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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."
Construction of the International Space Station began in 1998. The soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Thus, ISS Modules did not exist in Soviet Russia and did not "save you".
Instead of just plunging them in the ocean, wouldn't it be much cooler to put them in an orbit halfway between the Earth and the moon, as a sort of testament for future generations?
It could be something like the pyramids or the the Eiffel tower or the Chinese wall.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
Mars rovers? Voyager? NASA seems to be doing okay with that.
.sig withheld by request
In college, I wrote a web browser. It was fully functional and supported everything that IE supported at that time. My professor was amazed. Not only because I was able to implement such a complicated thing in VB, but also in that I was able to do it over the weekend.
I got an A, but I never told anyone the secret. Now, years after I graduated, I can divulge my methods. Or, should I say *heh heh heh* Microsoft's methods. I simply reused Microsoft's IE COM component and wrapped it in a slick VB shell. Code reuse, not only at the code level, but at the binary level!
So in the real world, it also makes sense to reuse technology and existing parts rather than rebuild them from scratch. Especially so for space-based things that require huge investment per kilogram just to get them up there. And by reusing older parts, we can standardize on the interfaces and create Lego-like systems that can easily work together instead of needing custom parts every time.
The only thing I really worry about is all that Russian fungus.
http://www.space.com/news/spacestation/space_fungus_000727.html
I so miss things which are made to last. Perhaps this is not a product of rocket science, but the chair I'm sitting on right now is a pre-WW2 german-made one. A regular chair, not one of Aeron types or whatever. Why? Because no desk chair I ever bought lasted more than a year; the one I inherited from my grandparents which they in turn inherited from their ancestors is still working fine.
I fully agree with the article poster's sentiment for old German products. Bring such chairs to the orbit and the ISS will be able to continue forever.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
More likely than not, America is going to allow Bigelow to attach a few units on there and they will ultimately replace the cans. They will be cheap and 100% appreciated by the occupants since they are MUCH BIGGER and QUIETER. In fact, if Obama and Bolden (our very likely next NASA head) were smart, they would continue COTS-D AND buy a Sundancer to attach to the ISS. Since NASA will not likely want to trust the Sundancer, it can be used for storage and the door kept closed in normal use. It will cost us 200M (assuming a falcon 9 launcher), which is chump change. By getting Bigelow started, it will lead to cheap new space stations for NASA, private space station, and perhaps military (important in light of China's new announcement of their multiple military). Finally, the Sundancer and the metal noodes can be replaced by BA-330's increasing the size of the ISS appreciably.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When the ISS is decommissioned, I doubt it'll be for technical reasons. It's obviously not a consumer product and NASA and their contractors have shown they can build stuff that lasts (like the Mars Rovers, Voyager, the Space Shuttle or any of the hundreds of satellites). At some point the ISS will simply stop being useful. Some say that day had come the day it was launched, but I'm sure there's a little bit of science and a lot of engineering research and PR that the ISS has and still is useful for.
Fleur de Sel
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."
No, but the space industry is one of the few where things are built to last. Portable consumer electronics are among the worst for quality except for a few notable examples like the iPod Mini and the Nokia 6310(i). Soldered-in lithium batteries, surface-mount MLC flash memory and electrolytic capacitors don't last all that long. Satellites are over-engineered, if anything goes wrong with them you can't put it in a cardboard box with styrofoam and send it back to the manufacturer.
The quality of cars hasn't actually gone down - when The Wall was knocked down lots of old Soviet cars like the 2-stroke Trabant were abandoned for second-hand German cars. Of course manufacturers are filling up modern cars with cheap consumer electronics and cheap Chinese DC motors to move every little thing because apparently buyers are too lazy to use their hands for anything. So while all the in-car entertainment and motorised windows,cup holders, sun roofs and central locks might break the car itself (engine & chassis) will probably be in a better state after 20 years than a '70s car would have been after 20 years since engine technology has improved and the underside of the car is better protected from rust.
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? =>
Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever -- old cars or weapons systems
As the owner of a rare, older Audi, I find this concept hilarious. A number of components last just about the warranty period- a number of solenoid valves, for example. Numerous hoses break (turbocharged engine- the hoses split and leak.) The radiator end-caps (and thus all the fittings) were of a plastic that broke after a couple of years. Alternators last a few years tops because of their location and cooling design (they are fed air straight through the bumper, so lots of water and crap.) BMW and Mercedes largely had the same issues as they were all being fed the same shit by Bosch and others. Don't be fooled: automotive companies contract out or shop off the shelf at major supplies like Bosch. The climate control and seat controls in my car are straight out of the AC/Delco parts bin, amusingly enough...despite it being an Audi.
Manual transmissions and differentials? Absolutely. The engine block/valvetrain/internals/exhaust, you got it. The (hot-dipped-galvanized) body? Yes. Most of the interior electrics? Yup. All relatively bulletproof and will last longer than you want to keep the car.
Ask B5 A4/S4 owners about their driver information display or ABS modules. Or front suspension links on the original A4...
Please help metamoderate.
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.
It is called survivorship bias. Almost all of the things produced in the past have long since broken down. We only see what stood the test of time and therefore tend to assume that things were built to last back in the day.
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"
I still see a lot of GM cars and trucks from the 80s' on the roads and in decent shape. Most American made products actually last a long time.
On the other hand, Chinese made stuff is not always very long lasting and usually poor quality, but it is very cheap.
Soviet made products, electronics and cars, did not have a good reputation in Easter Europe in the past.
Old stuff seems to last forever because the old stuff we have left is the stuff that survived. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's plenty of old junk-- but that went out with the trash years ago. Every era manufactures a bunch of unreliable crap, too.
To make matters worse: through sheer chance, some unreliable junk survives for a century now and then, too. While this stuff is all at the statistically unlikely end of the bell curve, and 99.9% of its cohorts have vanished, what remains by dumb luck reinforces the idea that "stuff was made better in the old days."
In Soviet Russia, things outlast you!
Many Russian/Soviet era military radios were tube type with regenerative receivers. They were supposedly designed so they would continue to work after an EMP. The reality was that they didn't have access to transistor patents, and tube factories provided jobs. The radios worked very well until the tubes went bad. As long as you looked at tubes as a disposable item, like a battery, you could say that they were made much better than the US equivalent. However, in reality, the silicon based radios were far superior in both function and reliability, and EMP hardened systems were developed, nullifying the tube's main advantage. My dad, a radio collector, has a Zenith Royal 500-D that has never had anything done other than replace batteries that still works as it did in 1955. There are almost no tube radios of that era that have maintained the stability of even those early transistor sets.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I come from a country that used to import Chinese crap way before that became "fashionable", and let me tell you, chinese products had a reputation of being crap already 30 years ago. With the trend in engineering as mentioned in the summary, things hadn't improved. Sadly, such lack in QC (or simply disregard for human life) extends to chinese food products as well. For that reason, I never ever buy any food or cosmetic product made in china, and actually avoid everything else whenever possible. Last time when my wife found this "lovely dinosaurus-shaped puppet", I was forced to buy it even though was china-made.
As for russian technical products, this is (or used to be, at least up until 15 years ago, I'm not up to date on their latest trends in production) a very weird mix of excellent quality parts and abysmal quality parts, assembled together with the greatest attention about 50% of the time, but also assembled together with half-arsed nonchalance the rest of the time. And often the two approaches at assembling are found in the same product. This results in an analog oscilloscope that would otherwise last forever and have excellent measurement parameters, if it wasn't for the CRT that, when produced, didn't quite meet the vacuum tolerances, and the capacitors in the probe being made from spit. Just for one example.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
They tend to design things to outlast the competition.
Look at the Kalashnikov: crude, but timeless. Our tax dollars have bought hundreds of thousands of AK-knockoffs in the last few years alone, for our puppets... I mean allies.
That is not a simple fact, but a grandiose fact claim on your part.
Some products may have been more durable in the past, some not so much. You would have to look at a case by case analysis, do some testing, empirical work to figure out what is true.
Metal and steel rusts and bends. Lots of mechanical and moving parts can cause all sorts of problems, line shafts wear out, cloth cables, springs, reed relais, etc.
Wooden joints that where glued or screwed together tend to get loose, etc.
No material is perfect. And cost saving can leed to simplicity, which can benefit durability greatly.
I believe that especially eletronics and computing is getting much better. Complicated VHS tape drives broke down all of the time. Reel to Reel tape drives had lots of problems. Optical is better and solid state even moreso.
It's possible to design much electronics to last a long time. I'd say that 95% of the reliability comes from not using wet electrolytic capacitors, which dry out with heat x time. The reliable test equipment I have from the 60s and 70s uses solid tantalum caps with a very long service life. And my mil-supplied, 50's built, tubes only, up to 500V variable voltage bench supplies use oil/paper caps and work perfectly after 50 years.
Unfortunately, much of NASA is focused on building things, not doing things. Look at the argument over the repair capabilities that made the Hubble a success : Nasa is letting go of those capabilities. The new Manned Space Flight System - Orion - will not have the capability to repair future Hubbles. In my opinion Hubble is the biggest success NASA has had since Apollo, and as before we are going to let the capability die.
The builder types of would respond "its cheaper to build new ones," except, of course, we more or less won't. The current paradigm means that we will launch a telescope, have it fail, and then wait 20-30 years until another of the same type can be orbited. And, there seems to be no real effort expended on new types of propulsion and certainly no effort on new types of manned propulsion.
The Russians, meanwhile, view everything they have ever launched as an asset. You bet that they are going to use their ISS modules as long as they can, and maybe just a little more.
"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
"Russian components...American components...ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!" -Lev Andropov, from Armageddon
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This is how we fix problem in the Russian space station!
[hits panel with tool]
I've wondered about this too. Economics just about guarentee that at some point any device will become too expensive to update or maintain for it's origional purpose. Why not think of another purpose for the Hubble or nearly any other retired space junk. If we de-orbit it, we get to see it burn up, but we really don't learn much from that, we just get the junk out of the way. There has to be somebody somewhere that has an idea of some way to get some kind of useful information from old space junk. It's a very well know mass and could be used as a test platform for ion engines or other propulsion devices. If we were to some how attach some form of experimental engine to it and push it out to a higher orbit not only would we get some good data on the propulsion system, we could eventually have it somewhere where we might be able to re-purpose it, maybe turn it around, modify the electonics and use it to measure ocean levels or maybe cloud cover. Tack a solar sail on it and point it at a right angle to the earth's orbit. Track it and see what the solar wind does to it. The information may not be as interesting as deep space pictures, but it could give someone more insight on solar weather or solar sail design. Another option might be to intentionaly try to bounce it off the earth's atmosphere. If we fail and it burns up, well, we were going to do that anyway, if not, we may end up learning more about design stresses, or predicting other types of failures. It seems like we have an oportunity to take a very well know object and learn what happens if we push it beyond it's design limits. Anything we do with it would be better than just burning it up.
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
The point is, the need for desks will always be there. He has a desk that was built stout enough so it can last through generations of humans using it. One good desk can be built instead of ten chintzy ones that fall apart after a few years, like those pressed sawdust hunks of crap they push at the office supply stores now. In that sense, it is probably a pretty efficient use of the materials and multiple humans will get the benefit from it. And being steel, even when it is finally so worn out that it isn't worth fixing, the steel itself is easily recyclable, whereas pressboard is just landfill mulch.
And as for not needing to support weight, I know I can't be the only one here who has climbed on a desk to change the lightbulb overhead or to run cables through drop ceilings. Try doing that with your pressboard and little peg lock together marvel.
My personal desk I am sitting at right now is a very adeqaute and simple cobjob made from an old birch plywood and fir edging (strong) platform single bed I built years ago and now just laid across two of those similar type antique made from heavy steel filing cabinets. Yep, used it to paint the ceiling, climbed right up on the sucker, didn't need to move it, just throw a dropcloth over it. Probably could stick 1,000 lbs on the thing if I really wanted to. Would I replace it with an officemax special? Not only no but hell no!
Really, there's something to be said for building things to last in the first place, this use stuff for a short time and then throw it away is highly energy intensive and wasteful. Build/buy strong, then recycle or repurpose like I did with the bed, that's the way to save time, energy and cash.
Ditto. Years ago an automobile was all but dead once (if) it reached 100,000 miles. Today's versions regularly hit 100,000, 150,000, or even 200,000 and keep on rolling.
People don't give the darn things enough credit. You design a device that will run for a decade or more with minimal maintenance and that will start up after a week of sub-zero winter nights in Wisconsin or after spending days on end broiling in the Phoenix heat.
Consumer electronics are on a much faster track, but even there they DO more. Try rendering some HD video on a Pentium... if you can get fit it onto the hard drive. Hell, the average FILE on my iPod is larger than my first hard drive.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I fully agree with the article poster's sentiment for old German products.
There are still some things made properly (i.e. without the designed-in short lifetime), but their number is declining, alas. Cheap shit forces good shit out of the mass market, and into expensive niches. This trend has been very clear for at least 15 years (I speak as a PhD engineer with 30 years experience).
The design objective nowadays is not really 2 days past warranty, but one day. Unfortunately, some fool puts an extra day into leap years, which necessitates one or more additional days of overengineered lifetime, as warranties are calendar-based.
An upcoming insidious trend is to make the warranty for complex items conditional on regular service, which can only be purchased from the manufacturer, due to "trade secrets" or protected "intellectual property".
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Same as it has ever been. You get (and got) what you paid for.
A lovely fiction book to read which talks about the condition of working class tradesmen in England in the early 20th century is "The ragged trousered philanthropists" by Robert Tressell. The novel is about one man's attempt to survive the situations many people found themselves in, and on the way you get great descriptions of what life was like for working class folk. Cheap furniture which fell apart for sure, and the book describes how the supervisor for the workers in the book encourages them to do jobs on the cheap when they are decorating a new house because the rich owners won't notice till a few years later that a bodge job has been done, and this will make a little more profit for the owners of the painting and decorating companies.
Always has been good and rubbish furniture and construction, and there's always been people on the make squeezing a bit of profit by doing things cheaply.
Because the lens was incorrectly ground due to an error in the software that ran the grinding process.
Wouldn't you test a lens that you were going to send into orbit?