Astronaut Loses Tools While Performing an EVA 445
tpheiska writes "NASA press release states that 'At approx. 3:33 p.m. EST, Piper reported that one of the Braycote lubrication guns had released grease into her toolbag. As she was cleaning the bag and wiping the tools and equipment inside, the bag floated away. Another bag carrying identical equipment is now being shared by Piper and Bowen.' Luckily they had a spare."
Re:I was just wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
I was thinking the same thing. I mean it's not uncommon to use a tether on your bag while on Earth. It would make even more sense in space.
Luckily? (Score:5, Insightful)
Luckily they have a spare? Umm guys, not luck, planning. Not an accident, not for the grace of a god, simply a good thing. Give credit where credit is due: someone planned well.
Why did it have to be a woman... (Score:3, Insightful)
Women already have it hard enough trying to "keep up with the boys." Jeebus. The 20 or so comments already on here are more than enough.
If life had taught her anything... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I was just wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the EVA retriever robot? (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA had a robot in development JUST FOR THIS SORT OF THING. In the early 1990s/late 1980s they were working on an autonomous robot that responds to voice commands that would fly around in space near a space station to retrieve tools or astronauts and such. It would be released and lock on to the tool or whatever and fly to it and fly back to the station. I have a picture of it in a kids book about robots, but I can't find one online.
Here's a fact sheet on the project:
http://cd.textfiles.com/spaceandast/TEXT/STATION/STF_EVA.TXT [textfiles.com]
Re:And THIS is why (Score:5, Insightful)
Pieces, parts and tools have been lost on a very large number of space missions since humanity first went into space. In zero G, if an object has the slightest amount of velocity and it is let go, it quickly is beyond your reach and irrecoverable.
Of course it goes without mention that men lost all of the previous items (including a spatula used to apply a test filler material for the shuttle tiles).
The misogyny of most of the posters to this article helps illustrate an earlier /. article on why fewer women are entering the computer sciences fields in university. Many ego-centric professionals (I use that term loosely) in the IT field still can see no use for a woman in their profession, unless we are staffing a help desk.
EVA missions during space travel are the most challenging and difficult activities of anything that NASA does. "Tim the Toolman" does not have a caddy of accessories to keep his stuff in place. Imagine how difficult it is to be standing on the end of a boom, attached to the shuttle. You have no visual frame of reference, the balance mechanisms in your ears are telling you one thing, your training is telling you something else. Now try to overhaul a bad rotary joint on one of the solar panels.
Ignorance is clearly bliss to several of the posters to this article.
Re:And THIS is why (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm... I don't know how to tell you this but...
You do know that the Enterprise was never actually built, don't you? All of that footage was either a 6 inch model or some cheesy computer graphics?
Shit happens ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait a second... (Score:3, Insightful)
But... why not go inside before attempting to clean the stupid things off? I mean, the tools are still usable, if a little gunked up...
Kudos to NASA for having two sets of tools, one for each astronaut.
Re:I was just wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
Except they are not on Earth.
You don't want a tether on a bag full of stuff in orbit because it can act in pretty unpredictable ways, flailing about and risking the life of the person that's holding the bag is the first consideration. Guys, this isn't changing the oil on your car. A stray object can damage any one of the many couplings on the suit and rendering that suit inoperable very quickly. Bad news if you happen to be that person inside the suit at that time. Failure on Earth means you pick up the wrench and go back at it. Failure up there is a dead person on a mission with a multiples of billions of dollars pricetag hung off to the side.
Further, they are trained on instrument loss...tools floating off, et cetera. Again, this is not Earth wherein you can grasp around with complete impunity looking for whatever tool that just spun out on the garage floor. Space walkers especially are trained far more on what they cannot do than what they can do. They can reach out very slowly to try and recover something that is drifting off, but any large effort means that they may also join that tool bag on its long, lonely orbit around the Earth. In the small and large scheme of things, an astronaut is of far more value than a wrench or any multitudes thereof.
Also, yes, NASA knows a little bit about redundancy and especially so on space walks.
Give our astronauts a bit of credit here. Tough job. Worst pay on the planet (or near it) for the risk. Awesome view, but colossal vertigo.
A bit of trivia: space walker's microphones are muted for the first 30 seconds of their first space walk. Reason is this: in space, no one can hear you scream. And with the mic off, neither can Houston.
Re:Solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Guess what my girlfriend is getting for Christmas. Chicks in toolbelts nice.
Re:I was just wondering (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I was just wondering (Score:2, Insightful)
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction...
With that in mind, I'm not sure it's a good idea to be "firing" things from your space suit. Depending on the force, some dangerous things might happen.
Full disclosure: I don't really know anything about working in space - my comment might actually be really stupid and invalid (hence, I posted as ac...)
Re:I was just wondering (Score:1, Insightful)
how bout attaching it to the ship/station itself then?
Re:I was just wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
[[citation needed]]
Being unable to call for help if something goes wrong sounds like a major danger, no way nasa would do this.
Wow.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In related news... (Score:2, Insightful)
I heard complaints like yours back during the Apollo program: Why spend so much money on space exploration when there's so much poverty in the US? So we stopped going to the Moon and spent all that money on social programs, which is why there are no more poor people in America.
The only problem with space exploration is that it's run by a government agency. If it was privately run, every time a shuttle lifted off, they'd have also orbited the fuel tanks rather than allow them to drop back to Earth. We'd have been able to connect them for a ready-made space station, instead of the ridiculous tinker toy ISS we've been assembling for a decade. Oh well, NASA's days are numbered, commercial space travel is almost on us, assuming short-sighted people don't kill mankind's future out of a misplaced sense of economy.
Re:I was just wondering (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I was just wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
2) The astronaut is not going to go flying off into space, as you suggested. 99.99% of space-walks are tethered (ie attached to the shuttle, space station etc)
3) As another commenter says below. I would like to see where Nasa says they mute the microphones. What if there was a problem in that period of time? Something which could potentially risk the entire mission, but which could be avoided by getting information from ground control?
Re:I was just wondering (Score:4, Insightful)
No idea if it is true, but who on earth wants to hear the dying gurgle of a good friend?
Someone who wants to know something bad just happened and figure out what that was.
Re:In related news... (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe we NEED to survive. The only way to do that in the long run is to go into space.
Hopefully more people can think further ahead than you.
Re:I was just wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
And even more importantly - if something does go wrong, the dying astronaut might be able to say what it was before dying. That chance alone is move valuable than any controller discomfort.
Re:I was just wondering (Score:3, Insightful)
So what you are saying is NASA needs to drop the ego and outfit all the astronauts with fanny packs?
Re:I was just wondering (Score:3, Insightful)
The United States had active contingency plans as recently as 1998 to drop up to 30 nuclear warheads on North Korea in case of an attack on Seoul, according to declassified documents from the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. government departments.
We also have a contingency plan to invade Canada, squirrel our officials into mountains, and nuke the hell out of everyone.
Most contingency plans are nothing more than psychological. Most are designed to NOT be used. The goal is to get people to find something that works by hanging a retarded "or else" over their heads. They are not well thought out, nor do they need to be.
So what's your point? You first brought up that answers.com article, and hoped no one would read it. I read it, and showed you that it in fact did not state what you said it stated.
You then pull up an article by Safire, pronouncing it as "by Safire himself". Safire had nothing to do with NASA. He was a speech writer.
Your evidence is about a memo and a speech.
It has nothing to do with what NASA would have done.