ISS air leakage fixed in time for crew handover, thanks to floating teabag There was good news for International Space Station (ISS) residents this week as the crew managed to plug a leak in the orbiting laboratory. While never an immediate threat to the crew's safety, nobody likes knowing that air is escaping overboard. Russian space agency Roscosmos reported the "temporary" fix on 19 October after …
I was disappointed by that headline. I read it and thought, well if you leave a teabag in a cup for too long, it does tend to stick to the sides and be hard to remove. Not to mention that time someone put one in the dishwasher at work, and it got stuck in the plastic rotating water jet thingymagig. That took a lot of work to get clear - so I can attest that dried teabags can be pretty strong. But I'm not sure I'd trust my life support to one.
For a repair I'd stake my life on I'd use either dried porridge or gaffer tape...
A friend of mine managed to get my daughter (in a high chair at the time) to follow his moves. She was eating porridge at the time. He mimed picking some porridge out of the bowl with his hands and rubbing it in his hair.
It was about three weeks before we cut the last of it from her long flowing locks. And 4 weeks for him to find his bollocks!
I am truly shocked and appalled that even the Ruskies have the affrontery call that sawdust in bags - tea!.
Clearly proper loose leaf tea wold have been far more effective in flowing towards and indicating precisely the leakage. As to the effect our Sainsburys Gold Label in bunging up our drains - no further action would have been needed.
Final question. Do you need a tea cosy in space?
"Do you need a tea cosy in space?"
I haven't investigated, but I would imagine that with the lack of convection the heat will remain in the tea on its own. The tea cosy is therefore purely for fashion and to stop you burning your hands.
As an adjunct, presumably the tea bag will also need agitating within the pot because without convection the deliciousness won't disperse correctly on its own.
You are definitely right to raise such important questions though.
"Do you need a tea cosy in space?"
I haven't investigated,
Clearly you need to write that up as a proposal. You could try for the next tranche of ESA'nauts heading for the ISS, or if you can't afford to take a few months off work, try for a NASA "quickie" in SpaceShip2.
"I'll never forget the smell of fresh epoxy on a cold winter morning"
A new addition to the workshop adhesives odours is UV curable "glue".
The faq points out that it won't actually stick anything together on close contact surfaces if you can't shine the UV torch in there. However it is marvellous for binding things together with external layers.for strengthening. Note "layers" - you have to build them up in thin increments. Found it very useful for making DC analogue Tri-ang model train headlight bulb replacements. Two tiny 1.8mm LEDs can be glued side-by-side with precise positioning***. Soldering the leads crossed-over gives a bright white light that works in either direction of travel. Better than using a bridge rectifier as there on no extra voltage drop at low speeds.
*** a prototyping 2.54mm matrix block allows them to be positioned and held firm while you apply the glue.
To make tea *inside* a pressure vessel, you'd be stewing the tea-leaves. Again, not a proper cuppa. It would need a pressure vessel that had some sort of mechanics inside that could boil the water and then allow it to mix with dry tea-leaves in a separate compartment whilst maintaining the pressure. Far from impossible, but a fairly complex design that I doubt could justify the transport cost to send to the ISS.
But you can't get a proper cuppa with Lipton's yellow label.
Admittedly Johnny foreigner sometimes issues you with a mug of below boiling hot water and a teabag to dunk in it, thus meaning you need to wait five minutes to get the thing to even vaguely resemble a liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
In 2006 crew of an RAF Nimrod used a teapot to block up a hole when a hatch failed to shut properly. Mitch Benn even wrote a song about it for The Now Show.
Much more importantly, what temperature do they heat the water to on the ISS to make tea? I think Italy provided an espresso machine, but who gave the tea-making facilities?
(I think we can forgive them for using teabags. Loose tea and weightlessness would be a little undesirable.)
On operation Black Buck - the first successful attempt to bomb the Falkland Islands runway was nearly aborted because the backup aircraft had a refuelling problem. Earlier, the strike aircraft had been unable to pressurise the cockpit after take-off, because they couldn't close one of the windows.
However, they were determined to make it. So they unwrapped one of the pilot's sandwiches, and blocked the gap with the wrapping. Not sure if it was clingfilm, brown paper bag or tinfoil though. Neither does history record what the sandwich filling was. However I'm pretty certain that there would have been plenty of flasks of tea on board - especially as the cabin heater on a Vulcan apparently took half an hour to get up to temperature - so you were pretty chilly for the first bit of any Vulcan flight. Especially with the windows open.
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