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

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.

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: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.

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: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: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: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: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.