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Preventing Sick Spaceships
An anonymous reader writes "The official NASA home page has a writeup on one of the lesser-known dangers of living on a Space Station: space germs. 'Picture this: You're one of several astronauts homeward bound after a three-year mission to Mars. Halfway back from the Red Planet, your spacecraft starts suffering intermittent electrical outages. So you remove a little-used service panel to check some wiring. To your unbelieving eyes, floating in midair in the microgravity near the wiring is a shivering, shimmering globule of dirty water larger than a grapefruit. And on the wiring connectors are unmistakable flecks of mold.' The article goes on to describe the unlikely circumstances that form these micro-ecologies, and what astronauts do to deal with the situation."
believe it
Just open the hatch and blow it all out.
What?
What is not stated, by NASA, is how to deal with sperm fluid resulting from wet dreams or, outright, masturbation. The vacuum cleaner will suck that gook up. Also, with a little imagination, putting a special attachment on the cleaner will enable it to give the best blow job ever.
As long as I don't see any of that 'Alien' slime, I won't be worrying too much. :)
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A real nasty one too!
-- My Sig is a P228.
President Bush declares 'Globulars' (we think he meant globules) and mold living in islamofacist micro-ecologies to be 'enemy combatants determined to subvert US interests in space'. The status of grapfruit and dirty water is still thought to be under consideration.
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What truth?
There is no dupe
Does this summary remind anyone else of a certain Voyager episode?
In all seriousness this is an interesting issue I've never heard about before. You'd think the media would be all over this as an actual new space story, it's been so long since anything new was really done (new in the sense of something you'd never think about). This begs the question of whether astronauts and their equipment should be decontaminated before going into space, sure there are microorganisms in their bodies but it would still probably be beneficial.
This also makes me wonder if NASA plans it's airflow so as to avoid situations where air is being blown into an area that the astronauts rarely visit and that is beneficial to bacteria, perhaps air flow could become a big part of space vessel designs so that situations like this are avoided?
All in all an interesting story.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
what else were they supposed to pee on?
Why, use the space toilet, of course
mod me,oh,frlog,mod me
So why bother having all these small enclosed spaces inside the livable area? Keep them in areas without air, and just put on a suit when they need to be inspected.
Well not really, but we seem to live best in a natural habitat - city dwellers have higher rates of asthma, there are always cases of sick buildings on the news(bad vents, mold, chemicals), and now fungus eating away at the structure of our space craft. We are really good at building big shiny metal boxes that look like they will stand up to anything, but a little bacteria and the whole thing crumbles. This is a pretty decent justification for 'Leviathan' type spacecraft - partially organic - capable of adapting to organic issues in a way that a metal box just fails.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
dodge this
Eight year round trips to Mars are never going to work. Name me one voyage that lasted longer than even one year without having to dock in some fashion.
We will never be able to fully explore, experiment and gather resources in out solar system if trips between planets take 5+ years. We need to look into saner proplusion systems that seperate the ground to orbit engine from the interplanetary engine. Even sci-fi shows seem to have grasped that fact.
May the Maths Be with you!
I believe it's called a Tricorder. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder Just ask it to tell you what life forms are present.
I voted for Moya in the poll. Moya took care of such things quite well where as other shows/ships never addressed this problem, or others regarding biological problems. In quite simple terms, the dust of dead skin cells and the mites that go everywhere with us would eventually cause problems. Moisture from the air (our breath for example) can be collected and used by micro organisms and would eventually cause problems somewhere on a long space voyage. A toilet is not sufficient to handle human waste as we drop dead cells and living organisms everywhere we go.
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I think I would rather of Tribbles.... They wouldn't set off my OCD as much ;)
It's only paranoia if your wrong...
Before anyone mods me down for trolling consider this: do you really think it would be a good idea for astronauts to exist in a completely sterile enviroment for years on end? What do you think this would do for their immune systems? At the very least they'd be seriously impaired by the time they came back to earth and possibly they could even die of some common microbe that is of no concern to people with healthy immune systems. At the worst their immune system could go into auto immune disease mode and then you could well end up with your spacecraft arriving at mars with just corpses strapped in the seats.
While the article raises some interesting concerns it seems more likely to me that living in a completely anti-microbal environment would be more dangerous. You would have to spike the astronauts immune systems and slowly reintegrate them into the world when they returned.
Anyhow, my suggestion would be including an extremely small temporary habitat that the astronauts occupy every so often while the main quarters are made inhospitable to living organisms. Maybe some combinations of prevasive UV, dehumidification, and extreme heat? It wouldn't matter that the microbes will reenter the main hab with the astronauts if you did this often enough... they would not have enough time to multiply.
Then again, I know nothing about this branch of science.
Regards.
That's all I got...yucky.
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From their description of the LOCAD-PTS unit, I'm reminded of the psi-scan in Red Dwarf...
"Here are the results [of the scan] and we're going to.... live"
Given the lead-in to the article, wouldn't "How could they cut the power, man? They're animals!" be more appropriate?
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It just so happened I have been watching the DVDs of an apparently little-known sci-fi series, the new Outer Limits from showtime, and saw an episode almost indistinguishable from the hypothetical in the description. The episode was called "The Voyage Home" featuring Michael Dorn (a.k.a. Warf). Him and two others were traveling back to Earth from Mars when they discover a strange substance on their ship. Here's more info (with spoilers) -_ Outer_Limits)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_Home_(The
I really recommend the series by the way. A lot of Trek alumni are featured in episodes (the one with Lenord Nimoy was pretty good).
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
The way to be sure that you don't get wet is to have the correct ventilation. This is easy to say but complicated to implement. One way is to configure ventilation to pass dehumidifiers and let the dry air be released in the electric compartments and allow it to leak out into the occupants space from where it is collected, cleaned and dehumidified again. On long-term space missions it will be a critical issue to re-circulate all water and not vent it into space.
Another more complex way is to seal off all electronics and use an inert gas in all electronics compartments. However, this is a very complex solution and it will certainly be hard to keep it safe and sound for a mission that will last for years.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Which means that the problem is not really solved...
My understanding is that MIR got a bad smell over time, undoubtedly due to the microbial & fungal contamination, and that one
module got so bad that the crews didn't like to go in it.
Also, contaminated water "balls" could undoubedtly create the conditions for Legionnaires disease, which is pretty fatal.
That's why it is bad to accidentally leave a Ganymede rock lobster in fridge for a Year.
Another example of technology developed for the space program that could assist us earthbound folks as well.
The LOCAD-PTS described in the article seems superior to any other method of portable biological detector present in the market (That I know of), could this be an effective device for the detection of biological weapons?
Or even, in a more mundane manner, for companies that specialize in flood recovery?
How do we not have the expertise to build one? I can see not having a factory big enough, but engineers are smart, the plans already exist.
Just because you have the plans doesn't mean you know how to build something. Any good machinist can tell you this.
There's a lot of 'tribal knowledge' that goes into the construction of something as big as a spacecraft, or for that matter anything really big and complicated. (You could say the same thing about a nuclear submarine or a microprocessor.) Fire all the people involved, and even with all their documentation, it can take years and millions of dollars to get a new group of people back up to where the old team was -- there's just so much that can be written down, too many little bits and pieces of information critical to making something that only exist in various people's heads.
The Saturn V was produced by a team of people (including von Braun) who had in some cases been working on rockets for decades; it was the culmination of years of work and a series of other projects just on the NASA side, to say nothing of the thousands of contractors who were basically employed full-time on rocketry-related projects. Virtually all of the people involved have since retired, and probably many of them are dead; even with whatever documentation was saved, the knowledge that they had (probably thousands or millions of man-years of experience) is immeasurable and would take a vast national effort to rebuild.
It's not that today's engineers aren't good; it's just that they'd be starting out at a fairly sizable disadvantage, and would probably be working under very harsh expectations ("well, you did it once, how hard can it be?"), which is one of the reasons why I suspect NASA is so reluctant to look back at old designs compared to making new ones from scratch.
Rebuilding a new Saturn V, like rebuilding a brand new fast-passenger steam locomotive, or WWII bomber, seems trivial on the surface because we know what the final product looked like, and have all the schematics; but what's lacking is all the institutional knowledge that went into the actual realization of that design in metal.
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They've got nothing on ... SPACE MADNESS!!!
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Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
How about just donning spacesuits every few weeks/months and then cycle the air in the ship with some form of gas that'll kill the bacteria?
A vacuum should deal with the moisture accumulating behind panels wouldn't it? So you pump the air out, pump some gas that's harmless for the ship's equipment but will kill germs, pump it out, and then replace the air.
If the ship is compartmentalized then you can do this in sections, but a spacesuit might be useful just in case.
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The risk to all life of these space mutated creations is too great. We must just detonate a small nuke to eradicate the whole vessel and eliminate the problem completely.
Or shunt them into a space graveyard come bio-warfare storage zone to be used against alien invaders.
Without gravity, lots of things become very difficult to do. A lot more money should be thrown into researching physics and finding out how to control/simulate gravity.
Design the intrament manals in a manner wher there is a breez moving through them. Make the metal casing out of mesh.
Also make them easy to come apart and make it a daily regement to clean them.
You will have lots of free time on the way to Mars.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Use a portable vaccum with a hepafilter and a canister of Lysol wet wipes.
Seems like the problems mentioned wouldn't be problems if there were some artificial gravity. Perhaps adding spin to part or all of the air craft?
.1G or so be difficult? Can we make the station strong enough to support some minimal spin? It would seem to make many things "easier", even though we want 0G for some tests. Have a core section that doesn't spin for the 0G tests.
I keep wondering when they are going to build the Space Station -- the one shaped like a bicycle wheel. I keep expecting they'll make progress "someday", but they continue to hang out in the "temporary quarters".
Certainly, the space station should move toward being a more livable "habitat", which, it seems, should include gravity? Would
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Yup, I know them. Some time ago these were called pirates..