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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."
How about using a rope tied to the suit? Seems like a low-tech solution, but might end up saving a life.
couldn't you just send another guy out there later who DOES have a jetpack to rescue the guy without?
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.
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.
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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.
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I'd poke a hole in my pressurized suit on the side facing away from the ISS.
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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.
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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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....
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It reminded me a bit of this (real) picture.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.