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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.
It means that the Paper Cassette needs attention, and the attention is to "load letter" paper in to it.
HP printers had two-character displays back in the day. "PC" for paper cassette was what they came up with. When they increased the number of characters they simply added to the existing messages. I'm going to hazard a guess that industrial printing control platforms could take that information through some kind of management network, and with newer printers still using that same system it was easier to just leave the original two-character message so that the control system still knew how to parse it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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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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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We've tried the paperless office. *I've* tried it and desperately wanted it to work well. I've tried hand writing recognition apps on tablets but, depending on what you do, it doesn't work all the time. In my day to day work, I work with a lot of theoretical math and statistics, modeling, forecasting etc. I've tried to use software to make myself more efficient and productive, but nothing works better for me than writing out a theory on a notepad, making a bunch of scribbles or changes in real-time and then going back to Minitab or Excel to input it. The problem I have found is that none of the stylus' have the precise / accurate contact that a nice pen has. The lines end up being too thick, or it misses contact. That can really break concentration when you're working on a complex formula because now you have to troubleshoot why the stylus missed something. OR you end up with massive writing just because the stylus can't pick up equations or formulas when trying to cram everything in a small space. With a pen and paper, you just automatically adjust your writing size to the available space without even really thinking about it. I imagine on the ISS, working out calculations or check lists is much easier if you can write next to the printed output rather than struggling to use a stylus and that's probably the reason they're using that method. It's NASA and astronauts - if there was a simpler, better way to do something, chances are they'd have done it already.