Russia To Save Its ISS Modules 280
jamax writes "According to the BBC, 'Russia is making plans to detach and fly away its parts of the International Space Station when the time comes to de-orbit the rest of the outpost. ... To facilitate the plan, RKK Energia, the country's main ISS contractor, has already started developing a special node module for the Russian segment, which will double as the cornerstone of the future station. ... Unlike many Nasa and European space officials, Russian engineers are confident that even after two decades in orbit, their modules would be in good enough shape to form the basis of a new space station. "We flew on Mir for 15 years and accumulated colossal experience in extending the service life (of such a vehicle)," said a senior Russian official at RKK Energia...' Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionally produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires? There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever — old cars or weapons systems, but one rarely sees anything of the sort these days."
Hubble (Score:1, Interesting)
When they announced that this will be the last service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, I was wondering why a large optical lens that was already in orbit had no value. Perhaps we should sell it to Russia for scrap.
No surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
Today, there are a lot of different price categories for a lot of goods. So to give the people what they really want (cheap stuff), the components that are used in today's products are mostly the cheap ones that are produced without big margins of error for reliability purposes. This obviously means that they won't last forever, but boy are they cheap! Why should someone buy a very expensive TV that's garanteed to work for 50 years when in 15 years time there would be new models with a lot of new functionality anyway?
Sometimes I don't understand why some people are saying that that old equipment was so much better because it lasted forever, but I think the explanation to that is so simple.
why not use the rest (Score:5, Interesting)
instead of burning them up/dumping them, why doesnt Russia also make use of the other components for its own project??
if US is willing to dump them then its junk for the US and Russia could use them i guess.
Agreed... overheard at a cafe by an old man... (Score:5, Interesting)
I am an on and off motorcycle rider. One day at the shop, I saw an OLD BMW motorcycle that looked well, vintage. It had no shine, it was matte, it looked like it had been riding forever. An old man tapped me on the shoulder, and informed me that my inspection needed to be renewed, so I took care of that.
Later I saw the same bike at the motorcycle gear/coffee shop thats a bit out of town. I had stopped for a coffee before my ride for the day and I heard a couple of older men talking....
"You need a new transmission"
"I do not. That transmission is fine, why would I want a new one that might not be good. This one has 650,000 miles on it. Every 200,000 there is a bearing that dissintigrates and I have to replace. That is a good transmission."
650,000 miles on one bike and still riding. Not THAT is a quality vehicle. I mean, I am sure he must take care of it, but damn.
-Steve
Re:why not use the rest (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess that maintainance of space modules is sheduled/directed by their manufacturers. Since various modules aren't produced in a single center, but are created by different countries, it may be impossible for a single country to lead on the whole project.
Then, there are concerns of national prestige. When MIR was to be destroyed, there were proposals to sell it to China. For some reason, the different option was chosen. Same concerns might take place for other space-faring countries as well.
That's why I'm not sure Russia received any proposals to keep some other national modules. But if such proposals exist -- I don't see why not to make it into another mini-international project.
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not a Big Government fan, but maybe we need to regulate quality of manufactured products and even tax crappy items more heavily. This is having a really adverse effect on the economy, and don't leave it up to me to convince every Joe Plumber out there that cheaper isn't better.
Reliability (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand the principle you are referring to, but I'm not really sure if it's a case of people remembering, or even imagining things more fondly than they really were. And I mean that literally; I'm not sure.
My grandfather, who passed away 16 years ago, left behind in his garage a lawnmower with a Briggs & Stratton engine. He originally purchased this lawnmower sometime in the late 50's. That lawnmower is *still* in my mother's garage, and still fully operational, some 50 years later. The only maintenance required is a bit of gasoline and a new spark plug every 10 years or so.
*50* years and still running strong
Fast forward to a car I owned in college. It was a 1985 Volkswagen Golf. The car was 5 years old when I got it; my mother owned it before me. It had about 60,000 miles on it when I got it, but it already had a cracked head (faulty radiator), CV joints were replaced 3 times (it was an engineering defect - anyone who owned a Golf or Jetta from about that time can attest to this), faulty fuel injector (it would stick at WOT sometimes when you floored it), headliner collapsed, sunroof broke twice (couldn't open it), and several other minor problems, and this was BEFORE I got it. I owned it for under two years and by then it was such a heap of garbage we decided to simply trade it in on something new, as it was too expensive to keep repairing. Mt grandfather bought me a 1992 Nissan pick-up, the no-frills base model, and it was mechanically the best vehicle I've owned to date, and I'm currently on my 8th automobile. I put over 200,000 (really rough) miles on it, and the only thing that ever failed was a bearing in the transmission, which was most likely my fault for driving it like a dragster. Was only $600 to repair, including parts and labor. Everything else worked great.
Going back in time again, I also have some of my grandfather's toys. They are stored away, and never touched, but the craftsmanship was so delicate, they never would have made it this long if continually played with. Even simple mechanisms like the Jack-in-the-Box readily break.
So taking into consideration the materials used in the past (heavy duty plastic, metal, solid wood) versus those in use today (thin plastic, cheap alloys, synthetic/pressed wood), as well as the business ethics of planned obsolescence (i.e. build something that breaks right after warranty) I would say that overall, if all manufactured products were compared to their equivalent from many decades past, it does seem that a higher percentage of products are now built more cheaply than they once were.
However, considering engineering advances, I'd put my Nissan up against any 1950's Ford or Chevy for reliability. And as has been mentioned by other posters, it's often what you pay and who you buy from. If you buy cheap, you shouldn't expect longevity. Of course there are exceptions to that, as well. My Nissan pick-up in 1992 was $9,000 out the door. The next most reliable car I've owned is my Viper, but it cost 10x as much as my old Nissan.
Re:Why burn them up? (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually anything above 500 miles in altitude will orbit virtually forever (at least 1,000 years)
http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/images/orbital_considerations_in_kankoh_maru_rendezvous_operations.2.gif
Re:Value Engineering & Built-in obsolescense (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. Around the time I graduated high school (1981, in North Carolina) a car with 50k miles on it was usually nearing the end of it's useful life and a car with 100k miles on it was virtually unheard of. (And these were cars that the average Joe could and did work on in an area with a strong shade tree mechanic cultural ethic.)
Heck, in the 70's cars didn't even come with warranties.
Meanwhile, my '98 Voyager just keeps humming along - 120k and counting. My wife's Aveo will top 100k sometime this summer and runs like a top.
Re:Survivorship bias (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sitting at a desk made during WW2 as I type this. It's made of thicker steel than most still running cars. I kept three 21 inch CRT monitors on top of it for a time before I went to lighter gear. Before I bought it from them, it stood up to 35 years at a DOE plant. All drawers, leveling casters and such work. There are some pretty intricate mechanisms to let spring loaded typing shelves and such lock in place and so a single key can lock all the drawers with a serious throw-bolt system. When I bought it it happened to be the one from the bottom of a stack eight high, so it was supporting about 550 lbs. (No, I didn't make them give me the one on the bottom, I bid on the seven drawer model and the forklift operator pulled the first one he saw.). There's little survival selection involved, as they must have still had 5,000 of them in the warehouses, and a heaping lot of them are still in service with DOE.
Re:Why burn them up? (Score:3, Interesting)
What about if you had solar cells and a tether? It seems like you could use the solar cells to generate electrical power and use the electrical power to generate lift using the tether.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether [wikipedia.org]
The downside I can think of is that over very long periods of time micro meteorites would slowly destroy the solar arrays and the power supply would gradual fail. Maybe a better option would be to use the tether to move the satellite into a very high orbit over a long time. Essentially you'd design the thing so that if it failed in a few decades it would still end up in a very high orbit.
Another option would be a Voyager type mission to put something into a very high orbit. You could make it come back every ten years or so and beam it's stored data back to Earth.
What's the point? It's an interesting engineering idea. You could justify it as a time capsule basically - you could store lots of data like the Library of Congress, DNA samples, and so on. If we blow ourselves to bits, aliens or a future human civilisation could learn a lot from the contents of the satellite.
Re:Hubble (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Russian radio (Score:3, Interesting)
yeah, like the soviets really gave a flying fuck for patents... most of their IT industry was created by unashemedly copying american designs from IBM, DEC and intel. to the point that their clones were pin compatible with intel 8080s...
Re:Agreed... overheard at a cafe by an old man... (Score:3, Interesting)
Theoretically, given the availability of replacement parts, you can just keep replacing parts on a machine ad infinitum, and it will continue functioning; if you do everything right, it's performance will always be at the level it was when the machine was brand-new. I have practiced this to a certain level myself -- much to the horror and amazement of most of the people in my social orbit. The biggest drawback to this philosophy is that it's usually not cost-effective. I had an old car that I eventually replaced the engine, transmission, and that I spent about $1000 and an entire weekend rebuilding the front suspension and steering, and given time would have gotten it re-painted as well; I spent several times in excess of what the Blue-Book value of the car was. It would have served me well for many years afterwards if it wasn't for one single accident that completely totalled it. Naturally I got less than $1000 from the insurance company for my trouble; my time and expense was worth nothing in the real world. All that being said, I feel that practicing this philosophy of renewal-rather-than-replace makes much more sense for one-of-a-kind items like a space station. After all, look at aircraft: there are still 747's in service with major airlines, and the US Armed Forces keep planes and tanks rebuilt and upgraded for decades. It only really seems to be the consumer culture that has been trained by the corporate world to believe that "new is better than old" and that you should replace rather than rebuild, and they design and produce consumer goods with that short-sighted philosophy in mind.
Re:Survivorship bias (Score:4, Interesting)
While that is true, it ignores some facts. Products designed in the first half of the last century did not benefit from the sort of design and analysis tools that allow corps to engineer something to several nines for an expected time to failure like they can now.
Consequently, product designers often used seat of the pants over-engineering to be sure the product would not fail early and give the company a bad rep. Consequently, there were a lot of appliances and such that were pretty damn robust.
I have a GE hand mixer that my mom got in 1961 that has been used weekly or monthly my entire life and still is completely functional. To this day I associate the smell of ozone with baking because of it.
Re:Hubble (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The answer isn't that obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
The bottom of the market has dropped a lot in most manufactured goods. Furniture, for example, is constructed from much cheaper materials and designed to shipped in flat boxes with little protection, which almost certainly makes the joints less stable given the assembly capabilities in the typical modern home vs. in a factory from 1950.
And while you could certainly argue that such a drop in the low-end of the market is bad for quality overall -- and I'd generally agree -- you also have to keep in mind that it doesn't strongly limit the high-end of the market. As such, the new low-end must be "good enough" for most people, so that they see it as economically efficient in spite of the reduced quality, because otherwise they would spend more to get the still-available better-quality goods. The lower prices also increases the availability of the item, and could increase its overall utility (for example, if you can afford a computer desk or a computer, the desk isn't worth much, but if you can afford them both it could be quite useful).
They used to build dodgy stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Same as it has ever been. You get (and got) what you paid for.
A lovely fiction book to read which talks about the condition of working class tradesmen in England in the early 20th century is "The ragged trousered philanthropists" by Robert Tressell. The novel is about one man's attempt to survive the situations many people found themselves in, and on the way you get great descriptions of what life was like for working class folk. Cheap furniture which fell apart for sure, and the book describes how the supervisor for the workers in the book encourages them to do jobs on the cheap when they are decorating a new house because the rich owners won't notice till a few years later that a bodge job has been done, and this will make a little more profit for the owners of the painting and decorating companies.
Always has been good and rubbish furniture and construction, and there's always been people on the make squeezing a bit of profit by doing things cheaply.