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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.
As a Finn with a couple Russian friends who've left their country because of 'organisational culture' let me give you some perspective. This is Putin's ' Novorossiya' where transparency is nonexistent and those who fail to satisfy the powers that be are thrown into jail in the best case, get into mysterious accidents or commit 'suicides' in the worst case. The space program is a key component in the cold war (which never really ended, it's just changed its nature to be less about armed conflict and more about information warfare) propaganda just as it was in the past, and as such it is of great importance to Kremlin. Whoever made the mistake is not afraid of getting fired, because getting fired is the least of your concerns in this situation. If I were him, I'd already be on my way out of the country and never drink any tea I haven't prepared myself..
The problem is not the the organisational culture of Roscosmos, the problem is the organisational culture of the entire State Meet the new boss, same as the old boss:
"Enemies are right in front of you, you are at war with them, then you make an armistice with them, and all is clear. A traitor must be destroyed, crushed."
-Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin in 2001, speaking to journalist Aleksei Venediktov, to whom he added “You know, Aleksei, you are not a traitor. You are an enemy.” (source: David Remnick, “Echo in the Dark,” in The New Yorker, September 22, 2008)
This is why seeing Trump act like Vlad's obedient little lapdog earlier in the summer here in Helsinki was one of the most absurd things I have ever witnessed in my life. Had you told me ten years ago that you're from the future where the fucking president of the US of A bows down to kiss the ring of Putin and call the European Union a foe, I'd have told you to go get your head checked. Yet here we are. My grandfather who's in his 80s said to me after the press conference that he thinks the Russians are winning, because 'one of the guys is a former KGB agent, and the other is a clueless goof.' Although grandpa is no political scientist, I have a hard time disagreeing with him here.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
You know how Russia ended up with Putin? Remember Yeltsin? Remember how we interfered with the 1996 Russian election and altered the result? Yeltsin was in the single digits before the Americans got involved.
You know what happened next? The US financial "experts" pushed Yeltsin to introduce neo-liberal shock therapy economics to the new Russian Federation. Ended up crashing the economy and leaving more in poverty then ever before. The number of people living in poverty in the former Soviet Republics rose from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million in 1998. As a result of the 1998 financial collapse and the devaluation of the ruble, the life savings of tens of millions of Russian families disappeared overnight. In the period from 1992 to 1998 Russia's GDP fell by half - something that did not happen even under during the German invasion in the Second World War.
Under Yeltsin's tenure, the death rate in Russia reached wartime levels. Accidents, food poisoning, exposure, heart attacks, lack of access to basic healthcare, and an epidemic of suicides - they all played a role. David Satter, a senior fellow at the anti-communist, Washington DC-based Hudson Institute, writing in the conservative Wall Street Journal, described the consequences of this victory of Democracy: "Western and Russian demographers now agree that between 1992 and 2000, the number of 'surplus deaths' in Russia - deaths that cannot be explained on the basis of previous trends - was between five and six million persons."
This secured Putin as a savior to Russians when he reversed it, and soured Russian public opinion to the US.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It was Victoria Nuland, former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State, who said "fuck the EU." She was nominated by Obama. You remember Obama, the same man who bugged Merkel's phone? The US regarding EU as a foe didn't start with Trump.
Who can blame Obama for his views? What do you call people who rip you off on trade to the tune of $150 billion every year? The EU is a security free-rider that exploits American generosity to run a massive trade surplus. For a continent flush with cash and a large budget surplus, every member should be able to spend an adequate amount on its own defense. The EU needs to create its own collective defense treaty without US involvement.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The problem is not the hole (mistake 1), the problem is attempting to fix it incompetently (mistake 2) and hiding mistake 1 (mistake 3). From the drill-bit-slides, this was also a low-skill person that should not have been allowed near the vehicle (mistake 4). I mean, when I drill aluminum, the result does not look anywhere this bad and I am just an amateur.
This does not qualify as normal mistake anymore. This is a cluster of negligence and dishonesty that is pretty bad.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
> I mean, when I drill aluminum, the result does not look anywhere this bad and I am just an amateur.
Yes, but how many holes does your drill have to make in aluminium before it can be replaced or sharpened with a jig.
It could still be more about equipment, and poor factory management than about unskilled labor. A slightly bent drill bit does exactly those marks, and using a punch on every one of thousands of rivet panels might not be required/allowed at that place.
I just finished a factory five chassis, drilling many many thousands of rivet holes in aluminum, likely very similar to what work was done on this body. Drill bits get killed doing this job by hand easily, as you line the two panels overtop each other before drilling to make sure the holes align correctly, and drill through both. You will occasionally have a gap (that rivets would eventually pull together) and the bit jumps between those sheets (after drilling though the top sheet into the bottom sheet) it will inevitably not come through clean and side load the bit causing it to be bent or chipped. Most of the time a drill bit was dead on average of 10-20 holes, but it could be after one, or a hundred drills. And these type of factory jobs in lower wage/class oriented countries tend to be overly stressed on preventing theft by over control of access to all supplies.
And I bet those aluminum panels are every bit as tough or more than the ones on my car. It isn't like drilling into freshly cast aluminium, these panels have been worked to have a hardened surface.
Defense from who? NATO destroyed Libya, and some of it's member nations were behind the destructions of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. It's the rest of the world that needs defense from the United States and its poodles, not the other way around.