Space Station Saved By a Toothbrush?

Hugh Pickens writes "Denise Chow reports that two spacewalking astronauts successfully replaced a vital power unit on the International Space Station today, defeating a stubborn bolt that prevented the astronauts from properly installing the power unit on the ISS's backbone-like truss with the help of some improvised tools made of spare parts and a toothbrush. Astronauts Sunita Williams and Akihiko Hoshide started by removing the power box, called a main bus switching unit (MBSU), from where it had been temporarily tied down with a tether, then spent several hours troubleshooting the unit and the two bolts that are designed to secure it in place on the space station's truss. After undoing the bolts, the spacewalkers examined them for possible damage, and used improvised cleaning tools and a pressurized can of nitrogen gas to clean out the metal shavings from the bolt receptacles. 'I see a lot of metal shavings coming out,' Hoshide said as he maneuvered a wire cleaner around one of the bolt holders. Williams and Hoshide then lubricated a spare bolt and manually threaded it into the place where the real bolt was eventually driven, in an effort to ensure that the receptacle was clear of any debris. Then the two applied grease to the sticky bolt as well as extra pressure and plain old jiggling until finally 4½ hours into the spacewalk, Hoshide reported: 'It is locked.' When Hoshide reported that the troublesome bolt was finally locked into place, the flight managers erupted in applause while astronaut Jack Fischer at Mission Control told the astronauts 'that is a little slice of awesome pie.'"

Comments

This is why we need people in space

[jmorris42]

And this is why robots aren't going replace people anytime soon. One little thing goes wrong with an unmanned mission and either a major subsystem is written off or the entire mission is a failure. People are able to do thigs robots aren't going to be able to do for quite a while longer. And it gets even worse as soon as you go beyond full duplex radio range. If you have to send a command, wait for a result, try something else, repeat until you scream, things get really slow the second you aren't executing preplanned directions without errors.

And people can perform physical actions we have yet to build a robot to do reliably. Sure they can put thousands of bolt on one after another on an assembly line but how many could deal with this one stuck bolt? None. Now try to build one that can open up a panel and troubleshoot wiring or plumbing.

Re:This is why we need people in space

[crmanriq]

You are missing the obvious difference:

Robots don't use toothbrushes.

Notoriously poor dental care. It's almost like robots are, um, ... British.

Why do you think the cybermen just use speakers? And the daleks hide inside their little trash cans?

Re:This is why we need people in space

[CheeseTroll]

Perhaps, but a robot wouldn't have had a toothbrush in space, would it?

Re:This is why we need people in space

[whoever57]

And this is why robots aren't going replace people anytime soon

A robot might not have cross-threaded the bolt in the first place (why do you think there were metal shavings in the threads?)

Re:This is why we need people in space

[adolf]

A robot might not have cross-threaded the bolt in the first place (why do you think there were metal shavings in the threads?)

Galling. If you haven't experienced it yet, you just haven't yet turned enough bolts.

Re:This is why we need people in space

[Paul Slocum]

I'm not much of an expert, but I can think of more human missions that have failed (expensively and tragically) than robotic missions that have failed. And the mars rovers have lasted dramatically longer than expected. Plus, getting the rover unstuck from the sand shows that you can fix tough problems that require improvising even with a robot.

Re:This is why we need people in space

[timeOday]

True, but not everybody's success rate is the same. One good trick is to start by turning the screw backwards until you feel it click, then start tightening.

Re:This is why we need people in space

[jamstar7]

Take a look at the overall mission records to Mars. About half the missions have failed spectacularly, compared to what, half a dozen manned missions that ended in death? I'm including Apollo 1 and a couple known Russian meatshots, btw.

Re:This is why we need people in space

[khallow]

You've got some flawed reasoning there, because if robots made the offending part it wouldn't have had metal debris in it.

It's worth noting at this point that there's a good chance the errant part was made by machine. Perhaps not a robot in the technical sense, but not a human either.

Re:This is why we need people in space

[khallow]

Then you are indeed not much of an expert. Mars missions are notorious for failure. Manned missions despite their many flaws are not. For example, there have been four in-flight accidents that killed astronauts out of perhaps 200-300 manned missions over the past 50 years. In comparison, 26 of the 50 unmanned missions to Mars have failed.

This is not intended to be an apples to apples comparison (going to Mars is a wee bit harder than achieving orbit and doing a few things for a few days). I'm just pointing out the far greater number of failures on the unmanned side.

Re:This is why we need people in space

[EETech1]

It is very easy for some CNC machines to tell if it has a dull or broken drill bit, or tap. I don't think it would take that much to add that capability to many of today's robots.

We had servo controlled torque wrenches with process monitors on a robotic production line where I worked that could also tell you way more about how that bolt (torque and turn) tightened than most observant skilled wrench operators (yes there is a skill to feeling a bolt tighten) and almost anyone that does it for 8 hours straight. Every bolt, every time, perfectly tightened, or rejected!

The logic to determine the failure (bolt, threads, nut, washer, or part interference) was there, and normally spot on, I doubt the programming to rework the various parts would add much to the complexity of today's state of the art assembly (line worker replacement) robots.

Cheers! to our manual labor (job) eliminating robot overloards!

Re:This is why we need people in space

[Bacon Bits]

You've got some flawed reasoning there, because if robots made the offending part it wouldn't have had metal debris in it.

It's worth noting at this point that there's a good chance the errant part was made by machine. Perhaps not a robot in the technical sense, but not a human either.

More to the point, the argument that humans will create flawed tools while robots will not is false on it's face. Robots are tools made by humans. What's to stop the robot from being flawed in the first place?

[Insert "it's turtles all the way down" reference here]

Re:This is why we need people in space

[gagol]

A multitask space robot builder would probably pack cleaning brushes and advanced 3D printer.

Re:This is why we need people in space

[Solandri]

The power unit is probably vital only because the ISS is manned, and having humans aboard means a higher power requirement. The thing about space is that the enormous launch costs (on the order of $5000 per kg at the low end) means many things you take for granted on earth (like a toothbrush and toothpaste) add horrendously to your overall cost. Estimates are that it takes about 2 tons of life support equipment to keep one person alive in space. So sending a single person to space incurs an extra $10 million in cost (ignoring consumables like food, water, and oxygen). For a fraction of that, you can just build your unmanned system with redundant backups for everything, including "vital power units".

e.g. The cost of the manned mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope cost almost as much as building and launching a replacement HST. If we'd had an unmanned launch vehicle other than the Shuttle capable of putting something Hubble's size into orbit, we could've put 3 HSTs into orbit for the cost of one Shuttle-launched HST and one repair mission. Remember the Solar Max repair mission? Ever wonder why aside from Hubble, that was the only repair mission conducted by the Shuttle? Because it was literally cheaper to build and launch a replacement satellite than to send the shuttle up to repair one.

We're trying to run before we can walk. We should kill the manned space program for about 10 years, or at the very least drastically scale it back. Work on lowering launch vehicle costs. Once we get those costs down to about $1000-$2000/kg (Falcon comes close), then restart the manned program. The Shuttle and ISS wasted hundreds of billions of dollars just so we could brag "Look! We have people in space!" If that money had been spent instead on researching and developing cheaper launch vehicles, we could've potentially been putting a dozen people in space for the cost of putting a single person in space today.

Re:This is why we need people in space

[gagol]

Non human payloads don't have the same levels of safety regulations...

Re:This is why we need people in space

[stepho-wrs]

Except you are solving a known problem, after it happened.
It's much harder to solve problems before they are known.
It's much harder to build a robot that can solve unknown problems.

What might be useful though is a general purpose manipulator that can be controlled by humans on the ground.
Humans are useful because they have brains, eyes and general purpose hands, the combination of which can solve a huge number of problems.
Give the robot cameras, hands so that it can pick-up and use other tools or even non-tools (ie whatever is laying around the craft but wasn't explicitly designed as a tool) and a link to a human controller.

Re:This is why we need people in space

[VortexCortex]

True, but not everybody's success rate is the same. One good trick is to start by turning the screw backwards until you feel it click, then start tightening.

WTF. You mean they WEREN'T doing it this way? I thought everyone did this -- It's how you start a screw.

Oh to be an alien drifting along that orbit:
"Look at the silly hairless apes, thwarted by a single simple screw.... Oh my, listen to them all cheering now. Congratulations you primitive little beasties, you've tightened an errant fastener in SPACE! Wow. Let's get out of here, at this rate it'll be centuries before they even discover reusable pop rivets."

Re:This is why we need people in space

[LordSnooty]

Having bad teeth matters not a jot when you're too fat to fit in your spacesuit. See, i can stereotype too!

Re:This is why we need people in space

[khallow]

Russia has a couple as well with its Soyuz. Parachute didn't deploy on one and decompression of the capsule for the other. Wikipedia says these were designated Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11.

Re:This is why we need people in space

[JoeMerchant]

This particular bolt problem might have been solved by a team of thousands on the ground, but if you've got the people up there already, it's going to be faster and cheaper to use them than to do something clever with fabricators, manipulators, etc.

By the time the robot fabrication factories get to be as capable as humans, they will be just as costly to launch into orbit and maintain there.

Biggest Surprise

[SuperKendall]

I'm more surprised that they have spare toothbrushes on hand than I am they were able to fix this.

all hail

[Anonymous Coward]

all hail the inanimate carbon rod!

Obligatory Simpsons

[DarkBlackFox]

"It's an inanimate carbon rod!!" http://i.imgur.com/ijjIh.png

Spare?

[PPH]

"Williams and Hoshide reporting in commander. We have good news and bad news. We managed to clear the threads on this power unit and complete installation. That's the good news. The bad news is that the only toothbrush we could find was yours."

My faith in NASA has been restored

[sabri]

American spaceship, Russian spaceship: all fixed with toothbrush!

Re:Yeah but how much did the toothbrush cost?

[PPH]

You get one free with each toilet seat.

Don't ask.

Re:Space station saved by ... Brains ...

[tragedy]

It wasn't them, it was the inanimate carbon rod!

Re:Thank you, Slashdot...

[jd2112]

MacGyver

In

SPACE
SPACE
Space
Space
space
space

Re:Good, now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now hunt down the machinists, engineers and managers responsible for a manufacturing process that left "lots of metal shavings" in a piece of life critical aerospace equipment and flay them alive as a lesson to all other machinists, engineers and managers.

Post the video on youtube, with a message officially obviating all current and future contracts with each and every subcontractor involved in this pathetic farce.

Ah, yeah, except the metal shavings were probably from the first cross-threaded bolt that was carving out a new threading in the mounting. Although astronauts are known to be god-like in competence, without any additional information, it would initially appear to be a case of operator error when the original bolt was first attempted.

The shavings, where did they go?

[advocate_one]

I hope they had some means in place to capture them like a magnet and some sticky paper... (a vacuum cleaner would have been useless there). Who knows where those shavings could get to if not captured...