds, dead in 3 minutes.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[mrchaotica]

That makes me wonder why we're using these big bulky rigid spacesuits when a relatively thin and light tight-fitting (except for the helmet) one would work just as well. I mean, all it needs to do is keep the UV rays and cold/heat out, and squeeze our skin at 1 atmosphere of pressure.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Alkrun]

If the shuttle is orbiting every 90 minutes and you push off of it you're changing your orbit (and to an undetectable extent the shuttle's orbit). But wouldn't you crash into the shuttle at either 1/2 an orbit or 1 full orbit? I remember seeing something interesting about how satellites are positioned into orbit and seem to remember any thrust changing the satellites orbit into an irregular or eliptical orbit would still lead back to the same spot as where the engine was cut off...

You might not end up hitting the shuttle, but you'd be closest to the shuttle every 45 or 90 minutes, so you could probably use the SAFER to guide yourself back to intercept the shuttle at one of those points?

I might be completely off, but that sounds right.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[dfenstrate]

They're working on it actually. I don't have a link for you, but I have seen articles about developing skin tight suits exactly as you describe.

IIRC, some of the first high-altitude/space suit prototypes where the skin-tight 'squeezing' sort. At the time, though, rubber was the only decent material they had for this, and it was found wanting.

60 years later, I'm willing to bet we have far more suitable materials, and will probably see a 'squeezing' suit if/when space travel develops further.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Ucklak]

I was kinda hopin for the Total Recall effect.

Believe it or not, my father had a movie program from 2001:ASO when it came out and it discussed that in the notes.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[smithtodda]

I don't understand the saliva boiling on the tongue.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[tftp]

Now if you thrust in towards the mass your orbiting, well im actually not quite sure what would happen but intuitively i dont think you would lower your orbit.

This will lower your orbit and increase your orbital speed at the same time. The trick here is that you have a lot of kinetic energy that you obtained through the launch, and that energy is not going anywhere, as far as your pushes are concerned. Human power (a few hundred Watts) is not enough to affect any change during the astronaut's lifetime.

See Equation of motion.

And if you follow through the links, you will find precomputed numbers for this very case:

The International Space Station has an orbital period of 91.74 minutes, hence the semi-major axis is 6738 km [1].
The energy is 29.6 MJ/kg [2]: the potential energy is 59.2 MJ/kg, and the kinetic energy 29.6 MJ/kg. Compare with the potential energy at the surface, which is 62.6 MJ/kg. The extra potential energy is 3.4 MJ/kg, the total extra energy is 33.0 MJ/kg.

This roughly means that if you weigh 100 kg you need to negate about 3.3 GJ to fall to the ground, and if your mechanical power is 1000W (a trained athlete, unencumbered with a spacesuit and provided with all the food and oxygen you need) you still need about 1000 hours of pushing, assuming that there is always something to push against. For example, you can carry a spring-driven pellet gun; however the weight of the pellets that you have to carry will slow your descent drastically. This does not take the atmosphere into account, but you definitely will find it there, briefly.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Gnavpot]

I don't understand the saliva boiling on the tongue.

The boiling temperature of water is dependent on the pressure. At a temperature of 37 C, the boiling pressure of fresh water will be approx. 0.063 bara which is pretty close to 1 psi.

The salts in the saliva will increase the boiling temperature a little. On the other hand there will also be some athmospheric gases dissolved in the water. When you are close to the boiling point, some degassing will occur, which would probably feel like boiling.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[Alioth]

I think that article overestimates the time of useful consciousness. If you quickly lose pressure in an aircraft at 40,000 feet, the time of useful consciousness is only around 12 seconds.

The trouble is it's not until the oxygen is used up in the blood (like someone trying to suffocate you at sea level), but when the pressure is that low (or in the case of space, a vacuum) your lungs work in reverse - they actually *pull* oxygen out of your bloodstream.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[gentoo_moo]

IIRC the suit has several layers to handle small-particle impact and also a layer to reduce x-ray exposure.

Re:Pretty hard push....

[mrchaotica]

A constricting suit wouldn't need to handle small-particle impact (aside from keeping the astronaut from being punctured) because it wouldn't have to be airtight to begin with. x-ray shielding would be good, though... aside from lead, what materials can be used for that?

Re:Pretty hard push....

[ObiWanKenblowme]

Thanks to years of faithful TV viewing, I'm pretty sure #3 is to float, calm in the knowledge that the rescue ship will pick you up on sensors just before your O2 runs out.

I don't

[Space cowboy]

I'd point out the benefits of tying a piece of rope to the outside of the airlock, and tying the other end around the astronaut's waist.

It's an old, outdated solution, but I'd definitely go for it if the alternative was a slow death by radiation or oxygen starvation - that's just me...

Simon

Re:I don't

[starbird]

Right. This is why each participant in the EVA is attached to 2 thethers at all times. Either 50' or 85', depending on where they are and where they're going.

The backpack is a tritary backup in case both tethers are released.

Re:I don't

[jdavidb]

Right. And that's why I didn't believe the posting when it said, "No jet pack means not getting home if you inadvertently push yourself away from the space station and into space."

Damn, I've misread that as...

[dorkygeek]

... "Astronauts Pull Off Risky Spacesuit", and asked myself, wtf are they doing stripping up there?? Obviously, someone must have finally flown the hookers to the ISS. Now, about playing blackjack...

Re:Damn, I've misread that as...

[Mr. Freeman]

If you were stuck in space for 6 months at a time with one other person you'd get pretty damn bored too.

Re:Damn, I've misread that as...

[malilo]

Actually a recurring argument between me and my fellow nerds is 'How many people have had sex in space?" I mean, I'd totally do it if I got up there. C'mon.

not _that_ risky

[dtfinch]

The act of launching into space in a gigantic 22 year old space shuttle protected by ceramic tiles sounds pretty risky on its own.

Their suits hold enough oxygen to last up to 9 hours. If you slowly push away from the space station, you won't keep moving away from it in a straight line, because you and the space station are both orbiting the earth. In 46 minutes or so you may find yourself passing by it again.

Re:not _that_ risky

[Radak]

The act of launching into space in a gigantic 22 year old space shuttle protected by ceramic tiles sounds pretty risky on its own.

Do you ever fly on commercial jetliners? If so, you're probably fairly regularly riding on 25+ year old aircraft which are subject to much MUCH less maintenance and scrutiny than the space shuttle orbiters are.

If you slowly push away from the space station, you won't keep moving away from it in a straight line, because you and the space station are both orbiting the earth. In 46 minutes or so you may find yourself passing by it again.

Oh now I understand. You're an idiot.

Re:not _that_ risky

[Dis*abstraction]

"you and the space station are both orbiting the earth. In 46 minutes or so you may find yourself passing by it again."

HAHAHAHAHAH!!!

Re:not _that_ risky

[Dis*abstraction]

This is what passes for (Score:5, Interesting) these days?

Wow. If anyone ever doubted Slashdot has jumped the shark, doubt no more.

Re:not _that_ risky

[Mr. Freeman]

Well yes this is true. IF AND ONLY IF you go from traveling thousands of miles per hour on the shuttle to 0 miles per hour standing still in space.

Re:not _that_ risky

[dtfinch]

If you push off from another object in orbit, and if you and the object are still going roughly the same speed, with roughly the same orbital period, but in different directions, you can expect to meet up with that object again on the other side of the earth. The ISS orbits about once every 92 minutes.

Re:not _that_ risky

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to push off the ISS in the opposite direction so that you'd meet it half-way around you would need to change your velocity by -55371.4km/h. Grow a brain, please.

Re:not _that_ risky

[dtfinch]

I never said opposite direction. That would be stupid.

Re:not _that_ risky

[Anonymous Coward]

If you push off from another object in orbit, and if you and the object are still going roughly the same speed, with roughly the same orbital period, but in different directions, you can expect to meet up with that object again on the other side of the earth. The ISS orbits about once every 92 minutes.

Wrong wrong wrong. If you push off the station at 1 meter per second, after half an hour you will be 1800 meters away from the station. NO MATTER WHAT DIRECTION YOU PUSH. It dosent matter how fast it is orbiting the Earth, it will not catch up to you again.

Re:not _that_ risky

[dtfinch]

NO MATTER WHAT DIRECTION YOU PUSH.

If you push off perpendicular to the station's orbit and tangent to the earth, you'll come very close to hitting it a half revolution later. If you push off in another direction, you'll still approach it on the other side, but not come nearly as close.

Re:not _that_ risky

[kimvette]

That may be true but somehow it seems that commercial airliners have a catastrophic failure rate of somewhat less than 20% over that same timeframe, and I doubt that even with an aluminum airframe, that the typical Boeing or Airbus is likely to be as fatigued as a shuttle which goes from (ambient) 14+psi to near-zero PSI and is exposed to temperatures ranging from >2000*F to 200*F all during a single flight. Sure, they rebuild much of the shuttle between each flight, but you cannot un-fatigue the airframe or the skin.

Re:not _that_ risky

[targo]

If you slowly push away from the space station, you won't keep moving away from it in a straight line, because you and the space station are both orbiting the earth. In 46 minutes or so you may find yourself passing by it again.

The parent actually has an interesting point but is simply bad at explaining himself, stop modding him down :)
1) The height of one's orbit is directly related to the speed - the higher the speed, the higher your orbit
2) If you push yourself away so that your earth-relative speed changes (e.g. forward or backward), you will get to a higher or lower orbit, and cannot get back to the station
3) However, if your earth-relative speed doesn't change (e.g. if you push yourself off perpendicularly), you will keep orbiting the Earth at the same height as before. So we'll have two orbits (ISS and you) with
a) same height and speed
b) slightly different angles
c) you were at the same point at some point in time
These orbits will keep intersecting in two points, the original point, and one right across the Earth, so it's actually possible to get back.

Re:not _that_ risky

[ukleafer]

3) However, if your earth-relative speed doesn't change (e.g. if you push yourself off perpendicularly), you will keep orbiting the Earth at the same height as before.

Smithers, fetch me your finest set square.

Re:not _that_ risky

[locofungus]

1) The height of one's orbit is directly related to the speed - the higher the speed, the higher your orbit

No, the higher the orbit the slower the speed.

The ISS orbit has a radius of about 6000km with an orbital period of about 90mins. Geostationary orbit is about 36000km with a period of 24hrs.

So the ISS is doing about 25000km/h while a geostationary satellite is doing about 6000km/h

You need to fire the thrusters to move into a higher orbit but in doing so you actually slow down. And if you are travelling in an identical orbit as something else and want to catch up with it you have to fire your retro-rockets to move into a lower orbit to catch it up.

Tim.

Re:not _that_ risky

[Radak]

That may be true but somehow it seems that commercial airliners have a catastrophic failure rate of somewhat less than 20% over that same timeframe...

The fact that we have lost 20% of the orbiter fleet has absolutely nothing to do with the age of the fleet. The loss of neither orbiter was age related, so this remark is a complete non-sequitur.

The space shuttle orbiter airframes were designed and built to take the stress of spaceflight for at least 100 flights each over at least 50 years. Talk to me again when your remarks become relevant.

Re:not _that_ risky

[linuxgurugamer]

It's not that simple.

First, when talking about stable orbits, the higher the orbit, the slower the actual speed.

Now it gets interesting. To move from a lower (faster) orbit to a higher (slower) orbit, you have to go faster. By going faster the vehicle will move away from the earth, thereby slowing down. When you get to the higher orbit you want, you will then have to adjust the speed accordingly (usually you will have to speed up in order to stableize the orbit).

When you are in a higher (slower) orbit and you want to move to a lower (faster) orbit, you first have to slow down. By slowing down you will start falling towards the earth. When you reach the lower orbit, you will then have to speed up in order to stableize the orbit. If someone pushes themselves away from the spacestation, they will have changed their orbit very slightly. Instead of being in a circular orbit, they will then be in an oval orbit. The two orbits will meet two times each time around the earth. So if someone somehow got adrift, in about 45 minutes they would be in a position to do an orbital correction in order to get back to the station/shuttle.

Re:not _that_ risky

[kimvette]

How would you compare failure rates then? If not over time and # of failed units / produced units, then by what metric? I was merely pointing out that the failure rate of the shuttle is higher by conventional metrics. It doesn't mean the shuttle program should be killed off. In fact it should be continued, but the existing shuttle should be replaced by a newer design, preferably another REUSABLE craft.

Face it. Space flights are dangerous, but how many of us wouldn't jump at the chance to go were it offered to us? I'd go in a heartbeat. I wasn't trying to FUD or slight the space program in any way, just pointing out that although many airlines' maintenance may be horrendous and their logs in some cases have been proven downright negligent or even fraudulent, their failure rate is still quite low compared to the shuttles which are largely rebuilt between each and every flight. They undergo far more than your typical aviation pre-flight check of "Ok, flap moves? No oil leaks? Oh wait, a few oil droplets, it `shouldn't` cause a problem so let's not ground it, just log that it requires further scruitiny. Oops, this bolt is a little loose, yeah, log that to be checked later. Okay, you're good to go." That kind of thing would not be allowed at ALL on the shuttle, and yet even with the uber-cheap maintenance budgets airlines allocate, their catastrophic failure rate is far, far below 20%. It should be even lower than it is (e/g., the ValueJet crash years ago was very preventable), but it is what it is, but is still very low-risk compared to space flight given the extremes (pressures, temperatures, etc.) the airframe and skin undergo each and every flight.

Yeah, I know, I have been trolled, and why am I responding to such an obvious troll? Oh well.

hey

[Anonymous Coward]

http://macpchobo.ytmnd.com/

LOL

Arrrrrrrr.....

[Turbs]

that be a long walk off a long plank me hearties... arrrrrrrrrrr....

uhhh.. sorry wrong section.. thought this was still the slashdot poll. :S

SAFER != MMU or EMU

[reality-bytes]

The item they are referring to is the SAFER (Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue) backpack.

SAFER is not an integral part of the EMU, rather it is a derivative of the MMU which is exclusively for emergency (loss of tether) use.

SAFER can provide an adrift astronaut with about 10m/s Delta-V ie: If you're travelling away from the station at less than 10m/s you have a chance of getting back (although the closer you are to 10m/s the longer it takes to get back)

Re:SAFER != MMU or EMU

[MichaelSmith]

SAFER can provide an adrift astronaut with about 10m/s Delta-V

I thought the dV was less than 1 m/s. 10 m/s is a hell of a lot of velocity in this context. I would expect that 10 cm/s would be considered reasonable.

Checking.....Oh right 10 ft/s (3 m/s).

Suicide pill?

[SonicSpike]

There have been rumors that the astronauts have suicide pills on them in case of an incident like this. I don't think this has ever been verified, and absolutely never been published.

Anyone have any info?

Re:Suicide pill?

[yeremein]

From the prologue of Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell & Jeffrey Kluger:

Stories about poison pills always made Jim Lovell laugh. Poison pills! Forget about it! First of all, there just weren't any situations in which you'd ever really consider making an early exit. And even if there were, you had a hell of a lot of easier ways to do it than poison pills. The command module had a crank for the cabin vent, after all. One turn of the handle, and five pounds per square inch of cozy capsule pressure would instantly be exposed to the zero pounds-per-square-inch pressure of space. Whatever air was left in your lungs would explode out in an angry rush, your blood would quickly--and literally--boil, and your traumatized system would simply shut up shop. The whole thing would be over in just a few seconds. It was no slower, really, than some ridiculous poison pill, and it was a lot more respectable.

Re:Suicide pill?

[SonicSpike]

Yes I realize that there would probably never be a situation for it to be used "fight to the death" and all. But, if one had to kill themselves in space, personally a pill that slips one into a deep sleep and then death in my opinion would be a lot more respectable in my opinion, more peaceful, and a hell of a lot less violent and painful than simply exposing oneself to a vacuum.

Having my blood boil, my skin shrink, and my lungs explode doesn't sound like a good way to go.

Re:Suicide pill?

[Anonymous Coward]

Poisoning yourself with just about anything is an unpleasant experience. You don't simply go to sleep. Your body fails one piece at a time. Maybe your kidneys go first so you start having violent seizures. Or maybe you took cyanide so you start foaming at the mouth while your body is wracked with spasms. Explosive decompression doesn't sound like fun but it's probably no worse than being poisoned.

Re:Suicide pill?

[Karthikkito]

Not really the case - see http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answer s/970603.html .

Re:Suicide pill?

[yeremein]

But, if one had to kill themselves in space, personally a pill that slips one into a deep sleep and then death in my opinion would be a lot more respectable in my opinion, more peaceful, and a hell of a lot less violent and painful than simply exposing oneself to a vacuum.

Lovell's words, not mine. He also has this to say:

"If you've got to buy the farm, better to do it while riding a corkscrewing rocket up through the atmosphere, or steering a tumbling spacecraft down to Earth, or getting stuck in orbit with a dead retrorocket, or being marooned on the face of the moon."

A suicide pill might be peaceful, but totally unbecoming a respectable pilot with the Right Stuff.

Re:Suicide pill?

[Ihlosi]

But, if one had to kill themselves in space, personally a pill that slips one into a deep sleep and then death in my opinion would be a lot more respectable in my opinion, more peaceful,

Well, sorry to tell you this, but cyanide poisoning is a fairly agonizing way to die, especially if taken in small amounts (just about the lethal dose).

Depressurizing the capsule (slowly) will lead to unconsciousness and then death, without much discomfort. No feelings of asphyxiation or anything, since your body can still get rid of excess CO2. The lights just go out.

Re:Suicide pill?

[e2d2]

And to add to you, I think Lovell was showing why he was an astronaut and we are on the surface. An astronaut doesn't give up when the S hits the fan, they act. I'd probably drown from all the piss in my space pants. As if sitting on top of so explosives and shooting yourself into space isn't dangerous enough, if he spent much time pondering the possible deaths he'd never get his work done. Besides, the amount of life support is limited, you'd only have to wait a while before you went out.

Re:Suicide pill?

[jschrod]

Whatever air was left in your lungs would explode out in an angry rush, your blood would quickly--and literally--boil,

NASA has a different opinion here. From the FAQ on Human Body in a Vacuum:

If you don't try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. [...] You do not explode and your blood does not boil because of the containing effect of your skin and circulatory system. You do not instantly freeze because, although the space environment is typically very cold, heat does not transfer away from a body quickly. Loss of consciousness occurs only after the body has depleted the supply of oxygen in the blood.

I.e., Lovell's citation is Right Stuff(tm) blabber. That's Hollywood imaging, but not reality. Go and read the FAQ, it's interesting.

Re:Suicide pill?

[Alioth]

If you are exposed to the vacuum of space, your blood doesn't boil and your lungs don't explode. You lose consciousness in around 9 to 12 seconds (because your lungs work in reverse at no or very low pressures) but the skin is strong enough and your cardiovascular system remains pressurized so long as you are still alive.

You'll already be dead by the time your body freezes/overheats.

How does risk impress investors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who would invest in a company that didn't wear their fucking equipment properly and correctly?

NASA is a coerced service. We don't want to hear about them or their monopoly on risk-management and limited liability.

This article just proves we don't need NASA or the corporate UNITED STATES that moves its employed agents around kicking the competition.

I wonder...

[bogaboga]

I wonder why any issue surrounding NASA and the space shuttle gets a lot of buzz in the US news media. Why? Similar accomplishments by the Russians do not get as much attention, yet they are equally daunting if not more. Is it an American `thing' or what?

I am an American but have no answer to this. Can a slashdotter enlighten an ignorant fellow?

I hope the buzz will be generated when Russia begins to produce rare-earth metals on the moon. Have a look at http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/06/06/raremetalsm oon.shtml. For now, a slahdotter begs for some answers. Thanx.

Re:I wonder...

[PatTheGreat]

Well, my first thought would be some sort of leftover Cold War thing. Push our accomplishments while ignoring theirs.

Second thought would be that it's just this particular mission that's getting a lot of attention. Since the last one ended in such tragedy, everybody is holding their breath. So anything that doesn't end in death, destruction, and ebay auctions of body parts from space is a good thing.

On the other hand, anything shuttle-related is easy news. It's in space, it's cool, and again, if it doesn't blow up, it's an easy happy piece.

But yeah, the shuttle-centric phenomenon is pretty common. Remember when China sent up their first guy? Or was it Japan? India? See? Some nation went into space for the first time, and I don't even remember who. Or when.

Re:I wonder...

[ScrewMaster]

I would say that, well, the government wants to project our accomplishments over others in order to help secure more funding ... but then it occurred to me that if they want the public to accept more spending on space, all they have to do is start publicizing other nations' achievements. Start talking up the military potential, explain the damage that a terrorist in space could do. Hell, that could jump start the Space Race again and we could find ourselves with a colony on Pluto before it's all over.

Re:I wonder...

[PigIronBob]

For the same reason Americans talk about a 'World Series' when they refer to a domestic compitition, you either think you're very big or the world to be a smaller place...

Re:I wonder...

[kimvette]

I wonder why any issue surrounding NASA and the space shuttle gets a lot of buzz in the US news media. Why? Similar accomplishments by the Russians do not get as much attention, yet they are equally daunting if not more. Is it an American `thing' or what?

A couple of guesses about the obvious:

  - Big media is made up of largely American companies
  - America has a manned reusable spacecraft with a (relatively) large crew capacity in production use. No one else does. Despite the shuttle's problems, it is still an admirable accomplishment.

With that said, it'd be interesting to see what the Russian shuttle could have accomplished had the USSR not gone broke. I doubt that the American space program would have stalled where it did.

Re:I wonder...

[DerekLyons]

I wonder why any issue surrounding NASA and the space shuttle gets a lot of buzz in the US news media. Why? Similar accomplishments by the Russians do not get as much attention, yet they are equally daunting if not more. Is it an American `thing' or what?

At least currently - there are no similar accomplishments by the Russians to compare to.
 
 

I hope the buzz will be generated when Russia begins to produce rare-earth metals on the moon. Have a look at http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/06/06/raremetalsm oon.shtml.

*yawn* Yet another Brave Press Release from the Russians. They've been issuing them for about ten years now - but have yet to produce anything other than more press releases.

Re:I wonder...

[asuffield]

I am an American but have no answer to this. Can a slashdotter enlighten an ignorant fellow?

NASA have a marketing department who generate this 'buzz' by aggressively promoting everything they do. This exercise is justified as necessary to keep attention on NASA and thusly secure funding, in an entertainment-driven political environment.

The Russians don't - I'm not entirely sure how their political system works, but it isn't based around soundbites for Fox 'news'.

They do this sort of thing everyday...

[Darlantan]

This kind of thing is part of the job description. I mean, they're in a freefall environment with no air, and very wide temperature ranges. They get up there by strapping themselves to what is really a controlled bomb. I don't think anybody's going to argue that they're working a risky job. Some of them are going to die, and eventually we WILL lose a person to some accident that leaves them drifting away from the ship. It's good to know we have systems in place to try to prevent it, but it will happen eventually.

It's a dangerous job, some are going to die, and that's that. They do it anyway, and a lot of 'em take these sort of risks without a second thought. People need to stop thinking that everyone who gets sent up is going to come back. Sure, we should do our best to make sure that they do, but accidents will happen. The risk involved, and their willingness to go up to open up a new frontier, are two reasons why I have so much respect and admiration for them. I just wish I could be up there too.

Re:They do this sort of thing everyday...

[ScrewMaster]

Well, the way to prevent losing people that way is to develop space technology to the point where they can be easily rescued. Somebody falls overboard, you send a boat to pick them up. Somebody drifts away from a space station, see, you just, well ... well. We just need to have a real, long-term manned presence in space that happens to include engineering and manufacturing facilities so we can start to actually build things in space. Engineers can actually be there working with materials and processes in space: that will advance the technology by leaps and bounds. All we can do now is shoot machinery off into space from the Earth's surface, and hope that our best guesses are adequate.

Not true

[srk]

No jet pack means not getting home if you inadvertently push yourself away from the space station and into space. That's a long goodbye that doesn't bear thinking about.

Not true. In that case you can simply maneuver space station toward the lost astronaut. This can be a problem if there are no astronauts on board. But now there are 9 people up there.

Re:Not true

[cyclone96]

In theory you could move the space station, in practice you could not. The space station isn't really designed to be maneuvered in real time by the crew (or the ground, for that matter). Attitude maneuvers can be accomplished fairly quickly (less than an hour if you really had to), but translational maneuvers (which would be required to go grab an astronaut) take in excess of a day to put together and execute. Space station normally bores holes in the sky, so it that capability was never designed in (like it was on the orbiter or Soyuz). The orbiter can't undock quickly enough to go get them, either - at least not without compromising the safety of the rest of the crew and the vehicles themselves.

Which is the whole reason why SAFER was developed. Back in the shuttle-only days, going and grabbing the lost crew member on a double tether failure was a viable option, today it isn't.

Re:Not true

[Anonymous Coward]

bah, you don't even need to move the station or the shuttle. Just take one of the Soyuz "rescue" capsules and go get the errant person. They don't even have to get in the capsule assuming there's a outside handhold of some sort.

Having acquired the walker, go back to the station. Done. Just like climbing on the back of somebody's pickup truck.

The Soyuz are absolutely capable of such things. Easy to fly, maneouverable.

OK suppose it takes time to do this. Well the walker is still in orbit more or less with the station. He's not going to suddenly plummet miles away or burn up. Worst-case, if he tried really hard to shove himself away, that's feet per second at best. So maybe the idiot is a couple thousand feet away by the time a rescue can be performed. His main danger would be running out of air or overloading the suit diapers. A smart walker could fall asleep to slow down consumption of air.

OK, OK, he might get nailed by an cosmic ray, solar flare, space junk, rocks, subatomic blackhole, or nabbed by greys. It's a dangerous job and every one of them knew that when they signed on to be astronauts.

And Ropes they have!

[reality-bytes]

Or rather tethers.

Whenever the Astronauts are on EVA, they keep themselves tethered to either the station, the shuttle or a hardpoint on a robotic arm.

The 'SAFER' backpack in question is strictly for emergency use should the worst happen and an astronaut go adrift. SAFER is normally only employed when there is no vehicle readily available to effect a rescue (ie the Shuttle is docked so it cannot persue a drifting astronaut in a hurry).

clowns...

[smash]

... haven't they ever heard of rope?

It's mandatory where I work that if you're working at heights, you wear a fall arresting harness.

Working several hundred km above the earth, one would presume that similar precautions would be a good idea. I.e., tether yourself to the shuttle/station/whatever before going space-walking...

Probably a lot easier to carry around than a jet-pack as well - certainly less costly.

Re:clowns...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if OSHA can fine them for not wearing a harness on the job site.

Re:clowns...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sellers was connected to Discovery or the ISS with two tethers at all times, and not in danger of drifting free

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060711/sc_space/na saspacewalkclearspathforissconstruction

In Other News

[Short Circuit]

Space Travel is "newsworthy" again.

Too bad it took the death of several astronauts to draw peoples' attention to the risks these souls take for the sake of scientific progress.

Velocity = Height (More or less)

[Chmcginn]

The difference between physics on the ground and physics in orbit is really hard to 'show' without pictures... In orbit, everything's already moving forward (in this case, at 30,000 kilometers per hour), and being pulled downwards (in this case, at 9.8 meters per second per second.) Along with your current distance to the center of the Earth, these three things determine whether you're currently rising, falling, or staying the same. If you actually interested in learning all the formulas, this is, in fact, what the wiki's good for. Beginner , not-so-beginner , and freakin' huge! . I mean, hard. Yes, that's it.

To sum it up, though, the total distance from the center of the orbited body and the orbiting object is proportional to the square of the velocity. Small change in velocity = not-quite so small, but still pretty small, change in orbital distance.

Has there ever been...

[Weaselmancer]

...a spacewalk that hasn't been risky?

Re:Has there ever been...

[novus ordo]

see moonwalk.

CowboyNeal Option

[cazbar]

D. Hope that CowboyNeal acquires a Tok'ra cargo ship to come save you?

Trading body parts to get back

[gd23ka]

Personally I can't imagine anything worse than watching your space ship slowly drift away from and you have no way
to reach it and you still have eight hours of oxygen left in which to agonize over the fact. There
should be a way to use excrements as reaction mass as I'm sure my bowels would ignite like a Saturn lift-off stage.

Okay that sounds ludicrous at first but hey how about a space suit 50 years from now that will first turn to
organic waste (bio gas) as an emergency propulsion system and then after that maybe even cannibalize the wearer's
body fat. Why not? Tell you what, if you're in that kind of position you might even be willing to trade whole
body parts just to get back.

On a side note: Heartfelt compliments go out to whoever had to go out and subject themselves to that kind of hazard
without losing it. Whoever forget about the safety line that astronauts should have been hooked into deserves to
be flown to Singapore to receive 24 strokes of the rattan cane and then to China, Russia or Texas to spend ten years of
his life in one of the world's worst labor camps.

Re:Trading body parts to get back

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just send 'em to a US run "interogation" camp in some dodgy "friendly" country and be done with them?

Could this work?

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

Is it possible for them to use their oxygen supply as a kind of jet pack? The oxygen must be under pressure, so they could disconnect the tube, hold their breath and aim carefully....

Re:Could this work?

[MichaelSmith]

could disconnect the tube, hold their breath and aim carefully.

The apollo suit had a purge valve in the chest which you could open to increase the rate of oxygen flow in an emergency. It also enabled you to equalise pressure with the spacecraft after repressurising. I would be surprised if the shuttle suit does not have a similar mechanism. You might have to pulse it open when pointing away from your target and you would probably pick up some rotation but it should be possible.

Re:Could this work?

[sponglish]

Speaking of aiming carefully, what modern spacesuits need as a backup system is a urine receptacle/emergency retro-rocket that can spray a stream compressed pee in times of emergency. You wouldn't have much time for the stream to run before it turned to ice crystals, but if you aimed right, it could be enough. A methane gas collector probably wouldn't work, because while extreme emergencies scare the pi** out of us they also scare us shi*less.

[Warning] Usage nazi

[Anonymous Coward]

tertiary

That's pretty scary...

[Jugalator]

It reminded me a bit of this (real) picture.

Misinformation

[magsilva]

The jet pack is great, but the astronauts don't put their lives entirely on them. Actually, what really make the EVA safe are two tethers, linking the astronauts to the ISS. The issue with the jet pack was that the danger of it becoming space debris, what could put the ISS in danger. Check it out at space.com or any really serious space news site.

Not a good thing to think about

[Hoser of the Valley]

Some days, I have panic attacks while reading /. for no good reason. Wii controler = scary. Not so much. Up the Xanax.

Other days, there is a very good reason. Drifting off into space with only hope of 1) re-entry or 2) sustaining small colonies of warring microbes until your eventual death in the VACUUM OF NOTHING would constitute such a reason.

*panic*

Re:Not a good thing to think about

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kind of funny, but when I was little, I'd think about death and get really, really scared for some reason-- just at the thought of eternal nothing, not at the actual method of death or anything like that. These days (without meds, amazingly enough) it doesn't bother me as much; I get a little freaked, but not nearly to the inconsolable sobbing and screaming that I once did. More like a slight cold feeling in my chest. Still, I'll agree with you-- it's not a pleasant thing to think about for extended periods of time. The story might be a little sensationalist, but let's not forget that if a three-deep redundant system is made of components that have at worst a 50-50 shot of failure, that's a 1 in 6 chance that you go spinning off into the void. Yeah, the real numbers are a lot less, maybe one in a billion or so, but worst case scenario is it's a 1d6 roll.

Re:Not a good thing to think about

[Ihlosi]

The story might be a little sensationalist, but let's not forget that if a three-deep redundant system is made of components that have at worst a 50-50 shot of failure, that's a 1 in 6 chance that you go spinning off into the void.

Ok.

If you have one component with a 50% failure rate, the chance for total failure is 1 in 2.

If you have two components with a 50% failure rate each, the chance for total failure is 1 in 4.

If you have three components with a 50% failure rate each, the chance for total failure is not 1 in 6.

[nitpick mode off]

Re:Not a good thing to think about

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, you're right-- it's 1 in 8. 2 * 3 != 2 ^ 3. My bad. Still, not great odds.

Re:Not a good thing to think about

[Cybrex]

True, but it's also not an accurate reflection of the risks posed. Tethers are extraordinarily reliable, and there are two of 'em. A tether is basically a rope with a solid clip on the end, so there isn't much short of deliberate sabotage that's going to cause even one of them to fail, let alone two. I think that the SAFER is there primarily for psychological reassurance.

Animal Experiments Eh..

[Anonymous Coward]

So does that mean that NASA launches animals into space to see if they exploded :) sounds a little twisted kind of like putting a magnifying glass to grasshopper, I'm surprised the animal activists aren't all over that one

Jet pack is a backup.

[Anonymous Coward]

The astronauts were not in any danger - well, not of floating off, anyway. The jetpacks are themselves a backup safety device. Each astronaut, when performing an EVA is ALWAYS tethered to a fixed part of the station. They carry two tethers with them. If they have to move a tether, the second tether is secured to the new location before the first one is removed from the old location.

The jet pack is intended to be used only if by some freak occurance an astronaut becomes untethered from the vehicle.

It's both

[WilliamSChips]

Read here for more details

Isn't the shuttle mobile?

[Twitch42]

I'm not saying that a space walk isn't suit-soiling scary, but if your jet pack dies and you go floating off, can't they just come get you? They do a pretty good job with satellites.

Duck/Duct Tape

[ModernGeek]

I had this discussion earlier this day, and I figured that slashdot people would know this one. Duck tape was used in the military for securing ammo boxes in WWII. It was army green like everything else. Soldiers got used to the idea of using Duck Tape for everything. It was called Duck Tape because it was waterproof like a ducks feet. Later on, it was turned silver and marketed in the United States as Duct Tape because people used it for Duct Work as it was waterproof. However, condensation was bad over time, and it didn't work well for Ducts, so it became a universal do it all tape. Duct and Duck are both proper. There is a group of people who do nothing but showcase duct/duck tape, but I can't find their site atm.

Re:Duck/Duct Tape

[samurphy21]

I grew up in a (canadian) military family, and we always had a supply of that army-green duct tape handy. The old man referred to it as "gun tape" because it was often used for field repair of training weapon stocks (which were often in poor repair).

Re:Duck/Duct Tape

[zach_d]

yep, I was in canadian army cadets too, and we came to know that green tape as gun tape as well.

Not getting home?

[mojotooth]

No jet pack means not getting home if you inadvertently push yourself away from the space station and into space.

Actually I was thinking that if you push yourself the wrong way, you might find yourself headed home way too quickly.

Re:Not getting home?

[Eliman]

No jet pack means not getting home if you inadvertently push yourself away from the space station and into space.

Actually I was thinking that if you push yourself the wrong way, you might find yourself headed home way too quickly.

How long would that actually take? How big a head start would you be getting and how negligible is the difference in descent between a shuttle and a person? Heavier things fall faster through the atmosphere than lighter things, but how long would it really take you to fall from orbit?

Perry Bible Fellowship

[Netochka]

Reminds me of this comic. From the Perry Bible Fellowship, which is all very quality stuff (Archive currently temporarily here)

In other news

[Frightening]

NASA orders all copies of Armageddon and similar space-adventure movies out of employee offices, citing unhealthy effects on astronaut psychology.

can of beans

[zen-theorist]

keep one handy, and let one rip for one helluva human-powered jetpack..

MOD PARENT UP!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Had some experience with this, at the pool. A total success! Even left a "contrail".

Risky business

[Salzorin]

In related news, 450 pound Michael Jackson impersonator pulls off a very risky moonwalk.

Orbital speed is what keeps things up

[p3d0]

Stuff isn't held in orbit by rockets or strings. It's held there by the centrifugal force you get from your orbital speed. If you only decrease your orbital kinetic energy by 1%, then you'll still have 99% of the centrifugal force you started with, and you'll only decrease your orbital radius (actually the semi-major axis) by 1%.

The baseball analogy breaks down partly because (I presume) you're imagining that the car travels in a straight line. If, instead, it's hurtling in a circle around a tree at 100MPH, I think you'd find it impossible to hit that tree with a baseball unless you're Nolan Ryan.

Orbital dynamics of tossing SuitSat.

[Namlak]

http://cndyorks.gn.apc.org/yspace/articles/spacesu it_satellite.htm

Scroll to the header "Safety concerns"

Keep laughing, buddy...

[Cybrex]

The really "funny" thing is that he's right. Depending upon the direction in which you push off, you're more likely to simply make your orbit more elliptical. By the time you reach the other side of the orbit it's not absurd to expect to smack right back into the station (or close enough to be rescued) at the same velocity with which you kicked off.

Orbital mechanics is counterintuitive until you become accustomed to it. If you want an easy and fun way to wrap your brain around the subject, I suggest downloading and playing with "Orbiter", a free space flight simulator. It has a bit of a learning curve (no pun intended), but it's surprisingly educational and a hell of a lot of fun.

Lower the perigee of elliptical orbit

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what it would take, but if you lower the perigee of your elliptical orbit sufficiently, atmospheric drag will take over and finish the job for you with a lot less expenditure of fuel. I may be wrong, but I believe it's common practice when de-orbiting a satellite or capsule to take partial advantage of the change in eccentricity from relatively small changes in velocity.