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Space

Alpha Station: Grumps In Space 87

Posted by michael from the I-will-not-throw-the-borscht-at-the-other-astronauts dept.
aldheorte writes: "The extolled virtues of polite multinational cooperation and goodwill allegedly exemplifed by Space Station Alpha are giving way to practical difficulties. CNN is carrying a story entitled "Life aboard the space station: long days, sarcasm and swearing" highlighted by ground controllers pleading with belligerent, swearing astronauts; certainly not the 'Gee shucks, darnit' family-values-and-apple-pie team image NASA likes to create." Well, at least they got the solar panels fixed.
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Alpha Station: Grumps In Space More

Alpha Station: Grumps In Space

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  • Re:Well, all good shrinks know... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Umm....I don't about NASA's staffing methodologies...but the initial poster was correct that it's a widely held belief in business team management that teams of three run the risk of problems in team dynamic. I'll won't go into the reasons why here. And yes, I'm a business manager and consultant with mutiple graduate degrees in business and organizational development, so I do have some idea what I'm talking about. You were out of link slamming the initial poster.
  • I didn't read anything about crew problems in that article. It seems to me that they are dealing with shitty Russian equipment and support. The idea of an 'international' space station is stupid and its going to get some of our (US) guys killed eventually. Even with its faults NASA is still the best at this stuff and it is insanity to put our people at the mercy of equipment that we didn't design and cannot control.
  • That's the exact reason why you are still on earth. Yes, these people are under pressure, but they are supposed to be the 'coolest' guys, able to handle a lot of stress and they are trained to do so.

    It looks like the swearing is misinterpreted by media as a tussle between the astronauts and the ground control just to make up some 'excitement'. It is quite natural for my mate to swear at me or my code, and me replying 'stop swearing'! but not really meaning it.
  • No kidding. If everything I ever saw on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (tm) was true, getting all those Alpha Males in one place, there's bound to be this thing going on...

    *cough*

  • The idea of belligerent, sarcastic, astronauts shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody if you think about it. Consider...

    1. Astronauts are nerds.
    2. The people who post on Slashdot are probably a good representative sample of nerds.
    3. The people who post on Slashdot are sarcastic and belligerent.

    Therefore, we can safely assume that astronauts are going to be sarcastic and belligerent.

    Maybe mission control should threaten to moderate them down next time. ("One more outburst like that and you're moderated down as a Troll." "First post!" "Oh, shut up...")
  • A more correct subject would be:

    "Not learning from Salyut, Mir, or Skylab."

    This problem has been stumbled upon and solved three times now. Each time, however, it's taken something akin to a mutiny to bring about the solution.

    It'll all be worked out decently in a few weeks. ground control will go on trying to micro-manage every waking second (like they did with skylab 2) until the crew gets fed up and takes a day or two off (just like skylab...) then ground control will lighten up and start providing general task lists and useful information, not moment by moment orders.
  • mod this up - mir == peace ( in Russian )
  • you can't beat THE SPACE MADNESS!
  • Russian components, American components...

    They're all made in Taiwan...
  • With all that joking around going on up there...

    No wonder space stations like Mir disintegrated. :P
  • NASA didn't choose the name, at least not as a unified whole. "Alpha" is the callsign that the current crew asked to use once they were on the station, with no say by anyone on the ground (though the ground crew could have objected if they felt strongly enough). That one act, above any other, is what sealed the station's name.
  • Did anybody really expect that outer space is 4-letter-words-free? Although being an astronaut might be one of the most interesting jobs, it still is a job with all the problems and accompaniment that allways pertain to jobs. And talking about the amount of work: when someone assigns a task to you who never did this himself - do you really think he knows how much time it will take?
  • This is never mentioned in any of the reporting done on the ISS:
    I think it is interesting to see that the US selected their Navy Seal trained astronaut (Bill Shepherd) to be their first representative on the multi-national space station.
    Did they expect some kind of trouble? That the russians would make a hostile takeover if Russian-American relations went downhill?
    I wonder if the russians on board have some kind of military elite force training?
    I'm pretty sure Shepherd is still employed by the Navy, on assignment at Nasa, and I've heard him mentioned in conjunction with the US military space program.
    Let's hope we'll never have to find out.

    -17028
  • From the article:

    "By contrast, the space station crew was dealing with an air conditioner that broke days ago when the system that removes carbon dioxide from the air also broke down. Since the systems are on the Russian module, the international crew of two Russians and one American dealt with Russian ground controllers, who scolded them after the astronauts decided to set up an alternate system for removing the potentially dangerous gas. "You could have damaged it," said a ground controller.

    "We have to breathe with something," snapped Sergei Krikalyov, one of two Russians on the three-man team.

    'Guys, don't swear at me'
    At one point the exchange between ground and space grew so heated that a ground controller said, "Guys, don't swear at me." "

    Sounds like the cosmonauts having a loving moment with their comrades dirtside... ;) Makes me wonder what kind of conversations went on at Mir!

    Derek
  • The funniest thing i heard on the webcast of the deployment of the solar panels was when the ground control person told the astronuts to "close Outlook so we can sync up your mail". It was so out of context with the images I was looking at that it took a few seconds to register what i had heard.
  • That article is a great introduction to the issues of space industrialization, but the writer glosses over the history. (Perhaps she wasn't aware just how long scientists & engineers have been working on this.)

    "Is the surface of the Earth really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" -- Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill

    Sci-fi began speculating about human habitation & industry in space back in the 1900's. It was Gerry O'Neill in the late '60s/early '70s who began rigorous analysis of the potential, and founded the Space Studies Institute [ssi.org], collecting private money to finance experiments toward space industry & permanent human habitation of space.

    The "killer app" I'm waiting for are the solar power satellites: high capital cost, but the lowest kilowatt/hour to manhour ratio of any power source. Let's live off the Sun, oh yeah!

  • Generally speaking, and this goes for us as well, Cosmonauts/Astronauts overwhelmingly come from military backgrounds, usually USAF or Navy/Marine aviators, or the Russian AF/Navy.
    ---------------------------------------- -----------------
    I bent my wookie
  • You mean to say that, russians and americans don't get along famously like the movies, TV and late night news report?

    Thats it, I'm calling my local news station to do an expose on this, as this just totally unacceptable...:P

    I will however, commend them on being able to get the job done even when you don't like someone. It can be difficult. I had a job a while back that when I quit, I realized that the one person there that I liked and wanted to work with in the future was someone that I had just hated when I started there. Turned out to have a pretty healthy respect for one another.

  • There are NO routine launches or EVA's.
    Each one is extremely dangerous and requires thousands of hours of preperation and rehersal. At any moment there are hundreds of thousands of subsystems that could fail and, even with triple redundancy, cause a fatal catastrophe.

    Each one of those photos gives a great deal of information on things of which we know VERY little.

    --
  • It strikes me as bizarre, given how often people talk about the public lack of interest in space that everything related to NASA is considered important enough to report."

    I think this is because a lot of the people interested in space are really interested in space. CNN can put their 50-odd stories up on the website, and they know that people will generally pick and choose and hopefully read a few stories. With things having to do with space, however, there are plenty of folks who want to know every detail everytime something happens (myself included). It's a very focused audience, and a given news agency can nab all of it just by putting minimal effort into running a story based mostly on a NASA press release.
  • Actually, I really think it's just as likely that Russia's becoming an accomplice to our folly. They've had a lot of experience with the very successfuly MIR program; we haven't.
  • > the friction exists primarily between the
    > ground controllers (American and Russian) and
    > the ISS crew, not among the ISS crew as most
    > previous posts seem to speculate.

    Most tension *on radio* is b/w ground control & the astronauts. It stands to reason (see my earlier post on the three-person groups being unusually fractious in high-stress conditions) that there would be intra-crew friction. I know for a fact that most of the Russo-American Mir crews had similiar issues on debriefing (or at least the American component did) - not a lot of which was communicated to GC during the mission. Remember, the Mir crews had also trained together extensively.

    I absolutely think that intra-crew friction is normal + expected - high stress, culture shock, unfamiliar environment...

    Is it just me, or is the article strongly biased pro-NASA? Surely the difference is not that large!
  • I apologize if it appears that I "made up" the information in my previous post. I wrote the post based on a magazine article (IIRC) that I read when I was 12-14. I regret that I cannot remember anything more specific about the article. In my defense, the idea seemed to make sense at the time, and still does.

    maggard, if you are a psychologist, psych student, a specialist in interpersonal dynamics or something along those lines, I will be happy to post a retraction if you can explain to me in layman's terms why a group of three is optimal in high-stress situations. I would be grateful (assuming it is not too much trouble, of course) if you could direct me to some of the publicly available material on this topic.

    I await your reply with interest.

    P.S. English is not my first language, and so the tone of some of my comments may seem inappropriate or stilted. I hope that I am judged by my intentions rather than by my tone.

  • "insanity to put our people at the mercy of equipment that we didn't design and cannot control"

    Like most computer users ;)?

  • "The US has a lot of experience training for short-term mission. Now we need to learn what to do for long-term mission"

    This is a very good point. I imagine it is one thing for astronauts to launch and work brutal hours in cramped, downright uncomfortable conditions with no clear "work day" knowing they are returning to relative vacation in a week or ten days; quite another to keep that tempo up for months on end. I agree some, if not most, of the problems are likely directly attributable to a short-term approach, by ground control, to long-term missions.

    I cannot help but compare the problems you cite to the difficulties and tensions in large software projects. If the team on Alpha gets bigger, will the tensions relax (more hands to do the work) or intensify (more problems created, more interpersonal tension)? I ask because, with software projects, it can go both ways.

  • "The "killer app" I'm waiting for are the solar power satellites: high capital cost, but the lowest kilowatt/hour to manhour ratio of any power source. Let's live off the Sun, oh yeah!"

    Question of curiosity: How do you efficiently get tcf:àower from the satellites to the ground?
  • The Grand Negas has taught you well.
  • It sounds like the guys are tired and overstressed, with X amount of potentially lethal faults developing. I for one do *not* like the sound of that air conditioner fault.
    In that situation, the last thing you need is someone sitting there shouting orders.
    Much as I'd like to go to the ISS, I'd hate to be in their situation just now.
  • Interesting point. It makes me wonder if there was some kind of disclaimer signed ahead of time so that finger pointing would be kept to a minimum if some crew members died. Maybe some giant international pre-nuptual agreement...


    ---
  • Luckily, it's not NASA's fault. The astronauts are quite happy with how NASA helps fix problems. It's the Russian Space Agency that's making them swear.
  • [begin of rant mode]

    Let's look back at the past Space Station stories :

    sound technical base. [slashdot.org]

    pristine organisation. [slashdot.org]

    smart investments 1. [slashdot.org]

    smart investments 2. [slashdot.org]

    ... And I did not manage to find the other links. It sadly reminds me of what they said on PC world [pcworld.com].

    According to those numbers, roughly 22 percent of computers break down each year. That makes them significantly worse on average than VCRs (9 percent), big-screen TVs (7 percent), clothes dryers (7 percent), and refrigerators (8 percent), but about as problematic as vacuum cleaners (22 percent). The only product we found with a problem rate higher than a computer's is the riding lawn mower and lawn tractor, which showed an average problem rate of about 25 percent.

    First, it was the software industry, then Intel showed the way with their infamous pentium bug, now, even NASA is whoring like the least .com [slashdot.org] before an IPO.

    Everyone motto is now : "ship it and wait for the calls".
    So, i guess if my life depended from the "quality of service", I would be swearing too. A lot.
    Anyway, their next move is probably going to send lawnmowers over there, since they are so cheap and even more unreliable than computers !
    [end of rant mode]
  • Oh yeah, it was that movie, Space Cowboys. It's so funny that it's happening in real life now. However, it's so disappointing that instead of learning from Russia's mistakes, we're just becoming another accomplice to the folly.
  • Experience? Yes. Success? That's debatable. Would you consider having that entire module of Mir being rammed by a Progress freighter a success? Would you consider that incident with the space fungus a success? It wasn't exactly a failure, but then again, what did Russia gain from Mir?

  • Stick me many miles above the earth's surface in a (relativly) small vessel and you'd be shocked by what came out of my mouth at the most minor annoyance.

    Heck, you'd be surprised at what comes out of my mouth at the most minor annoyance here in my room. I could be having the best round of Counter-Strike of my life and you don't want to be around to hear the string of expletives that I blurt out if/when I finally die, mostly involving a few curses about the lag followed by the foul-mouthed accusations that the other guy is obviously cheating. :) Just ask my roommate, I swear he's about to kick me out for it...

    And don't even get me started on Red Alert 2...

  • If I understand the tenure of this article correctly, whenever an issue arrives involving, say, a Russian component of ISS, the inhabitants confer with Russian ground control. Although this is more or less logical, it's rather worrying to think that no single entity bears full responsibility for the project or its failures.
    Imagine a problem arising involving the way two segments interoperate. I can easily see this devolving itno a shouting match between two sets of ground controllers unwilling to offer a solution because doing so would implicitly imply that their module was at fault.
    I should also state that, considering the shoestring budget the Russians are working on, and with all due respect for their accomplishments, it would be easy to consider it unwise to rely blindly on their reccomendations and estimates as far as improvised repair work goes. I doubt they have the resources needed to fully test and evaluate the correct course of action in urgent cases.
  • Space Station Alpha, huh? A little while ago it was "The International Space Station." And before that it was "Space Station Freedom."

    Ummm... excuse me folks... What the hell was wrong with "SS Freedom"?? I mean, did someone PROTEST??! Maybe some despotic 3rd world junta protested. =P "We protest at the naming of the international space station as "Freedom." For it to be truly international it must embrace the ideals of all nations, including tin-plated dictatorial regimes like ours. We don't allow freedom here in our nation, we don't like it, and we find it an insult to our great authoritarian, anti-life traditions. We demand the name be changed to "Space Station Slavery" at ONCE. All hail Comrade Napoleon! That is all."

    Maybe it was just a concession after all... Politicians do nothing so well as waffling. I just can't believe after all those ships named freedom, friendship, and such, NASA would choose "Alpha" over "Freedom". Heheheh, I'm amused, I think I'll call it SS Slavery from now on...=P

    Kasreyn
  • Yep, it was the third crew, who spent the best part of three months up there (12 weeks). Early in the flight, one of the crew got spacesick (which happens to 1/2 of all astronauts nowadays, apparently), and they didn't radio the ground to tell them the news. Relations went downhill from there.

    Later in the flight, having waaayyy too much work scheduled, the crew went on strike for a day in protest.

  • Good morning, you've got through to ISS support. Please stay on the line, your call is very important to us. If your problem is urgent please press 1 to leave a voice mail... This call may be monitored to ensure you of the best possible service.
  • IANA (I am not an astronaut), although a friend works on EVA training. I do know from her that it is very hard physical work to do any kind of mechanical operation in space (especially if you are suited).

    In the past the Russian space program has been rigidly hierarchical with the ground dictating. When problems occur, the ground never makes mistakes. It is always the cosmonauts' fault.

    NASA gives their astronauts a little more freedom, but I don't know how the crew is managed on the ISS.

  • these people are trying to get real work done and are getting jerked around by russian ground controllers. calling them "grumps" misses the point entirely.

    imagine being up there and having to rely on crappy tech support to get answers. the frustration would be intolerable. wouldn't you be livid as well?

  • Actually it was consistent with what happened on Mir. So I don't think the author was pushing an agenda.
  • All of those space-based projects require experience that there is only one way to gather - spend a lot of time in space. Right now, that's expensive. MIR helped, this will help more.


    ...phil
  • Are you sure you want the competition? What if she likes him more then you? -- Michael Of course, you _could_ expand your sexuality then what if *you* like him more then her?...
  • Man, that Kibo [nasa.gov] guy gets around.

  • After reading Bryan Burrough's "Dragonfly", about the tensions on board the Mir-Shuttle missions, I can understand this story better. First of all, there was a great friction between the astronauts and the ground controllers. Because of poor integration between Russian and US controllers, the ground crew was not always as well prepared as they could have been. Also compounded by this is the fact that cosmonauts get paid "bonuses" for work accomplished -- a successful manual Progress docking gets you $2k or so -- so there is more animosity toward the ground when they can't solve a problem.
  • mod this up - mir == peace ( in Russian )
    I thought "mir" meant "community", in the literal sense -- i.e. "hamlet", "neighborhood". But I'm sure others here know Russian better than I do.
  • They should make a sitcom out of this. Couple guys bickering about in a space station(er, ship).

    Wait, they already did. It's called Red Dwarf.
  • I believe that was Apollo 7, in 1968. It effectively ended the careers of the three astronauts on board. No big deal for Wally Schirra, he was going to retire anyways, but it really screwed over the other two: Don Eisele and Walt Cunningham.
  • Imagine all of the engineering time, the decades of training and preperation, the pressure and danger, just to get up into orbit, get on the space station and just grow Broccoli and feed lab rats .
  • The harshest sounding quote seemed to be when one of the ground control people said "Guys, don't swear at me." Wow, cool off there, man. They're in a pretty high stress environment, and they're probably ex-Air Force personnel (and militaries are known for having guys who swear a lot). I dunno, it just doesn't sound like they're really at each other's thoats as much as the article was trying to claim.

    Slightly OT, is it just me or will the media report ANYTHING that has to do with space? I mean, I like the fact that we have space probes and all, but they seem to report it every time a shuttle lifts off, or a space walk is conducted, or NASA decides to publish the photos they've been collecting. It strikes me as bizarre, given how often people talk about the public lack of interest in space that everything related to NASA is considered important enough to report.

  • Yeah, NASA is the best at building space stations. That's why we've had an almost continuously manned, American built, space station for 13 years, right? Um, sorry, the Russians are better at it, they just have less money. NASA is very good, mind you, but the Russians have a lot of experience and I don't think I've seen anything about Mir killing anyone.

    The only reason the idea of an international space station may be "stupid" is that there are multiple ground control groups with conflicting authority.

  • The following is the content of an email I received from someone who I am assuming wouldn't want their identity published. It sums up the media frenzy quite nicely:

    I was listening to that conversation over NASA TV and the "don't swear at me" line was, as usual, taken out of context and distorted by the media to indicate conflict where none was actually there.

    The "Don't swear at me" was used as a preface to some additional tasks that the russian mission control were trying to lay on the ISS crew.... and they knew that the crew had already requested a reduction in work load. So the controller said (in Russian, translated by NASA) OK, now, guys...... don't swear at me now; but I've got a few extra tasks you need to do today.

    Isn't is amazing that the CNN crew latched onto that ONE phrase and billowed it up to imply that the crew were cursing at the mission controllers?.... which never happened.

    --
  • The space station workers need a union. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, AFL-CIO/CLC [iamaw.org] already represents most of the people who built the US portion of the space station on the ground. They should represent the workers who are finishing the job in orbit.

    It's not a joke. Those guys are overworked and in a tough environment. They need the sort of labor protections the workers on drilling platforms and remote oil exploration sites need.

  • From what I know, mir translates as "world", "peace", and "community"/"community property." Sort of like, in the "mir" all is right/"mir" (peaceful) when everything is "mir" (belong by everybody). In the mir --> our town/place/world/existence. Very peasant-like.

    Or something. At least that's what one of my prof's said. Like many russian-isms, it is a very compact lingusitic structure that sort of depends on context how it expands into English, which can be a much more verbose language at times I think.


    --

  • As I see it, the real problem with the ISS is the huge amount of money that it is sucking up, to essentially just provide an international good-will playground for military trained rocketboys. If the resources devoted to the ISS were instead diverted to substantial research on practical, conceivably -profitable- projects, such as space mining and manufacturing [feedmag.com] , there might concievably be some real non-beuracratized development of space where private citizens could have the oppurtunity to finally have a new frontier to expand into.

    After all, the sun is more then halfway through it's usefull life. If intelligent civilization dosen't manage to establish a self-sustaining foothold in space while it has the chance [say, before it destroys itself, or is wrecked by natural disaster/cataclysm (perhaps, ironically enough by said very same insteller rocks)], then all of the glorious complexity and marvelous achievements of evolution [up to and including mankind] will have been for nothing.

    What a waste that would be... "I am ozymandius, king of kings, look upon my works, ye mighty, and dispair"...


    ---
    man sig
  • It's been obvious to anyone who's listened in during the past week. It's been very embarrassing for the Russians. I didn't hear the swearing incident but I did hear two others. Yesterday, a ground controller ask Bill Shepherd to do a short video piece for the media and he snapped back at them, "Why are you telling me this now!?" It was very funny because he was very annoyed and said it in Russian, and the female translator just repeated it in this deadpan voice like it was nothing :-) Later on, the crew were even slagging off the designers because a component didn't fit it's bracket. LOL! :-) It seems to me like they are intentionally annoying the controllers by not answering their calls right away. Then agan, it may just be their terrible radio link, cause it is really stinks compared to the one the Americans use.
  • The ignorant reporter sitting in his plush chair and breathing fresh air has no idea what cramped enviroment and low oxygen can do to a mans demenor. I mean, if it looked like i was going to suffocate in a sardine can with some russian fool telling me not to touch his equipment? I would be like shove it, im fixing the fuking thing wether you like it or not? Not to mention prolly only getting 4 hours of sleep a night.

    Politeness doesn't come into it when the situation is desperate. But that does not mean the mission is doomed to failure.

    Nekros

  • (Alpha is also Alpha in Russian).

    That's because it's fscking Greek.

  • It means both "world" and "peace", thus the saying "miru mir", "Peace to the world".

  • From what it sounds like in the article, the Russian crew and the American Commander seem to be getting along about as well as can be expected. It sounds more like the Russian crew and the Russian ground-control people are being catty with one another.

    This is likely because the crew on the ISS has been suffering an astonishing lack of Good Russian Vodka (tm).

    "Oo vas yest Vodka, tovarishchi? Nyet? HAHAHAHAHA!"
    --
  • The article didn't mention about how well the mixed Russian-American crew was getting along. It did seem to stress that the "communication" problems stemmed from a ground crew that wasn't being realistic about fixes for faulty equipment (possibly due to the fact that they may or may not have been paid in the last six months).

    It sounds to me like the Alpha astro/cosmonauts are working together pretty well, considering that they are still alive and that there are no hastily-scheduled crew exchanges. If there is a problem, it should be alleviated in a few years when Alpha is capable of housing a larger crew.

  • It was named Freedom when it was first drawn up to be a US-only station in the 1980's.

    It was named Alpha when it first became an international space station in the late 1980's or early 1990's.

    Alpha was dropped in NASA literature in the mid 1990's, about when Russia joined, possibly due to the fact that Russia had operated the first space station back in the 1970's.

    It became Alpha again after Bill Shepard arrived as the first commander, despite protests from top NASA administration (who probably wanted to name it to score some political points or have some big ceremony). Shepard had probably trained under the Alpha name for a while and decided to stick with it, since it was ok with the rest of his crew (Alpha is also Alpha in Russian).

  • What kind of agenda was the author of the article pushing? I suspect he was trying to say something on the order of "See these people are just as big pieces of shit as the rest of us are." I suspect he was attempting to denigrate something he couldn't do in a million years so that he would feel better about himself; it is the same rational in back of someone who 'keys' a new car "maybe I can't have one of these - but I'll make sure you aren't happy about it either".
  • Wouldn't it be cool if the ISS were equipped with lots of webcams, ala Big Brother.
  • You fail to consider the single most important thing.

    Slashdot nerds can get laid anytime, while your options in space range from none to.... well, probably, none.

    Ooops... just realized. I said Slashdot, and nerds. Nevermind about the getting laid part. That's probably why nerds on slashdot are as ill tempered as the nerds in space.
  • Stick me many miles above the earth's surface in a (relativly) small vessel and you'd be shocked by what came out of my mouth at the most minor annoyance.

    These people are under pressures that nobody still on earth can feel. They're going to do whatever makes them more comfortable while doing what they need to do. Who can blame them?

  • ... it has everything to do with just how much three people are being asked to accomplish, while at the same time dealing with all the glitches and bugs of a brand new space station. If they were three Americans, and the parts were all American, the first visitors would be under the same stress and would likely lose their temper just as easily as Alpha's crew is. In fact, we should be thanking our lucky stars that Russia are the people training our astronauts for long duration spaceflight. They have a long history of space stations, and their training programs specifically focus on preparing a person for the intense pressure of living with other people in a can in orbit. Without that training, I'd wager things would be much worse than a little hissy fit about a carbon dioxide removal unit.
  • I am not suprised that tensions grow on ISS. Having served on a submarine for four years I can empathize with the crews up there. Work times being alloted wrong, having to fix something just to breathe, and not getting enough sleep or exercise are things that submariners put up with all the time.

    Atleast they can look out the windows and see the earth!

  • Except that youre 180 degrees dead wrong.

    BZZZZzzzzzttt! Thank you for playing, try again.

    (I really hate it when some armchair theorist starts spouting their latest theory prefaced with "Everyone knows" then procedes to publically drool)

    In reality NASA spent a great deal of time researching the optimal crew size for high-stress envirinments and determined that 3 is the optimal number. All of the material is publically availiable & applied in a wide range of disciplines from physchiatry to business management.

    Moderators: It was harsh but this fellow was trying to pull a fast one. Making up information is *not* cool and folks *should* get called on it.

  • Not unprecented (Score:3)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @05:06AM (#573463) Homepage
    Seems I recally that the 70's skylab had an incident when the astronaughts (funny speeling on purpose) went on strike and refusted to do what ground control asked, felt they we're being pushed too hard. Too lazy to look up referances ... ok, here's an easy referance right here [airspacemag.com].

  • Pick the journalists to ISS (Score:3)

    by Ektanoor ( 9949 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:10AM (#573464) Journal
    What these "science" jounalists need is a trip on Mir or ISS. But not as tourists but to keep sending space news for a year... In the end we will only hear: Well, this *BEEP* space station *BEEP* working as usual ... Today *BEEEEEEEP* solar panels and ***BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP*** rest. *BEEP* Ground "discontrol" is ****BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPPPPPPP* about us...

    For nearly 20 years, Soviet Union/Russia had people on Space. And it becomes clear that the longer you stay there, the worse you get tired and nervous. They start getting sarcastic, nervous, sometimes quite ordinary. With longlivers, talks with ground control become 90% "not for children's ears". And this is not due to bad conditions or lack of air. The problem is on the huge amount of work, the lack of time and all this in an enclosed space on not very familiar conditions (lack of gravity is not as funny as it may seem). Besides there is a psychological problem with ground control that causes serous problems. You're working for monthes in a cage, swetting and having lots of things to do, troubles, glitches and features. You don't see your family or friends and it was monthes before you had be in a party or soemthing. And this damn lack of gravity to help. Now you see that ground controller who just came from home, had just seen his wife, had been in a party last week and tells you that you are doing something wrong... Can't you imagine the reaction? Well I haven't been in Space but I was in one quite remote place once. For several monthes. When someone started to tell me I was wrong through the sattelite phone I could only say:
    Ok you damn fat swine, take your ass from your hot seat and come here to the frost telling "I'm wrong" in your f**** sweet tone"

  • Space station alpha? (Score:3)

    by Ainis ( 52941 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @12:29AM (#573465)
    Geez, if it's still alpha, no wodner those guys are swearing a lot.

    Wait till it becomes at least Beta.

  • If this keeps up... (Score:3)

    by Raymond Luxury Yacht ( 112037 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @02:40AM (#573466) Homepage
    ...Nasa may be the next site found in the Smart Filter [slashdot.org].

  • You'd think... (Score:3)

    by brianboru ( 117882 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @11:03PM (#573467)

    You'd think they'd try to be extra nice to these guys...

    With all the concern about the Iridium satellites coming down unguided, I'd hate to think about what would happen if one of these guys got really mad and decided to give the ISS a shove towards Earth. Bet mom in Nebraska wouldn't be too happy to see the world's largest Erector set come flying into her backyard and mess up the flowers...

    (and yes for you physicists out there, I know it doesn't quite work that way...)

    brianboru

  • Re:Well, all good shrinks know... (Score:3)

    by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @09:29AM (#573468) Homepage
    I assume that you're talking about adding a female third person, rather than a male third person (which would be much more fun, IMO).

    Things brings up the interesting question...

    Is 3 really the optimum crew size in a mixed sex environment, or is it for a single sex environment? Hmmmm? Three alpha males? (Yum!) Or three dominatrix, or a mixture thereof.

    there is no unauthorized breeding in Jurrasic Park

  • obvious userfriendly spin (Score:3)

    by zencode ( 234108 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @02:10AM (#573469) Homepage
    sid [landside]: c'mon, kids. tick tock. maybe you could hold your breath every so often?
    pitr [alpha]: i am thinkink you might try turnink the wrench clockwise, da?
    stef [alpha]: wrench! clockwise! can't you geeks speak in plain !@#$ing english?!

    My .02,

  • This happened on Skylab (Score:3)

    by imipak ( 254310 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @12:26AM (#573470) Journal
    A very similar situation developed on Skylab in the mid 70s (for those too young to remember, Skylab was a spacestation built inside the upper stage of one of the remaining Apollo rockets after the remaining moon missions were cancelled. It was huge, and it rocked :)

    Tension between ground controllers and the astronauts reached a point where the crew actually mutinied, refused to obey ground instructions and took a day off. Can't find any info on this on nasa.gov ... go figure ;) Some generic info [nasa.gov]
    --
    If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles

  • Cussing at NASA (Score:3)

    by zania ( 254748 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @11:40PM (#573471)
    The NASA PR engine has long pandered to the US's puritanical values. One doesn't have to dig too deep to discover that Astronauts have been cursing since the Mercury program. More interesting is the relationship between ground controllers in US and Russia. As stated in the article, US ground control carefully plans and simulates every activity to make the Astronauts' difficult tasks as easy as possible. Russian policy is to train the crew well enough that they can improvise in any situation, which makes the 'you could have broke it' comment from the Russian ground control interesting. Were they talking to Shepard? Or was the crew not trained to repair the CO2 scrubber? Anyway, its no surprise to see a space project requiring more than twice the time and effort envisioned by the big heads.

  • The steak (Score:4)

    by alexburke ( 119254 ) <[ac.ekrubxela] [ta] [todhsals+xela]> on Friday December 08, 2000 @12:26AM (#573472)
    If you want the sizzle, see the article [cnn.com]. Otherwise, here's the steak, for people like me, who don't have time to read all the articles on Slashdot. (This isn't the whole article, but what I think to be the most poignant parts.)

    • Endeavour [nasa.gov]
    • ISS [nasa.gov]
    • "...when the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided that the limp wing of a new solar array on the station needed to be tightened, engineers worked on the problem around the clock. When a plan was devised, two astronauts on the ground suited up and hopped into a water tank used to simulate weightlessness. When they were finished testing the plan, NASA ground controllers could even tell the shuttle astronauts which torque settings to use on their power tools and gauge the degree of difficulty for each task."
    • "By contrast, the space station crew was dealing with an air conditioner that broke days ago when the system that removes carbon dioxide from the air also broke down. Since the systems are on the Russian module, the international crew of two Russians and one American dealt with Russian ground controllers, who scolded them after the astronauts decided to set up an alternate system for removing the potentially dangerous gas. 'You could have damaged it,' said a ground controller. 'We have to breathe with something,' snapped Sergei Krikalyov, one of two Russians on the three-man team. At one point the exchange between ground and space grew so heated that a ground controller said, 'Guys, don't swear at me.'"
    • "As the first crew to live on the space station, the Expedition One crew had little opportunity to adapt to space life when they arrived five weeks ago. They entered a station that had just two days of breathable oxygen. Since then, they have struggled with both the hardware and ground support. 'They plan an activity to take one hour and we know it will take five hours,' ISS crewman Yuri Gidzenko complained.


    --

  • I think that it should be noted that... (Score:4)

    by StandardDeviant ( 122674 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @11:25PM (#573473) Homepage Journal

    ... from the article's description the friction exists primarily between the ground controllers (American and Russian) and the ISS crew, not among the ISS crew as most previous posts seem to speculate. These three guys have had quite a while to train together on the ground and are working closely together under adverse circumstances, so I'd bet that they get along pretty well given where they are and what they're doing (how much stress would you be under in a tin can that makes a submarine look roomy, surrounded by hard vacuum, and you only have 48 hours worth of O2 upon setting foot therein?).

    Now add to that stress some jerkoff piloting a chair on the ground being pissy at you. I'd swear and be sarcastic too. Note also that the Russian language, and particularly their military slang, has a rich oral tradition when it comes to profanity (English absolutely pales by comparison, from my experience as a native English speaker and university-educated Russian speaker[1]), so the two Russian crewmen no doubt have a large palette with which to paint the situation and ground crews unflatteringly.

    [1] My fianceé is trilingual in English, German, and Russian, and in her opinion Russian is by far the most profane in terms of common usage. Just an additional point of reference... :-)


    --

  • Well, all good shrinks know... (Score:4)

    by abhinavnath ( 157483 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @10:56PM (#573474)
    ...that groups of three are the most unstable small grouping. There is always potential to form dynamic, shifting 1-against-2 conflicts. With the present crew, American-vs-Russian, commander-vs-other 2 crew (both of which coincide w/ the current command rotation), or minor shit like 2-guys-who-like-coffee vs 1-guy-who-likes-tea or something equally inane. Emotional conflicts as described are expected w/ a group of three.

    (btw, IANAPsychiatrist)

  • "Houston, we have a fscking problem..." (Score:4)

    by the dweeb ( 169796 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @11:02PM (#573475)
    NASA has made available flight data and radio exchange transcripts of previous space missions. I'd sure like to see what's in the logs in these latest missions.

  • Not learning from Mir (Score:4)

    by estar ( 261924 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @03:06AM (#573476)
    The article on CNN and MSNBC both sound like the stories told by the American astronaunts in Burrough's book Dragonfly. The problem seems that ground control (russian and US) doesn't seem to be able to come up with realistic timelines. reasons in Dragonfly why it was difficult. a)what is up there doesn't match the ground inventory b) the task was not simulated properly so the estimate was off. c) the crew is isolated and if they using russian ground control they only have comms for 10 minutes out of every 90 minute orbit. So the normal back and forth conversation between a astronaunt and ground control wasn't present on Mir. It was more like 80 minutes later 80 minutes later This goes on and on for days. Solution: Experience and communication. The US has a lot of experience training for short-term mission. Now we need to learn what to do for long-term mission. As long as they don't try to critize the astronaunts we should get the kinks worked. The good news is that next month US Ground Control will take over the station.

  • In space... (Score:5)

    by aonifer ( 64619 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @11:52PM (#573477)
    ...they can't hear you swear.

    Unless the mike is on.

  • Re:Well, all good shrinks know... (Score:5)

    by Wellspring ( 111524 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:41AM (#573478)

    In reality NASA spent a great deal of time researching the optimal crew size for high-stress envirinments and determined that 3 is the optimal number. All of the material is publically availiable & applied in a wide range of disciplines from physchiatry to business management.

    I've been trying to convince my girlfriend of this for some time. Could you post some of the online studies that have been published?

    The men of Slashdot appreciate your efforts.

  • body language differences (Score:5)

    by StandardDeviant ( 122674 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @02:12AM (#573479) Homepage Journal

    Hmm. I think given that data that it may not be intentional that the Americans felt the Russians were hacked off at them. Russian body language and linguistic habits can seem really gruff and cold to people not familiar with them (e.g. Russians very, very, very, veryrarely smile in public, to them it's a subconcious sign of sugar-coated, goody-two-shoes insincerity (now think about how Americans tend to smile first and ask questions later, is it any wonder most Russians think Americans are a bunch of twits?)). So the Russians may have just been in normal operating mode and the Americans misinterpreted it (magnified by the fact they have the personal space of a veal calf up there). Russian culture and American culture have grown much more accustomed to each other than they were in the 1970s, though, so this may not be as big a deal as it might have been then.

    (This is not to imply that Russians are actually cold and gruff, they just might seem that way to strangers. My experience with them personally has been 180 degrees opposite in that you couldn't hope for warmer friends once they get to know you and you become accustomed to their body language.)


    --

  • Someone should syndicate this. (Score:5)

    by smack_attack ( 171144 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @11:09PM (#573480) Homepage
    Kinda makes me think of MTV's Real World(TM) (shiny thing network), Survivor(TM) and Big Brother(TM).


    Bill Shepherd: "I'm sorry Sergei, the tribe, er crew, has decided to vote you off the ISS"

    Yuri Gidzenko: "We are thinkink you are takink up too much oxygen and not workink hard enough on da solar array"

    NASA Ground Crew: "Sergei, the crew has spoken, please remove your helmet and step out of the ISS"

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