19 thoughts on “The ISS Incident”

  1. Cue the Critical Drinker saying “Oh, it’ll be fine.”

    I suspect one of the system failures was in launching a backup to a 1996 module, which is a 25-year gap. The lead engineers on it have likely long since retired, and any that remained are likely pretty vague on many of the details. It had been reworked, but that just creates opportunities for the new folks to misunderstand what the original engineers had been thinking. It would be akin to NASA launching an Apollo/Saturn in 2000, and NASA and Roscosmos should’ve been prepared for all sorts of possible anomalies.

    1. For people who haven’t watched You Tube videos of the Critical Drinker, “Oh, it’ll be fine” needs to be said with a strong Scot’s accent with lots of glottal stops, dropped word ending and a hint of sarcasm?

      1. I looked it up, and the catch phrase is “Nah, it’ll be fine” with the initial “Nah” drawn out in mock reassurance that Russian modules are no serious threat to the ISS and business can be conducted as usual.

  2. How about we quit paying the Russians any more money? We’ve covered significant parts of ‘their’ contributions, we payed them for transport, we don’t need to anymore.

    If the Russians can’t afford to participate in space, it’s not our problem…maybe they can sweet-talk the CCP into the same stupid deal the US had.

    1. The issue he’s raising is the way they tried to sweep it under the rug

      Cue the Critical Drinker saying “Oh, it’ll be fine.”

      That looks eerily similar to the management culture that’s led to prior disasters. They apparently had no mechanism that kicked in to cope with a module that went nuts and decided to change orientations. It rotated the structure about a turn and a half, and it could’ve done so in along any axis or multiple axes. It also likely could’ve decided to try and de-orbit the station.

      1. It was simply human error. As far as I know, no automatic mechanism exists that would stop US ground controllers from commanding the SARJs to rotate in opposite directions and tearing ISS to pieces. For that matter, what would happen if a Cygnus suddenly started firing its main engine? Is there a way aboard ISS for the crew toi shut it down? What if a crew Dragon decided to reactivate its forward thrusters and fire them? Etc., etc. The big flaw in the way the Russians control Nauka (and Progress, and Soyuz) is the lack of a TDRSS system. And even then, we know ISS is out of contact with TDRSS (not to mention what happened with Starliner). That said, ISS was always a bad idea, just a jobs program for Russian engineers. We should have kept on with Freedom, but it was too Reagan for too many politicians.

    2. A coworker’s husband works at tge ISS control center on Redstone. They were warned in advance of the docking that bad things were likely to happen and to be prepared to evacuate the station. In that sense, having the ISS rotate 540 degrees at 0.5 degree per second wasn’t nearly as bad as they feared, but the fact that they went ahead with the docking was due to NASA caving to Russian political pressure. This tells me that the same managerial mindset that killed two Shuttle crews is still alive at NASA.

      1. I take these “my cousin Vinnie” anecdotes under advisement because they’re interesting, but they’re unverifiable. Nowadays news stories are under a similar cloud. If Beth Mole said that, I’d laugh. Oberg? Hates Russians? Berger? Maybe, but he’s got his own agenda. Best is actual NASA and Roskosmos employees speaking publicly. My information mainly comes from public events covered live. the Roskosmos interpreters aren’t censored (usually).

        The main bottom line is, how in the world do you think NASA would stop Russian from docking anything they want to the Russian Segment? Maybe Bill Nelson could threaten to hold his breath until he turns blue?

        Below that level, the truth is, the Kurs system works extremely well. The only time a Russian spacecraft or module ever collided with a space station and damaged it, was a Progress being flown manually. It was pilot error. In fact, if your second hand anecdote is true (as it may well be), it’s just a NASA equivalent of the way the Russians acted during the Demo-1 docking (making their crew stay in the ROS and shut the hatches). And the Russians had a point: Demo-1 actually *did* explode, once it was “safely” back on the ground!

        Simply put, the R-7 rocket family has flown thousands of times, with few problems. And the Soyuz/Progress spacecraft have flown hundreds of times with a similar safety record. I think the next Soyuz launch will be number 190 (counting from Soyuz-1 in 1967). A Soyuz failing is like losing a corporate jet. A Space Shuttle failing is like losing an aircraft carrier (in dollar terms). Dragon does have some failure modes (there’s a way it can go into a flat spin during reentry, which would probably kill the crew). And then there’s Starliner.

  4. I have a Modest Proposal. Let’s sell Russia and China the ISS, and build a new one in a better orbit (with blackjack!), using 8mx8m modules (preferably, inflatable ones).

    2. The Chinese aren’t that stupid and the Americans aren’t that canny. “See that used Ford with 200,000 miles on it? It’s *road proven* and everthing that can break has already broken.”

  5. The suit program is a disaster.

    I had an idea for a general suit joint concept that I’ve never gotten around to prototyping. Take a typical cloth suit joint and measure the torque/deflection curve when the suit is pressurized. That curve is a function of the joint’s change in volume (per angle theta) and the suit’s pressure differential.

    Now take a pneumatic piston of similar volume and attach it to the suit, with a small cable running from the piston’s shaft (the normal actuator on a pneumatic piston) to a shive cut as a cam. Then from the cam run another cable from one side of the joint to another, like a tendon. The piston is vented on one side and the side with the actuator is connected to the suit’s internal pressure via a small air line. When the suit is pressurized, the cylinder tries to retract the actuator, and thus pull on the attached cable.

    The air cylinder acts like a muscle, the cable is the tendon, and the cam matches the linear force-distance of the air piston to the non-linear angle-torque curve of the joint. The result is that the combination of the joint and the piston maintain a constant overall suit volume regardless of joint angle, and they do so without weird shapes and bearings like the stove-pipe joints on some of the Apollo or Shuttle suits.

    By supplying the force with an air piston instead of a spring, the counter-force doesn’t depend on the suit’s pressure differential, so the astronaut’s muscle force required to bend the joint won’t increase with suit pressure. Further, the pistons apply no force to the joint when the suit isn’t pressurized, so that astronaut won’t have to fight the system when donning the suit. If the air pistons were replaced with springs there cams would have to be altered due to the spring’s linear force-distance curve versus the constant force-distance curve of an air-piston, but then the suit would only have zero-force joints at one particular pressure differential, and might be hard to don.

    The air lines to all the suits pistons could be fed from one or several emergency cut-off valves, in case an O-ring fails, but thankfully O-rings almost never fail.

    The concept can also be expanded to 3-D joints such as necks and torsos by using more cables, cams, pulleys, and cleverness.

    However, given NASA looming scheduling constraints, it may be simpler to solve the lunar exploration suit problem by putting the astronaut in a large clear hamster-ball that would let them freely roam the surface as long as they didn’t encounter a major slope.

  6. Having read many of his books, I take Oberg’s “Russia sucks” screed with a tasty grain of salt. The fact is, the two main problems with Nauka were unrelated (even calling them quality control issues is stretching it). One was a failed pressure bladder (of unknown vintage) in a fuel tank, The other was human error. As for lacking on-orbit control over Nauka, Soviet spacecraft were always controlled largely from the ground. And beyond that, while the Russians have TORU at ISS for approaching vehicles, there’s no such system for US VVs,

    Stop paying the Russians? What’re we paying them now? Wasn’t it just for rides? ROS and USOS are otherwise operated as two cooperating space stations joined at a single point. ROS has 3-axis attitude control thrusters, USOS has CMGs. That sort of thing.

    Kick the Russians off ISS? How, exactly, would we do that? Unberth PMA1 from Node-1 and give them a shove with the ISSRMS? One orbit later the derelict ROS would collide with the non-maneuverable USOS. The Russians are going to sell seats to toruists from now on, and make a decision post-2025, partly based on what decision the other partners make at that time. With iROSA, the USOS is good until 2035. With Axiom, it has its own thrusters. But the ROS may have to remain as an abandoned segment until the Russians agree to detach and ditch it. I’m sure we’ll be asked to pay for that.

    I favor refurbishing USOS as a technical project and keeping it running indefinately, but I doubt that will happen.

  7. Do we actually pay the Russians anything to operate their parts of ISS, over and above the payments made for Soyuz seats? I don’t know and a cursory search wasn’t illuminating.

    I know we paid for Zarya, and it is in fact the property of the US. If the Russians decided to leave ISS in a snit, they’d legally have to leave it behind. So we bought a module from them. We also paid for Nodes-2 and 3, made by the Italian firm Thales Alenia, who also made the Columbus lab (paid for by ESA). The US also transported Rassvet up in a Shuttle as part of a barter agreement (and I’m not sure what we got in return).

    Does anyone know (as in have a reference) if we pay the Russians directly for any operational costs? Do they charge us for the air we use from their supply? Do they pay us for the power they “borrow?”

    1. AFAIK the payments are typically not made in cash but in barter trade for other services. For example ESA made some ATV cargo flights to pay for the Columbus module upkeep fees.

      1. That’s my understanding too, but people keep talking like we’re writing them checks for something other than Soyuz rides. Even there, we bought Vande Hei’s seat from Space Adventures, which bought it from Roskosmos. That’s a technicality cheat, I think. ESA switched over from ATVs to Orion service modules to pay for their rides to ISS. The Japanese are flying HTV-X soon as a continuation of HTV, and will be flying those on Falcon Heavy to pay for their share of Orion seats.

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