Spacesuit Problems Delay ISS Repair Spacewalk 70
Ars Technica reports that the next planned spacewalk in the continuing repairs of the International Space Station's ammonia pump has been delayed, because of problems with the spacesuit worn by astronaut Rick Mastracchio. From the article: "According to Deutsche Welle, the problem is with how the sublimator (a cooling unit) in Mastracchio's suit operated when entering ISS airlock. NASA said the question is whether water entered the sublimator at that time. 'During repressurization of the station's airlock following the spacewalk, a spacesuit configuration issue put the suit Mastracchio was wearing in question for the next excursion,' NASA said in a statement. Delaying the next steps of the valve replacement from Monday until Tuesday will give NASA time to address the issue. Mastracchio is scheduled to wear a backup suit and needs this time to have it resized."
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It should also be cheaper, lighter, shoot industrial-level laser from the eyes and include a lightsaber. Stupid scientists can't do anything right. If only they read /. once in a while they might learn something!
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Not very bright, are you? They are looking into better suits now, Slashdot is irrelevant.
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They should have built simpler, more reliable suits.
They are looking into better suits now
Tense mismatch.
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They should have built simpler, more reliable suits.
I wonder if it would be cheaper to retool the suits, or to select crews of suitably similar size and body type?
I don't doubt that the current hardware has some legacy decisions that NASA would like to rethink, or at least replace with current iterations that are smaller and more reliable; but it's not as though they added complexity for the fun of it the first time around. Keeping things within safe, never mind comfortable, parameters in a vacuum isn't trivial.
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It's a tradeoff, I suppose. It's so expensive to put people up there that it does make sense to put considerable effort into selecting the best people and training them well. So, it's just a question of what makes one person "better" for the job than another. If you have to move down to 15th place in the astronaut school evaluations to find someone with the right size, are you better off than going with 1st place and building adjustable suits? I don't know, maybe, maybe not.
Maybe #15 can do the job just as
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Were we to try venturing further afield, I'd imagine that (much as some people would hate it) the biological aspect of choosing the right human for the job would grow in importance. If you fancied a hop to mars, say, the differences in
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It's not like when you get a flat tire. You don't have an international space program assisting you remotely. So, while they're sorting the suit issue, can the folks at mission control go get some lunch or-- Hey, why don't they just call us once this suit thing is worked out, then we'll schedule another try again later?
Think of it as a scrubbed launch, but with an astronaut instead of a rocket.
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Why not have a tethered backup for suits?
Same reason laptops don't have a permanently tethered backup for the battery.
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Who said anything about your strawman of "permanent".
It's not a very good back up if you have a catastrophic failure of your life support system and don't have time to plug in.
Plugging them into a ship-mounted support system would be trivial.
Trivial? You want to mount ports all around the station - you'll need them reachable in a reasonable amount of time, after all - all of which will require regular maintenance and checks (you don't want a port venting air or water unexpectedly), and you're introducing more complexity to the suits (which you were arguing to be made more simple).
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How will a quick attachment make any difference to my point? You'd need multiple ports installed around the station and you'd be adding complexity - not to mention holes - to what you've already said is an overly-complicated spacesuit.
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What is the use case you are designing for?
You say tethers would solve any problem with life-support, so you tell me.
You don't seem to be trying to make it work, then showing short-comings, but instead trying to make it not work, and demonstrating your limited intelligence and problem solving.
Should be pretty easy to convince me otherwise, then, shouldn't it?
But, since you are just here for the argument, and not a discussion on suits, life support, or spacewalks...
But, since you aren't willing to defend your ideas or resolve the contradiction between your suggestion to build a spacesuit that is both simplermore complex at the same time...
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You would be surprised at how much changes in the vacuum environment in an orbit around a star. Suddenly the whole tether needs to be insulated, lest whatever working fluid you carry freezes in the shadow or boils in the sunlight. The insulation needs to survive flexing in those temperature extremes. Earthbound liquid ocean environment is quite thermally benign - it is all within the confines of liquid salty water. Almost none of the non-metallic materials used in this 100+ year old pre-SCUBA technology wou
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A tethered suit (like the early diving suits) would fix any problem with a life-support system.
Really? Any problem?
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Yes. Any problem with the man-carried life support system.
Unless the problem kills you before you can get yourself tethered (because as you've stated in another post, you weren't envisaging a permanent tether).
Actually, my example was going to be the flooding of a helmet, as occurred recently. How would your tether solve that?
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I don't have sufficient details on the flooding helmet.
Then why do you sound like you think you're an authority on spacesuit and life support system design?
Why are you asking such details. You obviously don't care what my answer is, you don't like the idea. So why keep complaining?
Because I'm trying to demonstrate that "asking such details" is exactly the sort of thing that is required in this situation, and that you seem to think your solution is the obvious one without considering such details.
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Then why do you sound like you think you're an authority on spacesuit and life support system design?
I'm a certified SCUBA trainer, which does make me an expert of sorts on life support.
Because I'm trying to demonstrate that "asking such details" is exactly the sort of thing that is required in this situation, and that you seem to think your solution is the obvious one without considering such details.
Yes, because if I can't solve it for every possible situation you come up with, then the general premise must be false. Or the nay-sayer is more persistent than the person who suggests a correct course of action, but the suggester isn't as emotionally tied to fighting everything. NASA has publicly announced that they are looking for new suits because of limitations in the current ones. If I agree with NASA, I'm an idiot.
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Yes, because if I can't solve it for every possible situation you come up with, then the general premise must be false.
I didn't come up with it; it actually happened! Ensuring that problems that have previously occurred don't happen again or have less severe effects would seem to be a good place to start when looking to improve things.
Or the nay-sayer is more persistent than the person who suggests a correct course of action
You've suggested a course of action. You said it would solve any problem with the life-support system (and you've again just implied it to be "correct"). I gave an example of a real problem that recently occurred and asked how your solution would have solved it, and you dismissed it as a mere
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Why did we have tethered diving long before SCUBA? I'll give you a hint. on-board life support is more complex than tethered systems.
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So a suit with no life support is more complex than one with CO2 scrubbers, O2, and other functions in a large attachment?
Since when are we talking about suits with no life support? You said "Why not have a tethered backup for suits?" I assumed (quite reasonably, I'd maintain) that you meant as a backup to the suit's built-in life support.
Are you now talking about a permanent tether with no onboard system?
Why did we have tethered diving long before SCUBA? I'll give you a hint. on-board life support is more complex than tethered systems.
Then why is everyone using SCUBA these days instead of tethers?
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Then why is everyone using SCUBA these days instead of tethers?
They aren't. And even if they were, it is mainly for operational constraints that don't apply in space. If your SCUBA fails completely, you most likely will survive it. Complete loss of life support in recreational diving is easily survivable. If the support pack fell off an astronaut, how survivable is that?
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Oh FFS. Let's see: the whole human race doesn't have 10,000 hours of EVA activity logged, but we've been sailing on the ocean since before recorded history. Yet somehow, somehow, there's still things to be learned about designing, building and sailing better sailboats. Ask any America's Cup team. NASA has eventualities even most good engineers would never dream of already planned for, printed up, and sitting in a binder, waiting for that 1 in 1,000,00
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Of course! It's so simple! Man, they'll be kicking themselves at NASA when they read this.
They should have built a simpler, more reliable cooling unit too.
Oh, also, a cheaper, safer rocket to get them up there in the first place.
Anything else you want to ask Santa for?
These Aren't Suits from JC Penny (Score:1)
These suits are meant to keep the wearer alive and somewhat comfortable in some rather extreme conditions - zero g, zero pressure, exposure to radiation temperatures ranging from 4 K to several hundred K. They are encountering some issues with control of the water cooling system, and perhaps some condensation. They need to be understood and dealt with, but all in all they are the nature of the beast.
HA HA - CAPTCHA is "earthly"
Alas! (Score:2)
The Sartorial Tragedy! We must send a tuxedo.
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You don't have an orbital tailor? Get with the program. This isn't the 20th century any more.
please skip this story (Score:4, Interesting)
Slashdotters are clever and generally well informed, but this is way out of your league.
I'm trying to moderate today but the fact is that none of you know anything about space suits.
Consider yourselves modded down one point.
For many years, many well trained people have devoted time, energy and tons of money to devise a better space suit. It's hard to imagine even a very clever reader here having anything worth contributing to the issue. Please move on to a story where your comments will be competent.
Why space suits at all? (Score:2)
Why is there no remote manipulator robot to do this? Is the goal here to test space suits or maintain a space station?
The space station should have the most advanced remote manipulator system available. Deep-sea work is not done by guys in complex suits, it is done by remotely controlled manipulator robots. The continued dependence on space suits for basic construction/repair/maintenence operation just seems like a bad idea given current remote maniplulation technology.
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Deep sea work is different - when you have external pressures higher than internal ones, the demands are different.
And no, a lot of deep sea work isn't done
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Have you ever looked at some of the equipment on the outside of the space station? Most of it is is quite delicate as opposed to oil rigs that are mostly very large steel pipes that you can pound on with a sledge hammer and do very little damage to. Everything on that space station is built as light as possible / practicable because it has to be pushed into orbit by chemical rockets.
Lots and lots of it is behind something else, lots of it has complex cable connections. The more robotics you send up tha
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A great site for space news (Score:1)
http://www.spaceflight101.com/iss-expedition-38-us-eva-25-updates.html [spaceflight101.com]
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Man, after reading that I feel like I could suit up and go out there myself to help. A really great article (and link). Thank you. Just in case, if the ISS needs help, I'm ready and willing to go.
Science fiction never really deals with the detail (Score:2)
Yet in real life we have seen that even enclo