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Space Junk Forced Astronauts Into ISS Escape Capsules

According to a story from CNN, "A piece of a debris from a Russian Cosmos satellite passed close enough to the International Space Station on Saturday that its crew was ordered into escape capsules as a precaution, NASA said. The six crew members were told to take shelter late Friday in their Soyuz capsules after it was determined there was a small possibility the debris could hit the station, the U.S. space agency said in a statement." This isn't the first time it's happened, either. The escape capsules (actually, they're Soyuz spacecraft) must be nice to have on hand, but I'd hate to have to test their efficacy.

26 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Test the efficacy? by Brett+Buck · · Score: 5, Informative

    You are kidding right? They ARE going to test their efficacy, that's how they get back down.
       

    1. Re:Test the efficacy? by RalphTheWonderLlama · · Score: 2

      Thank you! I was going to post it if noone else had. Soyuz are the only way to get up to ISS and back down right now.

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    2. Re:Test the efficacy? by NalosLayor · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yeah, they swap them out. People fly up and back on the ones they came on, and leave them parked for the duration of their stay, more or less. It's kinda like calling your parked car an "escape car".

    3. Re:Test the efficacy? by timothy · · Score: 2

      Heh, I meant "as escape vehicles per se," to leave a wounded ISS. That would be ... stressful.

      timothy

      --
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    4. Re:Test the efficacy? by afeeney · · Score: 2
      You mean not everybody calls them that?

      Man, I need to make some friends who aren't bank robbers.

  2. silly commentary indeed... by sribe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The escape capsules (actually, they're Soyuz spacecraft) must be nice to have on hand, but I'd hate to have to test their efficacy.

    You mean you don't want to come home at the end of the mission?

    1. Re:silly commentary indeed... by caseih · · Score: 5, Informative

      Indeed. You'd think a slashdot editor would be up on his ISS knowledge! :) The escape capsules are definitely tested and found efficacious every few months or so when the crew is rotated. In fact they cannot stay at the space station for more than 6 months or so. That was the whole reason they were thinking of abandoning the station back when Soyuz was grounded last year. That and the fact they didn't want to land the soyuz escape capsules in the dead of winter.

  3. And what if .... by realitycheckplease · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The debris hits the Soyuz and not the main station?

    1. Re:And what if .... by khallow · · Score: 2

      Then you might have some dead astronauts. The Soyuz has a much smaller cross-section area than the ISS does so it's much less likely to be hit.

    2. Re:And what if .... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Funny

      The debris hits the Soyuz and not the main station?

      If that happens, then the voice from Unreal Tournament comes on the station's PA and announces: "HEADSHOT!".

    3. Re:And what if .... by khallow · · Score: 2

      Let's consider a similar example. In the past few minutes, you may have spontaneously changed gender. Either it happened or it didn't. Using that famous Slashdot logic above, that's a 50% chance that you're now differently equipped.

  4. Re:Has the ISS become sentient yet? by jhoegl · · Score: 3, Funny

    Havent you learned anything from Movies yet?
    Macintosh saves the world.

  5. Re:analysis showed a slight possibility of hitting by Mr.+Freeman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When you consider how amazingly big space is and how incredibly fast debris can travel, that's actually really close.

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  6. Need the dragon by WindBourne · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Seriously, one of the hidden issues on the ISS is that the crews are split. Lets assume that SOMETHING happens in the middle of the station. That would seperate the western group from the souyz. Once the dragon is rated for cargo, it would actually be good if it got enough of a life support and seats put into place to launch a dragon up there and dock it there. According to SpaceX, it has a life of 1 year. Once dragon or any other western craft is human rated, then stop the life boats.

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  7. Re:analysis showed a slight possibility of hitting by TheCouchPotatoFamine · · Score: 2

    i mean it's big. Really big. So big you could... never mind.

    --
    CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
  8. Re:Has the ISS become sentient yet? by sqrt(2) · · Score: 2

    I love IBM era Thinkpads (and *nix loves them, too, which makes them all the more useful to me). Such amazing machines in form and function. I'm an Apple fan now, through and through, but those are the only laptops on the PC side of the great divide that I'd ever consider using. The Lenovo stuff is pretty junky, but when IBM still had their mark on them they were sublime.

    For their purpose, they'll probably still be useful for another 10 years. Space programs use a surprisingly little amount of CPU power.

    --
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  9. Re:analysis showed a slight possibility of hitting by geekmux · · Score: 2

    "The debris was predicted to pass about 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) from the space station, NASA said."

    Sooo, 14 miles and CDR Riker yells "red alert!"

    Ah, in the vast chasm that is outer space, 14.2 miles is officially known as "splitting-hair" close.

  10. Re:analysis showed a slight possibility of hitting by osu-neko · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "The debris was predicted to pass about 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) from the space station, NASA said."

    Sooo, 14 miles and CDR Riker yells "red alert!"

    The key word is "predicted". When something will pass within 14 miles of your location, give or take 20 miles...

    --
    "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
  11. Re:Has the ISS become sentient yet? by pecosdave · · Score: 5, Informative

    We actually have custom built Think Pads that are soldered to/the equivalent to IPC Level 3 cert, they aren't off the shelf even though they're quite similar to off the shelf ones - more like "extra carefully manufactured" versions. For training in the simulators they have IPC Level 2 cert laptops (basically off the shelf versions) with stickers on them that say they are only for training and not for orbital use.

    What's really interesting is our custom built printers, they look a lot like off the shelf models but with a unique color variant and twist lock USB cables that are built to the same standard as the rest of the hermetically sealed round connectors on the station. Even though I haven't really messed with the printers too much (I'm usually ops side but recently cross trained over at the simulation facility) I'm sure there's something in there to make sure the ink droplets don't float off. I recently had to make a bunch of custom VGA cables that used the same connectors for the simulator.

    Sit back, think of the basics of how most everything works in the computer industry, then replace nearly every cable with a round hermetically sealed twist lock version then you've got an idea of how the station operates. (thankfully not Ethernet cables)

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  12. Re:Awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Even so, if you'd pay attention, you'd notice outside the Soyuz there's a Space Indian looking at the debris and shedding a single tear. Littering has got stop.

  13. Re:Klingon-built by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

    Ya know I never figured out how that was supposed to work. Using credits or some plastic chips? i could see that. But if NOBODY has anything that takes the place of currency then how do you decide who gets something rare? I mean you watch the movies and Kirk had some seriously old collector's items, so how did he get it? they have a lotto or something and he was REALLY lucky? Hell even in DS-9 Nog was able to use barter with the Federation crewmen so they had to actually own things otherwise they wouldn't have anything to trade.

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  14. Re:Has the ISS become sentient yet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    They have thinkpads? For maximum safety they should have just got behind one of them.

  15. Re:Has the ISS become sentient yet? by NevarMore · · Score: 2

    The simpler the technology, the less it breaks.

    In the Apollo program, they had slide rules. Which continue to work even if the cabin is depressurized and the crew has not depressurized

  16. Re:Klingon-built by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

    But that STILL doesn't explain rare stuff like what Kirk had. He had Romulan ale, he had 300+ year old glasses, these things are RARE with a capital R, so how did he get them? Was he REALLY lucky? There has to be, even with replicators, a way to decide who gets the rare things because even with a replicator an original thing is gonna be more treasured than a copy, its just human nature. And as you pointed out how do you deal with other races? Janeway pointed out on Voyager there are STRICT rules about giving replicator tech to other races because of the obvious life changing implications, but there are still gonna be times when you need to deal with other races as not everything can be replicated, such as starship fuel.

    I personally think Rodenberry just never sat down and thought things through and left a couple of glaring plot holes nobody said anything about. Because lets think about it, you have replicators AND holodecks...why the fuck would you ever work? How do you get people to do the shitty jobs, like the guy that crawls in the tubes running the wiring? Why would you do the shitty jobs when you can push a button and have a feast and walk into this room and instantly be God? I can't remember which Sci-Fi writer wrote this but I agree that they didn't think Star Trek through, as any race with holodecks and replicators would probably be wiped out. aliens would land to find mummified corpses in holodecks as why deal with reality when you can have perfection? Why would you care when a simple button press gives you anything you desire? I just don't see how if one logically thought the process through it would work.

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  17. Re:Has the ISS become sentient yet? by wernst · · Score: 2

    Hey! I can answer a bit about this.

    My last job was at Epson, and around 1998, we made a special Epson Stylus Color 800 inkjet printer for use on the Shuttle. It went up on STS-95, which was the same mission John Glenn went up in. It (or perhaps a clone of it) now sits in the Epson America HQ lobby.

    Anyway, I can confirm that other than a special black plastic case, which included plastic "cages" for both feeding paper in and taking paper out (it kept the sheets from floating away), a special latch for the USB cable, and maybe a special power supply (I don't remember anything special, but it may have had one), it was an off-the-shelf printer.

    There was no special technology needed to pressurize the ink carts, or to move the ink from the heads to the paper during the act of printing. It just worked.

    Now I'm not saying that current printers weren't engineered especially to work in zero-G, but we found it was unnecessary back in the 90's.

  18. Re:Klingon-built by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

    But would that "instant bazillionaire" take a job cleaning puke at the Chuck E Cheese? ya see this is in a way the same argument I've been having with some of the FOSS community on why the GPL doesn't work on the desktop, its the "busted shitter" problem. You can get humans to do creative things for free, to write songs, create art, make some cool piece of software, but NOBODY wants or is willing to do the nasty jobs for free, cleaning the neighbors busted shitters or in the case of FOSS all the regression testing QA, document writing, fixing the current driver model, all those long, boring, dull, tedious and thankless jobs simply wouldn't get done. I mean if everyone has everything they want how would you get someone to spend all day cleaning plasma pipes? you wouldn't and THAT is the problem.

    Sadly the ONLY way I see out of the busted shitter dilemma in the ST universe would be to take a page from Star Wars and look into earth's history and create a slave class who were FORCED to clean the busted shitters. that is what the droids really were after all, a slave race forced to do the menial tasks that the other races didn't want to do. In a way we are seeing this problem play out IRL sadly with the ghettos and the third and fourth generation welfare queens. I recently read a very sad article by an inner city schoolteacher that when asking students "what do you want to be when you grow up?" several girls basically said 'i'm gonna have a couple of kids and get paid" and the others in class saw that as a valid "lifestyle" choice. Whether we choose to accept it or not a human can be a VERY lazy and pleasure driven creature and the problem with the ST universe is that given basically unlimited everything you'd have an insane number that would simply sit on their asses, get fat, and watch HoloTV. After all EVERYONE wants to be Picard, but how many would want to be Barclay? Or the guy who spends his day installing the sonic showers?

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