International Space Station actually spun one-and-a-half times by errant Russian module's thrusters The International Space Station actually spun one and a half times last week after the just-docked Russian Nauka module unexpectedly fired its thrusters. NASA earlier said the sudden and inadvertent rocket burn nudged the ISS 45 degrees out of attitude. Zebulon Scoville, a flight director working at the US space agency’s …
I immediately thought of Dead or Alive's classic, baby
Yeah, it did occur to us to do some kind of 'you spin me right round' reference but we may have worn out that gag. Shocking, I know, for a Reg editor to admit that. Exhibits A through E:
You spin me right round, baby, right round like an exploding asteroid, baby, right round round round
You spin me right round, storage, right round – like a ferrous-based platter baby, round round
(Picture caption in a Lara Croft game) You spin me right round, baby, right round...
(Picture caption of a galaxy) You spin me right round ... an artist's impression of the Milky Way
(Crosshead in an Audacity review) You spin me right round....
Plus, I've had many variations of Dead or Alive's smash hit on loop in my gym playlist so I don't think I can take any more spinning right round, like a record, baby, round round, you spin me right round, like a....
C.
Kylie Minogue - Spinning Around
I'm spinning around, move out of my way
I know you're feeling me 'cause you like it like this
I'm breaking it down, I'm not the same
I know you're feeling me 'cause you like it like this
Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff - Dizzy
Dizzy!
I'm so dizzy, my head is spinning
Like a whirlpool, it never ends
Turn! Turn! Turn! is another, but I was focused on the cause, not the effect. I also went with a classic.
I like smoke and lightnin', Heavy metal thunder, Racing with the wind, And the feeling that I'm under
Yeah, Nauka, go and make it happen, Take the world in a love embrace, Fire all of your guns at once, And explode into space
* With apologies to John Kay, born in Tilsit, Russia.
Blood, Sweat, and Tears. - that's how the astronauts felt.
Spinning Wheel 1969.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U12srfQS-eo
What goes up must come down
Spinnin' wheel, got to go round
Talkin' 'bout your troubles, it's a cryin' sin
Ride a painted pony, let the spinnin' wheel spin
I commented in the original El Reg article why I thought that the 45 degree rotation declaration was probably wrong. I had no idea how wrong it was until I read earlier today at space.com about the actual 540 degree rotation. There is something else of interest that was also in the comments to the first article that I read about at space.come today. It said that the Russians could not send the shut down command until it was over Russia and that they were still an hour away when it started. The thrusters did shut down after about 15 minutes (?) which lends credence to the idea that the only reason they shut down was because they ran out of fuel. And yet they are still trying to down play the danger to the astronauts/cosmonauts and the ISS. Is there anything else they aren't telling us? My guess is absolutely!
Space habitats are supposed to spin
The ISS was designed strictly as a micro-gravity research laboratory. Out of the countless design variations of Space Station Freedom and the International Space Station, one of the dominating criteria was protection the laboratory modules from acceleration, tidal forces, vibrations, and even crew movement. Quite a few cost-cutting designs were tossed because they didn't protect the lab modules' microgravity conditions. For example, the simple gravity-gradient stabilized Power Tower concept for Freedom was dropped because by using lab modules as ballast at one end of the tower they were subject to some tiny G-forces.
You don't get a microgravity environment by spinning the entire space station. You don't get a clean microgravity environment in a lab if part of the station is spinning, leaving the rest of the station shaking, shivering, and suffering gyroscopic precession as it orbits Earth.
goin up there to lose muscle and bone mass is the most poorly thought out thing that ever came out of the 60's and it's amazing that we haven't figured that out yet.
The ISS's research work is dominated by two fields: biology and materials science. A great many of the biology studies coming out of the ISS, like the Twins Study, are all about that bone and muscle loss. The whole point of 6-month and 1-year tours on the ISS is to find out what spaceflight does to humans because the 1960s left a lot of blanks.
The 1960s and 1970s 3-year Martian roundtrips or 14-month Venus flybys envisaged at the time would've crippled and incapacitated the astronauts and cosmonauts because space agencies of the era were clueless about long-term spaceflight effects.
The ISS's non-spinning environment has answered a lot of important questions over the last two decades of service, questions that would not have been answered with a spinning space station.
"A great many of the biology studies coming out of the ISS, like the Twins Study, are all about that bone and muscle loss. The whole point of 6-month and 1-year tours on the ISS is to find out what spaceflight does to humans because the 1960s left a lot of blanks."
This is the equivalent of doing experiments on scurvy in ships, instead of giving the crew lemons
Probably not anywhere the astronaughts can get to, no. They will be relying on electrically operated valves.
Running the fuel pipe from the tank, through the pressure vessel, to a valve, then back out through the pressure vessel to the thrusters, is a bad idea. It would add lots of mass, and on a spacecraft everything is about mass reduction. It would also add new failure modes, the pipe or valve could leak fuel directly into the atmosphere the crew are breathing, which is both a fire risk and a poison risk.
I tried to find the propellants used by Nauka and the closest I could get was it is a descendant of the TKS spacecraft. That used unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide. 252ppm of UDMH will kill half a rat in 4 hours. I could not find a figure for NTO but I think it is deadly at a few parts per billion.
Space craft designers make sure everything to do with these propellants is outside the pressure hull so someone would have to put on a space suit, go outside and dismantle Nauka to find a ball valve. There are probably several buttons that could be pressed to turn of the thrusters from inside Nauka. At the time the hatch was closed and so that a leak or poor docking seal would show up as a drop in pressure.
Other reports indicate that Nauka wasn't just spinning the station:
"...[Scoville] soon realized that it was not and that Nauka was not only firing its thrusters, but that it was trying to actually pull away from the space station that it had just docked with. And he was soon told that the module could only receive direct commands from a ground station in Russia, which the space station wouldn't pass over for over an hour."
The severity of the situation is summarized by Scoville's later tweet that he had never "been so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached."
Well, here's a toast to the engineers that dealt with the Nauka's excitement with calm and poise.
"And he was soon told that the module could only receive direct commands from a ground station in Russia,"
Seems like a very poor design. I would expect that local control of an approaching craft would be far more responsive than waiting for ground controllers to interpret data. Lacking a qualified pilot (if this was the case), I'd at least like a Big Red Button on the ISS to shut things down.
Failing all of that, just don't do any maneuvering when not in sight of a ground control up/down link.
I could be completely wrong, but to date the impression I have is that NASA and Roscosmos are so utterly intent on presenting what happened as zero-risk, no-danger, nothing-to-see here, that the actual truth of what happened is something we shall not know from them.
Why they're trying to do this I do not know, because it's so staggeringly obvious that uncommanded booster firing is the most extra-ordinarily mind-blowing fuck-up.
So I'm looking at this and it's not even just the cover-up; it's that they seem to be seriously attempting so utterly futile a cover-up.
"Nauka was sent commands by its controllers to not only shut off its engines but also to ensure they wouldn't unexpectedly fire again"
Oh, I know how they did that. I saw a documentary that included the process. A cosmonaut yells "this ess how ve feex tings on Russian space station!" while he hits things with a chunk of pipe.
Granted the documentary was more focused on unconventiomal NASA operations, so the Russian portrayal may have inaccuracies.
I smell a potential Olympic sport here, forget your ollie's, nollie's, shovit's, frontside 180's, backside 180's, and kickflips.... international freestyle space station trick riding. That ought to be suitably free of controversy and considerably more dangerous than anything else on offer. Consider the viewing figures as ISS crashes into pacific
Engines don't fire when they need to, fire when they don't need to. Direct command possible when flying over Russia.
25 Year overdue contraption full of hardware and software bugs. Slap a sticker on the docking hatch 'Return to sender, Defective', undock it, send it back to origin. may it burn up in pieces.
While reading The Reg, I began to chew my first bite of the first hot banana pepper from this year's back-yard crop, just picked and roasted and now on my dinner-plate. I waited in anticipation for the desired capsicum kick as I read the following words:
"Scoville – who wasn't even supposed to be working that day, and was..."
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