TERROR in ORBIT: Dodgy rocket burp biffs International Space Station off track A malfunction on a docked Russian spacecraft caused the International Space Station to shift from its normal orbital orientation, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said on Tuesday. NASA confirmed that the engines of Soyuz TMA-15M – one of two Soyuz spacecraft currently docked at the ISS – unexpectedly fired at 10:27am Central …
And so the ISS was blasted (slightly, ever so slightly) from its orbit, doomed (no, it isn't) to wander the galaxy (no, it won't) arriving in a new star system every week (are you kidding me?) and meeting english-speaking aliens (now that's just weird, no-one stopped to ask, 'Is this Candid Camera? You guys are putting us on right?') and zooming around in their Eagle spaceships (no, they've got one, or at most two, capsules with surprisingly little delta-V in them).
And always hoping to one day return home to lost Earth (it isn't lost, just look out the window)
Hmm, doing your own heckling, what a time-saver!
The late, great Douglas Adams had a bit about ships like that.
'Having seen the vessel, certain words came to mind. 'unsafe', 'dangerous', 'extremely rickety', and 'please may I get out?'
It's one of those odd things. SpaceX, Boeing and even SNC are making people-carrying-capsules to take crew to ISS & they'll be coming online in 2017/2018 (I wouldn't be surprised if things slipped to the right a bit.) but isn't ISS due to decommission not long after that? As ironies go, it's a bit like James Bond finally getting a female M, modeled on Stella Rimmington, but Dame Stella retired before Judy Dench (another Dame, and a fine old Dame at that) appeared on screen.
Maybe we need to start speculating on ISS 2.
ISS 2, The Electric Boogaloo? No, I've got it, ISS 2, This Time It's Personal.
Or how about ISS 2, Come with me if you want to...
Alright, I'm going, I'm going...
Joke aside I am not an expert by any means but based on what I have seen and heard about astronaut training is they really do a good job of weeding out human beings that basically ever panic under any situation (ie us %99 lol). That guy who didn't panic (and thus didn't die) while his helmet was filling full of water while on a space walk is but one example. They also do have a problem with astronauts doing literally anything to go to space so that they don't even blink about getting aboard ancient Russian spacecraft.
ISS isn't all that rigid - so a nice gentle thrust (liquid fuels, so easily throttled) means that you get the same deltaV with lower stresses on the structure. Oh, and IIRC better rocket efficiency to boot.
It's also quite heavy - gravity is about 98% of surface normal, it masses about 370,000 kg.
To raise it by 2,800m would take....
https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=mass+of+iss&meta=&safe=active&gws_rd=ssl#safe=active&hl=en&q=370000kg+*+2800m+*+9.81m%2Fs%5E2+*.98
10 GJ
over 2000 seconds is 5MW
Not too shabby...
(Yes I've ingored the required deltaV for the different orbital requirement)
One thing I've learnt playing KSP is that if you do a big burn quickly in one place, you'll only lift your orbit up on the far side of the planet. You'd need to burn again over the far side to raise it up where you did the first burn too.
On the other hand, a long slow burn can do it all in one go.
I worked in a building that had Big Red Buttons (standard Radiospares product) at intervals along the corridors. They sounded the bomb alert. One day the alarm went off several times with consequent disruption. It was eventually traced to one of the cleaners who decided the the buttons needed polishing.
I used to work in the radio industry and there were visual alarms for the Phone - white (they don't ring in the studios) Fire/Evacuation - red and the Obit one - orange. The Obit one (now called the Major Story alarm) went off when someone (The Queen, Queen Mum, Charles, Wills etc.) died and this obviously required your attention. It is delivered by IRN and was peoples worst nightmare that it would go off when they were on air as they then had to everything in the obit procedure correctly and it would be fairly obvious if they hadn't.
So Easter weekend and the Queen Mum sadly departs this world, IRN were supposed to make everyone aware of the news with the dreaded Obit alarm however the first a lot of people knew that she had gone was when the Saturday 6pm bulletin started with the National Anthem (which should have been at the end of the bulletin anyway). I was later told that there were two buttons at IRN which needed to be pressed simultaneously to activate the alarm and only one of them was correctly pressed, goodness only knows which other one was (incorrectly) hit. Someone a few days later commented to me that they should have just had a big red button that lit up when pressed, under a protective cover so that it wasn't hit accidentally but illuminated so you knew it had been pressed correctly.
There was a lot of anger from a lot of people that this major event had been fµ©£ed up (there was talk of the work experience being on duty etc.) which was only intensified when the regular Tuesday morning mid morning test of the system went ahead 3 days later.
In the semiconductor industry the big red buttons (EMO button) are found all over the fab but are required on every processing tool. I have never seen on pressed but I guarantee if I did I would be exiting the area in a hurry. Supposedly the tool is supposed to always safely contain the chemicals and gases inside but if you have ever seen a hazmat sheet on things like diborane, HF or silane you might think twice about it. The gas alarms would only serve to let the first responders know where your corpse is located.
Sadly, our Big Red Button has been pressed by accident. The first time was by the contractor who was changing the light bulbs in the room. They leaned their ladder up against the wall beside the door, and it pushed the button. A room with a couple of mainframe computers gets awfully quiet when that Big Red Button is pressed. :-(
The solution was to put a shield around the Big Red Button, so that something leaning up against the wall wouldn't accidentally push it. So, they hired a contractor to install a shield. That contractor brought their ladder in, and leaned it up against the wall beside the door. Uhoh! :-(
Dave
We had a big red "do not touch" button in the data center with no cover on it. On the day of some layoffs, some coworkers went in to discuss the goings on, and one of them leaned against the button on accident.
Never seen the president of the company move so fast. He thought it was sabotage.
It quickly received a nice clear cover after that.
"But 'accidentally' firing the rocket motors on a space capsule attached to the ISS..."
This was a persistent fear about the shuttle on station missions. Apparently, NASA reckoned there was a 1-in-10,000 (or less) chance of the shuttle's thrusters accidentally firing while docked. There had been 5 accidental thruster firings in free space prior to the station missions, where the loud bangs harmed nothing but astronauts' underwear. For Mir missions, astronauts simply de-powered the avionics that controlled the shuttle's thrusters, but there were always windows of opportunity for the thrusters to glitch when they were powered, such as during undocking and docking procedures.
Besides the obvious difference in size and mass between the US shuttle and Rooskie capsule, there's a fundamental difference in philosophy about performance. Russian capsules have always had under-powered thrusters because, as noted in this discussion, they don't need much thrust once in orbit. American Gemini and Apollo capsules and the shuttle have been comparative hotrods with significant design influence from their military test pilots, who wanted responsive vehicles.
This led to NASA's fear about a docked shuttle's motors firing accidentally: the thrusters could tear the shuttle off the station, depressurizing both vehicles and causing a TPK.
http://www.space.com/972-shuttle-thrusters-potential-risk-space-station.html
You missed the more obvious explanation.
This picture looks like standard "product transition" scenario you can see in nearly any big shop.
Under the current diplomatic conditions the contract with NASA is now assigned to the B team. The same is valid for a list of programs considered as legacy and not in need of A team.
In the meantime, the A team is working on something else. It will be interesting to see what rolls off the assembly line in Plisetsk (or somewhere else where the press does not have access on a nearly 24x7 basis) within the next few years.
"... the A team is working on something else."
I don't buy that. These are almost 'mass produced' craft, not something new so QC and consistency of product off the production line *should* be good - if they aren't that's a failure in it's own right.
The Russians make a lot of money launching - a single failure of such a public vehicle is bad for PR, but the business will work it out and the company will be fine. Multiple failures make people talk to alternative suppliers - Chinese, Indians, ESO, SpaceX or whatever and, down the line, that's seriously bad for the company.
The Duma have just been investigating Roscosmos and some people from their contractors have just been charged with corruption. The head of the Duma committee said something like $1.3 billion of their 2013 budget can't be accounted for. This is either a major probe into sorting out serious corruption - or some of senior management being punished for various recent failures, it's hard to know.
Russian government spending was already being tightened before sanctions and the collapse in the oil price did such damage to the Russian economy and tax base. They've also been heavily increasing defence spending for a few years, so I do wonder if money has been moved from the civilian to the military space programmes.
Equally it's possible that Roscosmos is extremely well funded, but now suffering crippling levels of corruption.
Apparently 98% of people arrested in Russia go on to get convicted, and according to a piece I read from a Russian commentator you have to bribe the police to let you go before you get to the police station, as once you're there and the paperwork is started, you're doomed.
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Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) ex ISS commander, tweeted a couple of things about this:
"While re-powering the Soyuz after 6 mos it's possible to inadvertently activate its attitude control & fire the thrusters."
"No real harm done, it happened during Expedition 7 too, just wastes a bit of fuel, and Soyuz has plenty."
Doesn't really sound that alarming?
On the other hand not sounding alarmed is part of his job :O)
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