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Space Science

Minor Leak Being Investigated Aboard the ISS 219

Posted by Zonk from the wasn't-aware-there-was-such-a-thing-as-a-minor-leak-in-space dept.
Josh Fink writes "Space.com is reporting that the International Space Station has a minor atmosphere leak. 'An inspection of a vestibule bridging the station's new Harmony connecting module and NASA's Destiny laboratory indicated a slight air leak of about three pounds (1.3 kilograms) per day ..A close-up inspection of the vestibule seal by the station's three-astronaut Expedition 16 crew using an ultrasonic leak detector found no trace of a leak on Wednesday, [NASA spokesperson Lynette Madison] said. Studies of the station's overall internal pressure also found no signs of decay, she added.' While this is yet another technical issue with the ISS, when will this end? I am all for the space program, but there have been some major issues lately."
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Minor Leak Being Investigated Aboard the ISS More

Minor Leak Being Investigated Aboard the ISS

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  • Comes with the territory (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SIGALRM ( 784769 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:00PM (#21537745) Journal

    I am all for the space program, but there have been some major issues lately
    Being "for the space program" requires some acceptance of the massive risks inherent in manned space travel. If mechanical systems are design-simplified it may reduce points of failure.

    KERMIt, a "Kit for External Repair of Module Impacts", is one of those simple systems being developed at Marshall Research to seal punctures in the ISS. It will enable crewmembers to seal punctures from outside damaged modules that have lost atmospheric pressure. Delivery of the kit is scheduled for next year. KERMIt is also useful for sealing leaking atmospheric seals as TFF article describes (more info here [nasa.gov]).

    • Problems never end (Score:5, Insightful)

      by YA_Python_dev ( 885173 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:07PM (#21537819) Journal
      I agree.

      While this is yet another technical issue with the ISS, when will this end?
      Never. When you build something big, hardware or software, you will have problems. You can't expect to have everything always work the first time.

      When you encounter a problem you fix it, it's that simple.

      Remember: "The perfect is the enemy of the good." -- Voltaire

      • Re:Problems never end (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:51PM (#21538399)

        When you encounter a problem you fix it, it's that simple.

        And more importantly, you get better at fixing them. That's really why we're out there after all. We're gaining experience that can only be gained the real way.
        • This whole article is bizarre. How could you possibly think that this is easy? First, you ride a giant goddamn bomb into orbit. If it doesn't explode and you manage not to fling yourself into deep space, once in orbit you have to do everything in zero gee and a vacuum. There is no atmospheric shielding from solar radiation. Once you are finished attempting to survive, the ride home consists of falling through the atmosphere at speeds great enough to cause instant incineration due to atmospheric frictio
        • you get better at fixing them. That's really why we're out there after all. We're gaining experience that can only be gained the real way.

          I have heard the ISS being criticized as having outlived it's usefulness, but I disagree primarily for the reason you stated. Sure the science experiments are nice, but the real experiment is the station itself, maintaining that thing is the best current path towards ever setting foot on Mars or getting significant numbers of humans in space. That said I have to wonder

          • Re:Problems never end (Score:5, Interesting)

            by david.given ( 6740 ) <dg@cowlark.com> on Friday November 30, 2007 @10:14PM (#21540607) Homepage Journal

            That said I have to wonder if the ISS could be bumped into a lower maintenance orbit and used as a hub for a bolo style rotating space station.

            It's too low as it is --- there's enough air resistance that it has to be reboosted at intervals to keep it in orbit. (It has to be that low because otherwise the shuttles can't get there. They have lousy range.) Lowering the orbit any further would be very dangerous.

            As for spinning it (you did mean bola, right? Unless you were actually thinking of giant robotic tanks, which I will admit would be quite cool), not only is it not designed for that and would fall apart, but if you want gravity there's plenty on Earth, where it's quite cheap. One of the main purposes for getting into space is to get free fall.

            I rather regret that Mir was destroyed for purely political reasons. If the ISS was built as a set of add-on modules to Mir, gradually superseding Mir's own modules as they began to break down, construction could have gone a lot faster. Even if the Mir modules stopped working completely, they'd still have considerable value as salvage.

            Rather than a trip to the moon, I would be far more excited to hear about an ISS greenhouse that does all of the air and water maintenance.

            I want a balloon. A ten or twenty metre inflatable habitat module, semitransparent hopefully, in which plants a grown. Inflatables and plastics are the future of spaceflight; look at the cool stuff that Bigelow Aerospace are doing. But even they are simply replicating existing modules using inflatables. It ought to be possible to use the new materials to radically change the way space stations are built. How about a 100m wide spherical envelope, full of air, with your space station built inside? Now, that would be cool, particularly once you have a decent amount of plant life in there...

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by DerekLyons ( 302214 )

        When you build something big, hardware or software, you will have problems. You can't expect to have everything always work the first time.

        Or even the n th time. A system as large and complex as the ISS will always have problems. Period.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )
          Exactly. My thought when I read this:

          NEWS FLASH: Massive, One-Of-A-Kind Contraption With Millions Of Parts In Hostile, Minimally Understood Environment Suffers New Glitch Every Few Months

          In other news, the sun rose in the East today...

    • these problems are the reason we need ISS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:11PM (#21537859)
      guys... I work for nasa on the space station program... i am amazed at how people frame the detection and fixing of problems on the space station are such a negative thing... the space station construction is so incredibly difficult and complex... and when we have issues, people point them out as never ending. This is the 2nd space station... compare that to the 2nd airplane.

      And the biggest thing that amazes me is that these problems are the biggest reason to have the space station!!! We have to learn how to fly in space long term... and fix problems just like these!! what kind of problems do you think we will have when we go to the moon and mars?? do people honestly think if we just drop what we are doing and took off trying to get to mars, we would find out just how much learning we have left to do.

      overall, i think the american public is left feeling ashamed of the problems they see on the ISS, instead of being proud of the accomplishment because they don't really comprehend just how insane the Apollo successes were, and how ahead of their time they were. We really do have a lot left to learn about flying in space and fixing things in space with the materials in place, and unless we want to take insane risks and costs like were done in the Apollo program, we need to do that with the space station.

      these problems... their detection, isolation, and recovery, are the greatest asset of the space station.

      • Re:these problems are the reason we need ISS (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:26PM (#21538037)
        I know you guys are working with a neutered budget, but that doesn't mean they had to pawn off your [shift] key. That was totally lame on their part.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by stevied ( 169 )
        This is the 2nd space station...

        2nd [wikipedia.org]?

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by R3d M3rcury ( 871886 )
          Second space station that NASA has been involved with.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Fzz ( 153115 )
          If you look at the list you linked to, all the Salyuts are very small and just single-launch spacecraft. Skylab is four times larger, but still not that big and still launched in one piece. Only Mir and the ISS are really of large size and involve complex in-orbit assembly. These are the first true space stations - the rest are not in the same league at all and are more like long-duration capsules. So, yes, we really are on the steepest part of the learning curve when it comes to space stations and in-or

      • Re:these problems are the reason we need ISS (Score:5, Funny)

        by popo ( 107611 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @07:16PM (#21539275) Homepage
        I thought I issued a company-wide memo about NASA employees surfing Slashdot during work-hours.

        Please come down to my office right away.

      • This is the 2nd space station... compare that to the 2nd airplane.

        It's at LEAST the third space station, Mir and Skylab were pretty well-publicized. I'm guessing you don't actually work at NASA.

    • Re:Comes with the territory (Score:5, Insightful)

      by iminplaya ( 723125 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:28PM (#21538065) Journal
      Being "for the space program" requires some acceptance of the massive risks inherent in manned space travel.

      You're not kidding. The submitter's complaint is like bitching about the Wright Brother's airplane not being able to fly 100 people across the Atlantic by the end of 1904. The thing is an experiment, ok? Some problems may be due to poor decision making, but I think we can still cut them some slack here. This is not like the Challenger disaster where I believe upper management committed criminal negligence for political expediency. They were warned about that impending failure to the point that the TV news reporters were discussing it before launch. So they got a leak. Use it to ventilate the bathroom.
    • KERMIT's a weird name for a chewing gum?

    • Re:Comes with the territory (Score:4, Funny)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:32PM (#21538127)
      KERMIt, a "Kit for External Repair of Module Impacts", is one of those simple systems being developed at Marshall Research to seal punctures in the ISS.

      The kit contains foil and a pack of Tropical Fruit Bubbalicious...

    • Being "for the space program" requires some acceptance of the massive risks inherent in manned space travel.

      Unfortunately NASA's current high-risk/low-reward policies haven't produced results that would validate the cost.

    • Re:Comes with the territory (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:57PM (#21538511)
      The purpose of the ISS is to learn how to build and maintain large facilities in space. It is a learning process. My question to those that use issues like this as a reason to criticize the ISS is simple: Would you rather have this kind of problem come up on a lunar base where the crew was three days, not two hours from safety? How about on a Mars mission where there was no chance of sending repair parts or rescuing the crew? It is far better to discover issues like this, or the torn solar panel, or the metal shavings they found in an array rotary junction, now and figure out how to deal with it and prevent it from happening again in the wading pool of low Earth orbit rather than in the deep ocean of space.
    • Did no one read the article? It says they're investigating a possible leak. They haven't even confirmed it isn't a miscalibration or some other spurious data.

      For comparison, there's about 400 kg of free air inside the space station, and the purported 1.3 kg per day leak isn't even enough to show up as a pressure drop.

      I checked NASA's ISS site, and there doesn't seem to be any mention of a leak there yet. The latest update does mention leak checks between the brand new Harmony module and the shuttle do

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mikael ( 484 )
        If there was an air leak, wouldn't the water vapor condense and form ice around the venting region (like a little volcano?)
    • Darn right, a total air leak of this magnitude (1.3 kg/day = 40 kg/mo -- call it a welding tank a month) would hardly be noted on a nuclear submarine on a multi-month submerged mission. Yes, leaks are more worrisome in space where air cannot be replenished readily, and every kilogram of supplies is expensive -- but it's still well under the mass of personal consumables for a single crewman, and crew supplies are a modest fraction of the content of each resupply mission.

      Ignore it? Of course not. But put to s

  • ultrasonic leak detector? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Monkey ( 795756 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:02PM (#21537759)
    Just wondering, but did a blue box show up on the IIS?

  • I Agree! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:03PM (#21537767)
    It's like, when I drive to Dallas to Houston I don't have any problems. But when NASA tries to build a space station in orbit stuff goes wrong!

    What is up with that?

  • "when will it end?" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:05PM (#21537787) Homepage Journal
    hopefully never - the whole point is it's an engineering experiment, if nothing fails they won't learn anything, it'll just be a bunch of guys sitting around wondering what they're doing there

  • Going to space is hard (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TooMuchToDo ( 882796 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:05PM (#21537807)

    While this is yet another technical issue with the ISS, when will this end? I am all for the space program, but there have been some major issues lately."

    Going to space is hard. It shouldn't stop us from doing it. Issues will crop up.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by afidel ( 530433 )
      That and we're doing it on the cheap. Even at the height of the Apollo program we were still spending less as a percentage of GDP on exploration than the Spanish had during Columbus's time or the Persians or Romans had during their time. Americans like to think of ourselves as explorers, but as a nation we really aren't really into funding exploration like many of our predecessors, we're a lot more like China, fairly isolationists with occasional small forays outside.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by maxume ( 22995 )
        Please compute the ROI for exploring space and say, discovering all that gold that Spain got from the new world. The comparison is a non sequitur.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by afidel ( 530433 )
          nearly unlimited power and far more valuable metals that have been mined in the history of mankind, I'de say space exploration will pay huge dividends in the end. In fact in probably about the same timeframe as the exploration of the Americas if we actually put the resources into it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )
      No, life is just hard even on Earth.

  • pin sized hole hard to reach (Score:5, Informative)

    by wizardforce ( 1005805 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:12PM (#21537867) Journal

    While this is yet another technical issue with the ISS, when will this end? I am all for the space program, but there have been some major issues lately."
    it's probably a leak about the size of a needle hole hidden somewhere out of reach with a simple leak test. it wouldn't need much, 1.3 kg of air is about 1 cubic meter in size leaking over a day's time. considering there's about 10N/cm^2 force and the force exerted by a moving column of air is mv^2 while the density m is 1.28 kg/m^3 solving for the size of a hole required to vent the gas is about 2mm in diameter if back of the envelope calculations are correct [probably not but you get my point]

    • Re:pin sized hole hard to reach (Score:5, Informative)

      by kebes ( 861706 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @06:06PM (#21538631) Journal
      Sounds about right. I just ran it through some simple effusion equations (kinetic gas laws). Assuming that the amount of air escaping is 1.3 kg (1.14 m^3), and that the volume of the room it is escaping from is ~200 m^3 (apparently [wikipedia.org] the total final size of the ISS is 1000 m^3), and that the ISS is pressurized to 101.3 kPa (the Wikipedia article says that it is), then we can calculate the time for 1/200 of the air (0.5%) to escape, as a function of the hole diameter. It turns out that a hole of diameter 0.15 mm will lead to that kind of rate of pressure loss (1 m^3 in the first day).

      Needles to say, the effusion equations have various assumptions built into them, and I had to make all kinds of assumptions about the values... but at least to within order-of-magnitude, this suggests a pinhole-sized leak.


      Details for anyone who cares: The effusion equation can be derived similar to the conventional gas law expressions, by calculating the number of molecules per unit area that impinge on a wall section of a certain size (the hole). (We assume a container in vacuum, so that any molecule that impinges on the hole is lost irreversibly to the outside.) The equation, as you might expect, turn out to be exponential decays (since the derivation incorporates the decreasing internal pressure as air is lost):

      N(t)/N_total = exp( -(A/V)*sqrt(k*T/2*pi*m)*t )

      or

      t = ( -(V/A)*sqrt(2*pi*m/k*T) )*ln(N(t)/N_total)

      where:
      t, time (until the given loss of atmosphere)
      V, volume of container
      A, surface area of hole
      m, mass of gas molecules
      T, temperature (~300 K for room temperature)
      k, Boltzmann constant [wikipedia.org]
      N(t), # molecules at time t
      N_total, total # molecules (initial quantity)
      • You are making too many assumptions. It is simpler and more precise to go this way:
        escaped mass m = (hole area)*(time)*(number of collisions with the hole area)

        so you get 1.3kg = A * 86400s * 10^5 Pa * sqrt( 29/( 2 *Pi* k *T))

        Solving for the round hole A gives you about 33 micron radius (though you are close): 0.033 mm
    • So in other words, in space nobody can hear the hiss?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by clem ( 5683 )
        I have had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' space station!

  • Gotta take a leak (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    where are those astronaut diapers when ya need them?/
  • While this may sound funny, but isn't that a lot. While air does have weight how much air is 3 lbs? The area over vermont 10' deep?

    • Re:3 lbs a day!? (Score:4, Informative)

      by wizardforce ( 1005805 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:25PM (#21538011) Journal
      air has a density of about 1.28 kilograms per cubic meter so 1.3 kilograms of air occupies a space just over 1 cubic meter in size, in this case it is 35.9 cubic feet of air to be exact. The fact it has some easily measurable density allows for helium balloons to remain in the air as well as airplanes to shuffle large amounts of air around to create significant lift. the amount of energy air turbines generate depends on the density of air being as high as it is otherwise the airspeed required to produce any amount of power would be much higher if the density were lower.
    • presuming dry air at sea-level pressure (no idea on the humidity/pressure up on the ISS), it's a little more than 1 cubic metre or 1000 litres.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )
      One mole of any gas at STP fills 22.4L. Air is roughly 70% N2 and 30% O2. The formula weight of N2 is 14g/mol, and that of O2 is 16g/mol. There are 453g/lb. You can work out the rest yourself.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sconeu ( 64226 )
        Isn't N2 *28* g/mole since atomic nitrogen has an atomic mass of roughly 14? N2 is *two* atoms in a molecule. Similarly, O2 should be about 32 g/mole.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Hatta ( 162192 )
          You are right, I am wrong. I mistook the atomic number for the atomic weight. Silly mistake.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by j79zlr ( 930600 )

      While this may sound funny, but isn't that a lot. While air does have weight how much air is 3 lbs? The area over vermont 10' deep?
      If you took an invisible column and surrounded the Eiffel Tower, the air inside that column would weigh more than the steel structure.
    • I dunno exactly, but I do know that a 1" square column of air from sea level to the upper atmosphere weights about 14 lbs.
    • 3lb is 3lb. You measure amounts of air in units of mass. The pound is a unit of mass. What are you after? One of those comparisons like "every year the ISS loses as much air as the line of peanuts you could make if you drove round the state of Vermont in a VW bug and dropped one peanut every 35 minutes"?

  • Cues (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bearpaw ( 13080 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:13PM (#21537889)
    Cue human missions vs automated missions debate.

    Cue government space programs vs private space programs debate.

    (At least the breathing oxygen vs breathing vacuum debate would be short.)
  • They don't end. From the 60s computer with faulty radio tubes to todays supercomputer-in-a-console, technical problems shows up every time and never mind mechanics with all that wear and tear and partially working stuff rather than "simple" 0s and 1s. We progress by fixing them, then we push the envelope a little further and run into new ones. Seriously, sometimes it sounds like we haven't learned *anything* about space travel since 1969 and that's just not true. The things we can do something about is a lo
  • ... would be worse if they had to learn to deal with these problems in Mars orbit.

  • Space is hard (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportlandNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:18PM (#21537933) Homepage Journal
    but to quote some guy:
    "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." - JFK

    http://www.quotesandsayings.com/sjfk.htm [quotesandsayings.com]

    Yeah, it's hard and complex. We will learn how to make maintenance of those systems routine and automated. We will continue to look forward, we must less we stagnate and die. The fate of the Dinosaurs will be our fate as well if we don't diversify off this rock. There are a lot of steps between here and the next habitable planet. Whether it's habitable because nature forms more planets like ours, or habitable because we terrorformed it makes no matter.

  • Pound != 0.454 Kilogram on the ISS (Score:5, Informative)

    by corsec67 ( 627446 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:21PM (#21537957) Homepage Journal
    FTA: "a slight air leak of about three pounds (1.3 kilograms) per day".
    I hate to break it to this reporter, but on the ISS, a pound is a large number of kilograms, since they are in microgravity. Pound is a unit of weight, and gram is a unit of mass. The conversion between them depends on the gravity that the object is experiencing, which in this case is almost none, so the 1.3 kilograms of air is almost 0 pounds.

  • Too bad we can't moderate the TLP as "troll". (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mmell ( 832646 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:21PM (#21537961)
    After all, Columbus, DeGama, Balboa, Cortez, Magellan - they all had flawless journeys of exploration, didn't they?
  • There needs to be sufficient tools and supplies that any of these problems can be fixed without sending up a 5 Billion dollar delivery. This would be an ideal spot for a 3D printer, even if it was very expensive. Need a part? Make and customize, 3 hours...

  • Send 'em a can of industrial grade great stuff [dow.com].



    (ducks)

  • Movie-inspired salvation (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lurker2288 ( 995635 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:29PM (#21538085)
    I totally saw this in a movie once. All they need to do is open a prominently featured can of Dr. Pepper and let the soda spraying out through the hull show them where the leak is. Caveat: this plan carries a small risk of vaccuum-freezing Tim Robbins.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I don't get it. What's the caveat?
  • Quoth the poster: While this is yet another technical issue with the ISS, when will this end? I am all for the space program, but there have been some major issues lately.

    Yet another round of bugs were discovered in several major operating systems and userland packages. I'm all for operating systems, user software, and advances in computing technology. but there have been some major issues lately. I vote we give up and go back to the abacus and using smoke signals to communicate.

  • Isnt there a simple solution like...:
    • Have someone light up one of those nasty Russian cigarettes while somebody outside looks for puffs of smoke.
    • If the hole is actually about 2m in estimated size, something about the consistency of pancake syrup should plug it quite nicely. A fine aerosol of Aunt Jemima in the general area should get sucked into the hole within an hour or so. Cleaning up the rest is left as an exercise to the occupants.
  • Space Construction is Hard. Space Maintenance is Hard as well.

    Now, I sit in an office where the temp goes from 72 to 80 in the space of 30 minutes and it sounds like dead bodies are flapping around in the air ducts. It stinks and the only cockroaches I've seen are the dead ones, as the live ones have plenty of hiding places.

    And you're complaining about some minor air leaks and a computer problem or two on a Space Station?

    PLEASE!!
  • It's not like we've done this before. This is the first time we've assembled something this complex in orbit. Even if building space stations was routine, there would be technical glitches that turn up and need to be dealt with. What you are seeing is all part of the learning experience.

  • failure is not an option? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sohp ( 22984 ) <.moc.oi. .ta. .notwens.> on Friday November 30, 2007 @05:56PM (#21538489) Homepage
    Seriously, the story of the space program is not "we did so well nothing went wrong" but, "when things went wrong we used our guts and brains and fixed them"

    Examples:

    Gemini 8 thruster stuck. Armstrong was able to regain control and return safely home.
    Apollo 11 landing 1201 and 1202 program alarms. Programmers on the ground and flight engineers were able to rapidly determine that the alarms posed no threat and the landing continued to success.
    Apollo 13. Catastrophic explosion disabled the service module. The astronauts returned home safely using the LEM as a lifeboat and some creative navigation.
    Skylab launch: Ripped off a solar panel and part of the outer skin. Astronauts were able to rig a replacement screen to cool inside of the lab and open the other solar panel that was stuck partly open. Three expeditions extended the time in space records and recorded what was then the most detail solar observations ever.
    STS-49: Multiple attempts to capture and return an Intelsat satellite failed, but a final attempt involving the shuttle commander flying directly to the satellite and it being hand-captured by 3 spacewalkers succeeded.

    There are plenty more, including the recent working solving problems with stuck and torn solar panels.

    Incidentally, these kinds of things are why I favor human spaceflight over robots for complex and difficult challenges.
    • The Mars rover Spirit had a glitch. JPL very nearly lost Spirit because they filled up all of the space on the flash memory. This was recovered because a software engineer thought ahead of time to include a backdoor to boot it into a recovery mode with no file system. There are countless examples on this project where good design ahead of time made for a very successful project.

      Spirit and Opportunity are great examples of robots doing wonderful things in space. Landing on Mars and driving around is a

    • Apollo 11 landing 1201 and 1202 program alarms. Programmers on the ground and flight engineers were able to rapidly determine that the alarms posed no threat and the landing continued to success.

      Not to nitpick, but to claim that this is an example of "when things went wrong we used our guts and brains and fixed them" kinda demeans the rest of the list. This is something that seemed to be a problem, but was not.

      There are a lot of things that required brains and guts to fix them (although in many cases, th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caluml ( 551744 )

      Apollo 13. Catastrophic explosion disabled the service module. The astronauts returned home safely using the LEM as a lifeboat and some creative navigation. Skylab launch: Ripped off a solar panel and part of the outer skin. Astronauts were able to rig a replacement screen to cool inside of the lab and open the other solar panel that was stuck partly open. Three expeditions extended the time in space records and recorded what was then the most detail solar observations ever.

      Wow, that sounds exciting! Someone should make a film about that! :)

  • Stupid NASA. All they have to do is submerge the space station in water and pressurize it to 10 atmospheres. That'll find that leak in NO TIME!

  • Isn't there a fairly simple way to track down leaks? Just set a very light but very visible object in the room, and watch as it naturally drifts towards where the air is exiting the vehicle. It will at least give you a small area to look, as opposed to hunting everywhere within a module.

  • In space, I'm not sure you can characterize an air leak as 'minor.' If I was up there, I'd be spending pretty much all of my time trying to find and seal it.

    Minor would be something like itchy underwear.

  • While this is yet another technical issue with the ISS, when will this end?
    When will a space station under development be free of problems?
    When will a software in development be bug free?

    This is technology, technology even in a quite extreme environment... I think you'd better get used to it. I think this is part of space science.

    As long as we can handle it, we can handle it. I don't think we can hope for more, really.

  • Idiot OP? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dotancohen ( 1015143 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @06:35PM (#21538877) Homepage

    While this is yet another technical issue with the ISS, when will this end? I am all for the space program, but there have been some major issues lately.
    Are you kidding? Do you not have any idea how fucking complex and unique the ISS is? My 2008 Ford Focus has gone in for repairs three times in the four months that I've owned it, and Ford has been building those motherfuckers for over 100 years now. The ISS is the third of it's kind, designed and built from scratch and completely hand made. In space! By people wearing spacesuits! You don't expect a problem every now and then?!? I'd go so far as to say that problems are the major mission of the ISS. The creation and solving of problems is building experience for NASA, the Russians, the Europeans, and everybody else involved. Not to mention those brave guys up there actually manning the thing. Problems or not, the ISS is one hell of an achievement. The fact that it hasn't killed anybody yet is either a miracle or testimony to the amazing engineering that has been invested in it.
    • My 2008 Ford Focus has gone in for repairs three times in the four months that I've owned it, and Ford has been building those motherfuckers for over 100 years now.

      Yeah, the Focus model is badly in need of a refresh.
  • The whole manned space program is still experimental, it's purpose is to push the limits of our capabilities and expose problems/weaknesses so they can be overcome. Sooner or later were going to need to step off this rock and expand out, ISS is valuable stepping stone and research tool on that path.

    You can only simulate so much in the labs, practical experience is what counts. Finding and fixing leaks, whilst annoying (and I dare-say worrying to those onboard), will provide a lot of valuable data, vital for

  • It's a minor leak, but it's very expensive air (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Phat_Tony ( 661117 ) on Friday November 30, 2007 @08:02PM (#21539729)
    At $20,000 per pound [usatoday.com] to deliver more air with the space shuttle, it's very expensive air their losing, at $60,000 worth of air per day. How long would it take to leak a minor scientific research project out of the budget?

  • "Minor leak in the ISS Being Investigated" actually says what the subby is trying to say...

    Minor Leak Being Investigated Aboard the ISS suggests they're investigating from space, which would be cool too I guess...

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