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Russia Thinks Someone With a Drill Caused the Recent ISS Air Leak (arstechnica.com)
Last week, NASA discovered a small pressure leak on the International Space Station. U.S. and Russian crew members managed to trace the leak to a 2mm breach in the orbital module of the Soyuz MS-09 vehicle and patch it with epoxy. The drama might have ended there, as it was initially presumed that the breach had been caused by a tiny bit of orbital debris, but Russian news outlets are reporting that the problem was a manufacturing defect. "It remains unclear whether the hole was an accidental error or intentional," reports Ars Technica. "There is evidence that a technician saw the drilling mistake and covered the hole with glue, which prevented the problem from being detected during a vacuum test."
"We are able to narrow down the cause to a technological mistake of a technician. We can see the mark where the drill bit slid along the surface of the hull," Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, told RIA Novosti. "We want to find out the full name of who is at fault -- and we will." From the report: NASA spokesman Dan Huot, based in Houston where the space station program is managed, deferred all comment on the issue to Roscosmos. The spacecraft was manufactured by Energia, a Russian corporation. A former employee of the company who is now a professor at Moscow State University told another Russian publication that these kinds of incidents have occurred before at Energia. "I have conducted investigations of all kinds of spacecraft, and after landing, we discovered a hole drilled completely through the hull of a re-entry module," the former Energia employee, Viktor Minenko, said in Gazeta.RU. "But the technician didn't report the defect to anyone but sealed up the hole with epoxy. We found the person, and after a commotion he was terminated," said Minenko. In this case, the technician used glue instead of epoxy. As the Soyuz hull is made from an aluminum alloy, it could have been properly repaired on Earth by welding, had the technician reported the mistake.
"We are able to narrow down the cause to a technological mistake of a technician. We can see the mark where the drill bit slid along the surface of the hull," Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, told RIA Novosti. "We want to find out the full name of who is at fault -- and we will." From the report: NASA spokesman Dan Huot, based in Houston where the space station program is managed, deferred all comment on the issue to Roscosmos. The spacecraft was manufactured by Energia, a Russian corporation. A former employee of the company who is now a professor at Moscow State University told another Russian publication that these kinds of incidents have occurred before at Energia. "I have conducted investigations of all kinds of spacecraft, and after landing, we discovered a hole drilled completely through the hull of a re-entry module," the former Energia employee, Viktor Minenko, said in Gazeta.RU. "But the technician didn't report the defect to anyone but sealed up the hole with epoxy. We found the person, and after a commotion he was terminated," said Minenko. In this case, the technician used glue instead of epoxy. As the Soyuz hull is made from an aluminum alloy, it could have been properly repaired on Earth by welding, had the technician reported the mistake.
Cultural "did-you-know" time! In Russian culture, one does not speak of "termination". The official/neutral word for being fired is "uvolen", literally, "made free". (As in freedom, not as in beer.)
NO NO NO NO NO
It could NOT have been repaired on Earth by welding.
DO NOT EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES EVEN THINK about repairing stressed aluminum by welding. Once aluminum has been fatigued, welding only damages and weakens it further.
A spinning drill bit that ultimately caused a hole would have certainly yielded the aluminum in the immediate vicinity, and attempting to weld it only would have made it weaker.
YOU CANNOT FIX BROKEN ALUMINUM WITH WELDING..
For the love of Pete, are you trying to get someone killed, besides the guy who covered this up?
So you contrast a phone call on Youtube that I cannot even in any way verify to be from the actual people you claim it to be from, to the sitting president of the US openly calling the European Union an enemy. How the hell does that make any sense? The Union and the US have had their disagreements in the past as well and no-one is denying that, but geopolitically speaking the alliance between the continents has been strong ever since the 2nd world war, and the Trump era marks a clear shift in this policy. This is obvious to anyone who follows global politics even at a cursory level.
Uhm.... people that the Americans like buying stuff from? I mean, no-one's forcing Americans to buy European cars and other stuff, but you guys seem to like it. I thought you of all people would understand this, since you've been the nr. 1 proponent of free trade for decades, and are the world's second largest export economy after China.
The idea that everyone needs to be trading the exact same amount with everyone else lest someone is getting 'ripped off' is ridiculous. It's called trade because your exchanging money for goods and services that you want-
I agree that European defense spending overall is too low. The collapse of the soviet union lulled many into a false sense of security and defense spending was cut in many places. However at the same time calling it 'exploitation' as if the US did not have their own interests in mind with their defense spending here is misleading to say the least. That is, to say that the US is doing this out of sheer generosity and not because global stability is something you also benefit from is twisting the truth. You have troops and based all over the world because of this, and no-one's forced you to do that, you've done it out of your own volition after the last world war presumably because you don't fancy a new one, and neither do we.
Moreover, 150 billion represents ~1/rth of the total US defense spending. I did some googling and according to this your defense spending in Europe is about 5 % of your total defense budget, which comes down to about 30 billion. That's still a lot obviously, but even if that were to be eliminated entirely we'd still be running a surplus.
That being said, European defense spending has been on the rise for a few years now, since before Trump.
Agreed. This is also why we're not in NATO and are actually paying for our own defense. However note that this does not mean NATO should be done away with. Defense spending needs to be increased, for numerous reasons of which Russia is only one but that still doesn't mean we shouldn't be allied with the US, because of all the major players out there in the field of geopolitics, the US is far closer to EU in terms of values and policies than say, China or Russia.
Agreed again, and that's now beginning. You must understand that since the EU is a trade zone and not a federation, EU-wide defense co-operation has been a difficult subject because any notion of an 'EU army' is often perceived as a step towards federalization and that's something that the majority of people do not like, s
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
I call them "trade partners". I also call people who regard a trade deficit as "ripping off" "abyssmally ignorant of the basic facts of economics." A trade deficit is when a country sends us more good then we send them--for which they take dollars that *we print*. This is bad?