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."
I was just wondering (Score:5, Interesting)
Time to hire space debris collectors (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe some other people also haven seen the anime "Planetes" that is about space debris collectors because too much stuff was lost in space that it was dangerous with all the stuff flying around.
Lets say it starts with a screw flying at high speed at a space ship that went "boom".
It might really become a problem in the future.
Re:I was just wondering (Score:3, Interesting)
There's always the chance the object will interact with another NEO and not come back, but if no other force acts on it, it should just intersect orbits on the next revolution since it seems like very little force was imparted to the object to change it's trajectory. At least, that's my admittedly limited understanding of orbital mechanics: if two objects in basically identical orbits exchange momentum, then their new orbits will intersect at the same place the original exchange took place.
Re:I was just wondering (Score:4, Interesting)
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...)
No, you are right. Unless you fired it directly from your center of gravity, the most likely result is that you'd end up spinning around. If it was a grappling cable (seeing as we don't have magnetic tractor beams yet) you'd get wrapped up in it. Not fun.
In related news... (Score:1, Interesting)
NASA just added $750 million to the rapidly growing U.S. national debt to send up a repair mission for a purposeless low-orbit space station that we never needed and can't afford.
Now go ahead, mod me down, tell me about how space is our future, repeat some urban legends about NASA developing velcro, tell me how relatively small NASA's budget is, etc. It still won't change the facts that the U.S. government is headed at an increasingly rapid pace towards bankruptcy, each shuttle mission runs around $650-$750 million, the ISS has served little practical prupose, and that a very expensive low-orbit vehicle like the shuttle also serves little real purpose anymore, except to serve the aforementioned ISS.
The shuttle and the ISS are money-sinks. I'm sorry, but for a long tiem the U.S. government has been spending like a teenager with dad's credit card. If we're going to have any chance of getting the deficit under control before the dollar becomes worthless and we become a debtor nation, we have to stop deluding ourselves on these old science fiction dreams that just aren't practical in the real world that we live in. It's down to what we REALLY NEED at this point, not what we WANT.
Re:I was just wondering (Score:2, Interesting)
How the heck is Houston going to help in the first 30 seconds anyway? Unless you have someone dressed in a space suit to immediately help, it is unlikely that voice instruction is going to do anything. Stuff tends to happen catastrophically, and those things that don't the space walker is well trained to handle.
It sounds plausible. No idea if it is true, but who on earth wants to hear the dying gurgle of a good friend?
Re:I was just wondering (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why you attach it with Velcro. Astronauts use Velcro quite a lot to attach small pouches to them while inside the ISS. It would seem to make sense to do the same thing outside.
Death by Velcro? (Score:3, Interesting)
Story goes, the Apollo missions were supposed to run on reduced cabin pressure. 80% of air is just fairly useless nitrogen, so they figured, we can get away with a lower pressure but still have the astronauts breathing the same amount of oxygen, if we use a lower pressure but "up" the oxygen content to compensate.
So the Apollo 1 training exercise used a 100% oxygen environment. But since it was done on the ground, they were using pure oxygen at atmospheric-pressure. Now as anyone who's read the regs on bus driving licences knows, pure oxygen is potentially very dangerous stuff. Velcro is deliberately made of soft flexible plastics, and has a very high surface area, and it's been suggested that hot velcro in 1-atmosphere pure oxygen might be somewhat prone to bursting into flames.
Probably perfectly safe in the context of anchoring things in a vacuum, but ... triggers some uncomfortable memories of incinerated astronauts.
Re:I was just wondering (Score:3, Interesting)
How about the 'Project Westford' needles [wikipedia.org]?
They were supposed to de-orbit in 3 years from launch (in 1966) - guess what? They're _still_ re-entering! I suspect that Stevenson and the military told the rest of the world what they wanted to hear. 480 million needles! Sheesh!
Re:I was just wondering (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Very true. In "The Right Stuff", Tom Wolfe wrote that when test pilots were about to crash they would yell into the radio "I TRIED A! I TRIED B!" etc etc. to make sure that their death would yield some useful info on what happened to the plane.