Preventing Sick Spaceships 91
An anonymous reader writes "The official NASA home page has a writeup on one of the lesser-known dangers of living on a Space Station: space germs. 'Picture this: You're one of several astronauts homeward bound after a three-year mission to Mars. Halfway back from the Red Planet, your spacecraft starts suffering intermittent electrical outages. So you remove a little-used service panel to check some wiring. To your unbelieving eyes, floating in midair in the microgravity near the wiring is a shivering, shimmering globule of dirty water larger than a grapefruit. And on the wiring connectors are unmistakable flecks of mold.' The article goes on to describe the unlikely circumstances that form these micro-ecologies, and what astronauts do to deal with the situation."
Oh Boy... (Score:5, Interesting)
In all seriousness this is an interesting issue I've never heard about before. You'd think the media would be all over this as an actual new space story, it's been so long since anything new was really done (new in the sense of something you'd never think about). This begs the question of whether astronauts and their equipment should be decontaminated before going into space, sure there are microorganisms in their bodies but it would still probably be beneficial.
This also makes me wonder if NASA plans it's airflow so as to avoid situations where air is being blown into an area that the astronauts rarely visit and that is beneficial to bacteria, perhaps air flow could become a big part of space vessel designs so that situations like this are avoided?
All in all an interesting story.
Re:Deep space Homer (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the problems, however, was how to handle evaporation. Water in the air of a space craft equals mold, fungi, microbes, etc.
One of the potential solutions was to vent the humidity to space.
Moya and friends (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Moya and friends (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Deep space Homer (Score:3, Interesting)
Anti-Microbal concerns (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyhow, my suggestion would be including an extremely small temporary habitat that the astronauts occupy every so often while the main quarters are made inhospitable to living organisms. Maybe some combinations of prevasive UV, dehumidification, and extreme heat? It wouldn't matter that the microbes will reenter the main hab with the astronauts if you did this often enough... they would not have enough time to multiply.
Then again, I know nothing about this branch of science.
Regards.
Re:Deep space Homer (Score:3, Interesting)
We've forgotten the development. (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because you have the plans doesn't mean you know how to build something. Any good machinist can tell you this.
There's a lot of 'tribal knowledge' that goes into the construction of something as big as a spacecraft, or for that matter anything really big and complicated. (You could say the same thing about a nuclear submarine or a microprocessor.) Fire all the people involved, and even with all their documentation, it can take years and millions of dollars to get a new group of people back up to where the old team was -- there's just so much that can be written down, too many little bits and pieces of information critical to making something that only exist in various people's heads.
The Saturn V was produced by a team of people (including von Braun) who had in some cases been working on rockets for decades; it was the culmination of years of work and a series of other projects just on the NASA side, to say nothing of the thousands of contractors who were basically employed full-time on rocketry-related projects. Virtually all of the people involved have since retired, and probably many of them are dead; even with whatever documentation was saved, the knowledge that they had (probably thousands or millions of man-years of experience) is immeasurable and would take a vast national effort to rebuild.
It's not that today's engineers aren't good; it's just that they'd be starting out at a fairly sizable disadvantage, and would probably be working under very harsh expectations ("well, you did it once, how hard can it be?"), which is one of the reasons why I suspect NASA is so reluctant to look back at old designs compared to making new ones from scratch.
Rebuilding a new Saturn V, like rebuilding a brand new fast-passenger steam locomotive, or WWII bomber, seems trivial on the surface because we know what the final product looked like, and have all the schematics; but what's lacking is all the institutional knowledge that went into the actual realization of that design in metal.
Re:Moya and friends (Score:5, Interesting)
Completely inaccessible areas could be setup to flush themselves with ultraviolet light, and either an intensely antimicrobial coolant (fluid or gaseous) or a vacuum (possibly both). Anything else can be design to easily be taken apart and cleaned. This has the added benefit of making maintenance easier.