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Russia To Save Its ISS Modules
jamax writes "According to the BBC, 'Russia is making plans to detach and fly away its parts of the International Space Station when the time comes to de-orbit the rest of the outpost. ... To facilitate the plan, RKK Energia, the country's main ISS contractor, has already started developing a special node module for the Russian segment, which will double as the cornerstone of the future station. ... Unlike many Nasa and European space officials, Russian engineers are confident that even after two decades in orbit, their modules would be in good enough shape to form the basis of a new space station. "We flew on Mir for 15 years and accumulated colossal experience in extending the service life (of such a vehicle)," said a senior Russian official at RKK Energia...' Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionally produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires? There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever — old cars or weapons systems, but one rarely sees anything of the sort these days."
What's so difficult to understand about the fact that new products don't last as much as they used to? Back in the days the production and design processes were not as advanced as today, so a lot of margin of error was needed to produce equipment that worked the way it needed.
Today, there are a lot of different price categories for a lot of goods. So to give the people what they really want (cheap stuff), the components that are used in today's products are mostly the cheap ones that are produced without big margins of error for reliability purposes. This obviously means that they won't last forever, but boy are they cheap! Why should someone buy a very expensive TV that's garanteed to work for 50 years when in 15 years time there would be new models with a lot of new functionality anyway?
Sometimes I don't understand why some people are saying that that old equipment was so much better because it lasted forever, but I think the explanation to that is so simple.
Dependency hell? =>
instead of burning them up/dumping them, why doesnt Russia also make use of the other components for its own project??
if US is willing to dump them then its junk for the US and Russia could use them i guess.
I am an on and off motorcycle rider. One day at the shop, I saw an OLD BMW motorcycle that looked well, vintage. It had no shine, it was matte, it looked like it had been riding forever. An old man tapped me on the shoulder, and informed me that my inspection needed to be renewed, so I took care of that.
Later I saw the same bike at the motorcycle gear/coffee shop thats a bit out of town. I had stopped for a coffee before my ride for the day and I heard a couple of older men talking....
"You need a new transmission"
"I do not. That transmission is fine, why would I want a new one that might not be good. This one has 650,000 miles on it. Every 200,000 there is a bearing that dissintigrates and I have to replace. That is a good transmission."
650,000 miles on one bike and still riding. Not THAT is a quality vehicle. I mean, I am sure he must take care of it, but damn.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
"There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever..."
I understand the principle you are referring to, but I'm not really sure if it's a case of people remembering, or even imagining things more fondly than they really were. And I mean that literally; I'm not sure.
My grandfather, who passed away 16 years ago, left behind in his garage a lawnmower with a Briggs & Stratton engine. He originally purchased this lawnmower sometime in the late 50's. That lawnmower is *still* in my mother's garage, and still fully operational, some 50 years later. The only maintenance required is a bit of gasoline and a new spark plug every 10 years or so.
*50* years and still running strong
Fast forward to a car I owned in college. It was a 1985 Volkswagen Golf. The car was 5 years old when I got it; my mother owned it before me. It had about 60,000 miles on it when I got it, but it already had a cracked head (faulty radiator), CV joints were replaced 3 times (it was an engineering defect - anyone who owned a Golf or Jetta from about that time can attest to this), faulty fuel injector (it would stick at WOT sometimes when you floored it), headliner collapsed, sunroof broke twice (couldn't open it), and several other minor problems, and this was BEFORE I got it. I owned it for under two years and by then it was such a heap of garbage we decided to simply trade it in on something new, as it was too expensive to keep repairing. Mt grandfather bought me a 1992 Nissan pick-up, the no-frills base model, and it was mechanically the best vehicle I've owned to date, and I'm currently on my 8th automobile. I put over 200,000 (really rough) miles on it, and the only thing that ever failed was a bearing in the transmission, which was most likely my fault for driving it like a dragster. Was only $600 to repair, including parts and labor. Everything else worked great.
Going back in time again, I also have some of my grandfather's toys. They are stored away, and never touched, but the craftsmanship was so delicate, they never would have made it this long if continually played with. Even simple mechanisms like the Jack-in-the-Box readily break.
So taking into consideration the materials used in the past (heavy duty plastic, metal, solid wood) versus those in use today (thin plastic, cheap alloys, synthetic/pressed wood), as well as the business ethics of planned obsolescence (i.e. build something that breaks right after warranty) I would say that overall, if all manufactured products were compared to their equivalent from many decades past, it does seem that a higher percentage of products are now built more cheaply than they once were.
However, considering engineering advances, I'd put my Nissan up against any 1950's Ford or Chevy for reliability. And as has been mentioned by other posters, it's often what you pay and who you buy from. If you buy cheap, you shouldn't expect longevity. Of course there are exceptions to that, as well. My Nissan pick-up in 1992 was $9,000 out the door. The next most reliable car I've owned is my Viper, but it cost 10x as much as my old Nissan.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
I'm sitting at a desk made during WW2 as I type this. It's made of thicker steel than most still running cars. I kept three 21 inch CRT monitors on top of it for a time before I went to lighter gear. Before I bought it from them, it stood up to 35 years at a DOE plant. All drawers, leveling casters and such work. There are some pretty intricate mechanisms to let spring loaded typing shelves and such lock in place and so a single key can lock all the drawers with a serious throw-bolt system. When I bought it it happened to be the one from the bottom of a stack eight high, so it was supporting about 550 lbs. (No, I didn't make them give me the one on the bottom, I bid on the seven drawer model and the forklift operator pulled the first one he saw.). There's little survival selection involved, as they must have still had 5,000 of them in the warehouses, and a heaping lot of them are still in service with DOE.
Who is John Cabal?
What about if you had solar cells and a tether? It seems like you could use the solar cells to generate electrical power and use the electrical power to generate lift using the tether.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether
The downside I can think of is that over very long periods of time micro meteorites would slowly destroy the solar arrays and the power supply would gradual fail. Maybe a better option would be to use the tether to move the satellite into a very high orbit over a long time. Essentially you'd design the thing so that if it failed in a few decades it would still end up in a very high orbit.
Another option would be a Voyager type mission to put something into a very high orbit. You could make it come back every ten years or so and beam it's stored data back to Earth.
What's the point? It's an interesting engineering idea. You could justify it as a time capsule basically - you could store lots of data like the Library of Congress, DNA samples, and so on. If we blow ourselves to bits, aliens or a future human civilisation could learn a lot from the contents of the satellite.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
While that is true, it ignores some facts. Products designed in the first half of the last century did not benefit from the sort of design and analysis tools that allow corps to engineer something to several nines for an expected time to failure like they can now.
Consequently, product designers often used seat of the pants over-engineering to be sure the product would not fail early and give the company a bad rep. Consequently, there were a lot of appliances and such that were pretty damn robust.
I have a GE hand mixer that my mom got in 1961 that has been used weekly or monthly my entire life and still is completely functional. To this day I associate the smell of ozone with baking because of it.
Because the lens was incorrectly ground due to an error in the software that ran the grinding process. The "corrective optics" only recover a fraction of the light gathering capacity Hubble was supposed to be capable of. Hubble is finally old enough that it can be retired without people screaming about the waste of money (along with the people who were responsible allowing that error to pass in the first place). People made do with Hubble because it blew decades' worth of budget allocation. Hopefully now we'll get a visible light replacement space telescope that isn't crippled out of the gate.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire