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The International Space Station Is Getting Its First Printer Upgrade in 17 Years (mashable.com)
Lance Ulanoff, writing for Mashable: Somewhere, 254 miles above us, an astronaut is probably printing something. Ever since the International Space Station (ISS) welcomed its first residents in November of 2000, there have been printers on board. Astronauts use them to print out critical mission information, emergency evacuation procedures and, sometimes, photos from home. According to NASA, they print roughly 1,000 pages a month on two printers; one is installed on the U.S. side of the ISS, the other in the Russian segment. ISS residents do all this on 20-year-old technology. "When the printer was new, it was like 2000-era tech and we had 2000-era laptop computers. Everything worked pretty good," recalled NASA Astronaut Don Pettit, who brought the first printer up to the ISS. But "the printer's been problematic for the last five or six years," said Pettit who's spent a total of one year on the station. It's not that the Space Station has been orbiting with the same printer since Justin Timberlake was still N'Sync. NASA had dozens of this printer and, as one failed, they'd send up another identical model. But now it's time for something truly new. In 2018, NASA will send two brand new, specialized printers up to the station. However, figuring out the right kind of printer to send was a lot more complicated than you'd probably expect. NASA has turned to HP for its IT supply and needs. The agency requires the following things in its printer: print and handle paper management in zero gravity, handle ink waste during printing, be flame retardant, and be power efficient. HP, Mashable reports, has recommended the HP Envy 5600, its all-in-one (printer, scanner, copier, fax) device that retails for $129.99. The model has been modified, according to the report.
> However, figuring out the right kind of printer to send was a lot more complicated than you'd probably expect.
Yeah i would expect it to be a lot more complicated than to turn to the most notorious supplier of "crapware", that breaks, or simply refuses to work because you didnt upgrade your service contract to Platinum or Plutonium, or even dared to use unapproved paper or ink...
Most..expensive..ink...EVER!
$35 a cartridge, but man, $150M in shipping costs.
The paper isn't cheap either.
Wow an HP printer. What company has the ink resupply contract for that, I need to invest yesterday.
You can get the latest model, HP Envy 5660, for $95.
Now they'll need bigger storage devices!
Why?
WHY?
I mean, really....
WHY!?!?!?!
1000 pages per MONTH? For WHAT?!?
That seems patently absurd. This is 2017, when printers are all but obsolete, for ANYTHING. Who prints photos anymore? Who prints ANYTHING anymore? Seriously, a 10" tablet does everything paper can do and more.
There is just no need for this senselessness.
PC Load Letter? WTF does THAT mean?
You know what the Russians did instead? "Used a pencil". I hate that meme.
Ok, I can get printing emergency procedures - if the power goes out, you can't rely on a battery and screen to get you through necessarily, that hard copy could be life or death. But that seems like the limit given the costs of getting it up there. Not for fucking pictures of Timmy and Lucy playing with old yellar and your wifes upskirts or husbands dick pics.
is still probably better than our newest retail printers sold in supermarkets.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I have printers in my office that the extended warranty gave up in 2001.
Maybe a few decades ago it made sense, but today with e-paper, tablets, etc I have a hard time understanding the necessity of a printer in space. Just design a mission critical tablet with all of the relevant documentation/manuals on it, manufacture a few dozen of them, and spread them throughout the station. If you're really paranoid about electronic devices print out manuals on Earth and send them up on resupplies. Any labeling of samples/experiments/etc could be done with one of those little handheld labelmakers.
Also a requirement : have a good Linux support out of the box.
aaaaaaa
Couldn't keep restoring the ink on the ribbon using that WD40? Did they run out of spray cans or did the dot-matrix printer finally actually die?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It really does take a rocket scientist to keep a $(#@)%{@* printer working.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
*100 mile high club* for...
"PC Load Letter"? What the fuck does that mean?
Boy, is NASA fucked.
HP will bilk them for tons of money, delivery sub-standard crap, and utterly fail to meet actual needs.
Shitty.
"said Pettit who also told me that, with the advent of tablets and laptops, astronauts don't print now as much as they used to."
What, about a hundred dollars a sheet?
for script changes! Who would have thought that your ordinary ink jet printer doesn't use gravity fed ink reservoirs? There's individual pumps for each color! I'm going to go bolt mine upside down to my ceiling!
Space is fake. Earth is flat.
They're pretty much off the shelf except the connector has been changed to a twist-lock hermetically sealed connector (overkill in my opinion, but I understand why they did it - it's pretty much the standard connector on the station). They also have steel cages around the paper trays, mostly to keep the paper from floating off. I think they use Velcro in space to keep the thing planted, maybe magnets, but on the earth side that particular detail wasn't worried about in the training environment.
Out of pure coincidence after I didn't even work there anymore, I wound up on the phone with one of the people from Epson who was on the project to get the old one going. He confirmed that it was pretty much off the shelf save for the few mods for low-G - such as the a fore mentioned cages. He was just as surprised to talk to someone who knew so much about the printers who wasn't at NASA as I was to actually wind up on the phone with that knowledge for the same reasons....
FYI - working on those hermetically sealed connectors is a pain in the ass. They're not particular difficult in any one sense, it's that if you've ever worked with serial/parallel pin inserters and extractors it's pretty much the same, except the insertion/removal tool is flimsy plastic and tends to bend/break on a regular basis (and just try ordering new stuff on a low end government contract if you're not the right persons buddy - everything is drama in the power struggle between the bottom and the top). The standard tools work, but you run a serious risk of hurting the rubber the pin sits in and even if it's just for training purposes using the standard one will land your butt in a sling. If it were actual flight equipment, even if you did it in such a way you could prove caused no damage they would still rip it out and ding the contract as a whole for such things. I suspect if it actually were for flight equipment those people would have an easier time getting the tools than us ground people did. The flight equipment people were at the cape, us training people were in Houston.
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can they get a tablet with a battery that is easy to swap? and has SD cards?
My HP LaserJet 4+, manufactured May, 1994, is still running strong with basic maintenance. Slow to rasterize the first page @600 DPI, but still cranks ~12 PPM.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
The new one will irreparably break down in 6 months and during that time they'll have spent more than triple on ink than the total spent in the previous 20 years with the old reliable printer.
I agree with you 100%. I think a 9" e-reader (hard to come by these days) would be perfect.
Here's the deal - flight certification.
On the station they're still mostly using IBM Thinkpads. Not Lenovo Thinkpads, IBM Thinkpads. Let that sink in for a moment.
Everything that goes up into space has to be flight certified other than a few personal effects for each astronaut, and even then there's criteria that must be met. It was a pretty big deal during the last few shuttle missions when the Astronauts were allowed to bring personal iPods for music, but only if they were modified to run on Alkaline AA's and they had to stay on the shuttle, they were not allowed to pass through the airlock into the station which they were not certified for.
Getting things certified for flight is part of the reason so much of the equipment used in space missions is antiquated. The moment something actually passes the certification process and is allowed to fly it's been in the process for so long it's several generations behind, and they don't look to replace it. If something gets certified for use in space and they need exactly one on the station in active use they'll buy a dozen or more, send three up keeping two in storage in case it's needed for a replacement and keep the rest on the ground. Every time they dip into a spare on the station they'll send a new spare up to put back in storage.
If they thought e-paper was the way to go, which BTW I agree - I can tell you about the old system that predates what they're using now - and they were sending up e-paper today it would likely be a Nook Simple Touch or a fourth gen Kindle - the original Kindle Touch that didn't last long, because that's how far back the certification process would have started.
The OLD system before they started sending everything up as PDF's about five years ago, was something that looked a little like a transparency projector, you know the thing they probably used in your classroom in the 1990's, only instead of a mirror at the top it was a bad-ass Sony camera with a super expensive lens pointed at a flight book. Seriously, somebody on the ground would turn a book to a page they needed, set it on this setup and transmit a video signal over the K-Band up to them, and it was likely to transmit for hours.
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when it's cheaper to buy new ink cartridges and keep the printer than it is to just buy a new printer with catridges included.
Is it just me that would actually prefer slides?
Print-to-slide.
Then if you need it in an emergency, just shine a light (which you need anyway to see) through it onto any surface. Bam. Dense information, high-resolution, excellent preservation, low resource usages and you don't need fragile/flammable/soakable paper just floating around and in steel cages to print.
Plus.. it's a bit more space-agey to just hold up the slide to a bulb to look at the information on it. Hell, you could even have a tiny chip in the exterior of it that stores the same information as the image itself, but digitally-readable if you DO still have a device that works.
1" square of HP ink compared to 8.5"x11" or whatever letter paper size is in America.
Surely, in an environment where every square inch and gram matters, a slide makes a better information store than paper?
It's 10x the amount we print in a 15 people company.
There needs to be something wrong there: two reams of paper is a lot of paper and weight!
Do they really really need to print on paper? No e-ink?
Weird!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
HP, Mashable reports, has recommended the HP Envy 5600
Note to NASA: Make sure you sign up for Instant ink "Get ink delivered to your door for as low as $2.99 a month."
A hell of a lot cheaper than getting it Space-X'd up there.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I wonder what the ISS uses for DC-to-AC Inverters?
I've been using my HP LaserJet 1100 Printer for about that long. Newer tech isn't always better.
I know most printers wont work with now gravity, wonder what Epson 800 Inkjet printer, I always envisioned that they would be using some kind of dot matrix printer with reams of paper with guide holes.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
The problem with NASA printers is that while they're pretty cheap, the new ink cartridges are about $1,000,000 each.
they print with dark matter
Mhmm. Tell me more. Actually, don't. Forget I said anything. It is very fortunate that the number of people who believe this sort of thing is very low, and most of them are self-mitigating in other ways; they willingly label themselves so we don't have figure out if they're sane or not.
Watch and learn: https://vimeo.com/230976895
https://vimeo.com/92378881
This is 2017, when printers are all but obsolete, for ANYTHING.
Evidently you are too young to actually work in a real office. Printers are about as far from dead as one can imagine. I personally print several thousand pages of documents every month. Work instructions, log sheets, customer orders, packing slips, and quite a lot more. I'm an engineer and the work instructions we send to our production floor are on paper. A tablet would be less useful, less flexible, and probably break quickly with the abuse it would take even if we disregard the fact that replacing paper would easily cost six figures in new hardware and custom software and it probably wouldn't result in anything better than what we have now.
Who prints photos anymore?
I do. Photography is a hobby of mine and I print some of the better pictures. Some for display and others to give to friends and family. Walk into any pharmacy and they do a pretty steady business in printing photos.
Seriously, a 10" tablet does everything paper can do and more.
No. No it does not. The software available for tablets isn't even remotely close to being usable enough, flexible enough, or cheap enough to replace paper. Paper is portable, cheap, flexible, reliable, and ubiquitous. Tablets are great tools in the right setting with the right software but there are countless jobs which lack usable software for a given task and even it it did exist it would be overkill. A tablet for a grocery list? No thanks.
Astronauts were latter seen throwing their printer out an airlock.
Seriously, e-paper tablets, even if they had to make/order a custom firmware for it, would be much better. Takes less room, less energy, doesn't need to be re-supplied with paper and ink.
And I'm sure you know what would work better in space than NASA does. The arrogance of a lot of slashdot posters seldom fails to amaze. Do you seriously think that no one at NASA is aware of what a tablet or e-paper is and that they haven't considered the idea? Why don't you find out why they do what they do with printers before you spout off that you know better than literal rocket scientists how to do their job.
I can imagine the satisfaction one would get from the space version of the Office Space "bash the printer" scene. Throw it out of the airlock and use a telescope to watch it burn as it re-enters?
From LaserJet 4 to anything after means it won't work 1/2 the time.
See an article about it here:
https://space.stackexchange.co...
on multiple occasions, the lead broke, and they had small conductive graphite particles floating around the control panels.
Paper is amazingly versatile and is not vulnerable to viruses or power failures. Apollo 13 used the cover of their flight manual (along with duct tape, socks and a few other odds and ends) to construct a CO2 scrubber that saved the lives of three crew members. I'd like to see a tablet computer do that.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
with no usage data being sent over the internet
disable no print if color X is out
disable cartridge time limit
disable non HP cartridge lockout
Instant ink gsa is $199.99 / site + fees
They are upgrading their printer to an HP. In what universe is an HP printer an upgrade?
Can they Please, PLEASE, re-enact the printer destruction scene from Office Space?
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
Yeah i would expect it to be a lot more complicated than to turn to the most notorious supplier of "crapware", that breaks, or simply refuses to work because you didnt upgrade your service contract to Platinum or Plutonium, or even dared to use unapproved paper or ink...
Epson (the old printer) and HP (maybe the new printer) are both capable of building top-notch commercial quality printers. Look at the POS equipment next time you buy something in a store: Epson thermal receipt printers abound - and for good reasons, like their dot-matrix machines, they're pretty damned near unstoppable. And HP is HP. HP invented and popularized the desktop laser printer by strapping a Motorola 68000, a laser, and a spinning mirror onto a Canon photocopier engine. HP is the IBM of printers - like, for all their prowess in computers and typewriters like the Selectrics, even IBM isn't the IBM of printers.
The ISS printers may benefit from the experience of mass-produced cheap printers made of lightweight plastic, festooned with Energy Star stickers, and getting relatively low product return rates at big-box retailers like Best Buy - all of these things are what NASA would want.
But those cheap mass-produced plastic printers probably won't be getting stock firmware, Windows drivers [shivers in horror at the thought of using Microsoft crap on the ISS], and probably won't be getting stock ink or toner cartridges. They'll be getting something better. They'll be getting the "Yes, Sir, Mr. Mission Commander" Service Contract.
"Oh, Mr. Mission Commander, you need to refill the ink cartridges with human urine? Here's how to disable the error message."
1000 pages per month is nothing for any modern printer, if you have the toner/ink, and you're using good quality paper. Throw a few separator pads and transfer rollers onto the next replenishment launch, and you're good to go to print War And Peace anytime you want.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
That's my point. Not everyone at NASA is a rocket scientist. Some are regular administrators, managers, etc.
Those administrators aren't the ones deciding whether on not a printer would be useful on the space station. If anything I'm fairly confident they would try to keep one off the station to reduce costs if possible. They manage the budgets and might veto an idea but they would need the engineers thumbs up and cooperation to get a printer on the station. They use paper on the space station and I'm fairly confident they do so for good reasons. Remember that anything they send up there generally has to last for a long time. Paper doesn't have a power budget. There is the old saying that if you shoot a GPS with a bullet you have a piece of junk. Shoot a paper map with a bullet and you still have a map. Probably applies here too.
Now why they use an inkjet instead of a laser is an interesting question. I presume they had a good reason though I'm curious how often they have to replace the ink and what the relative launch costs would be. Lasers emit some fumes and the toner is a particulate that carries a charge so I'm guessing that played a role.
Now that HP printers are crippled with region restricted consumables it begs the question what region is the ISS classified as? The I in ISS is for International but the new HP printer policies don't permit consumables that can be used internationally. They do say there is a US and Russian side to the space station so I guess they can send up two separate sets based on those regions but of course if one printer runs out of consumables they will not longer be able to use the consumables from the other printer. But hey that's the price of progress right?
Seems a good 3D printer would be a valuable item to have up there.
YET - for heavens sake, NOT and HP anything! Genuine garbage.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.