The hits just keep coming for the International Space Station (ISS), literally in the case of a resupply mission scheduled for June that is now scrubbed thanks to a heavy equipment incident that damaged the cargo spacecraft. The shipping container for the Cygnus automated cargo ship NG-22 apparently picked up some damage in transit from Northrop Grumman’s Redondo Beach plant in Los Angeles to Florida. Engineers inspected the Cygnus and found that whatever had damaged the container had also damaged the spacecraft, leading to the June mission’s scrub.
Mission controllers are hopeful that NG-22 can be patched up enough for a future resupply mission, but that doesn’t help the ISS right now, which is said to be running low on consumables. To fix that, the next scheduled resupply mission, a SpaceX Cargo Dragon slated for an April launch, will be modified to include more food and consumables for the ISS crew. That’s great, but it might raise another problem: garbage. Unlike the reusable Cargo Dragons, the Cygnus cargo modules are expendable, which makes them a great way to dispose of the trash produced by the ISS crew since everything just burns up on reentry. The earliest a Cygnus is scheduled to dock at the ISS again is sometime in this autumn, meaning it might be a long, stinky summer for the crew.
By now you’ve probably heard the news that genetic testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy. The company spent years hawking their spit-in-a-tube testing kits, which after DNA sequence analysis returned a report revealing all your genetic secrets. This led to a lot of DNA surprises, like finding a whole mess of half-siblings, learning that your kid isn’t really related to you, and even catching an alleged murderer. But now that a bankruptcy judge has given permission for the company to sell that treasure trove of genetic data to the highest bidder, there’s a mad rush of 23andMe customers to delete their data. It’s supposed to be as easy as signing into your account and clicking a few buttons to delete your data permanently, with the option to have any preserved samples destroyed as well. Color us skeptical, though, that the company would willingly allow its single most valuable asset to be drained. Indeed, there were reports of the 23andMe website crashing on Monday, probably simply because of the rush of deletion requests, but then again, maybe not.
It may not have been 121 gigawatts-worth, but the tiny sample of plutonium that a hapless Sydney “science nerd” procured may be enough to earn him some jail time. Emmanuel Lidden, 24, pleaded guilty to violations of Australia’s nuclear proliferation laws after ordering a small sample of the metal from a US supplier, as part of his laudable bid to collect a sample of every element in the periodic table. Shipping plutonium to Australia is apparently a big no-no, but not so much that the border force officials who initially seized the shipment didn’t return some of the material to Lidden. Someone must have realized they made a mistake, judging by the outsized response to re-seize the material, which included shutting down the street where his parents live and a lot of people milling about in hazmat suits. We Googled around very briefly for plutonium samples for sale, which is just another in a long list of searches since joining Hackaday that no doubt lands us on a list, and found this small chunk of trinitite encased in an acrylic cube for $100. We really hope this isn’t what the Australian authorities got so exercised about that Lidden now faces ten years in prison. That would be really embarrassing.
And finally, we couldn’t begin to tote up the many happy hours of our youth spent building plastic models. New model day was always the best day, and although it’s been a while since we’ve indulged, we’d really get a kick out of building models of some of the cars we had an emotional connection to, like the 1972 Volkswagen Beetle that took us on many high school adventures, or our beloved 1986 Toyota 4×4 pickup with the amazing 22R engine. Sadly, those always seemed to be vehicles that wouldn’t appeal to a broad enough market to make it worth a model company’s while to mass-produce. But if you’re lucky, the car of your dreams might just be available as a download thanks to the work of Andrey Bezrodny, who has created quite a collection of 3D models of off-beat and quirky vehicles. Most of the files are pretty reasonably priced considering the work that obviously went into them, and all you have to do is download the files and print them up. It’s not quite the same experience as taking the shrink-wrap off a Revell or Monogram box and freeing the plastic parts from they’re trees to glue them together, but it still looks like a lot of fun.
Plutonium? Wouldn’t it be easier to rip off terrorist and give them a fake bomb full of junk and keep plutonium for his time machine? Or rather his all natural periodic table display?
Or mix your beryllium sample with your uranium sample and wait.
It always seemed silly to me that the ISS requires many tons of propellant every year to keep it in orbit, while at the same time discarding many tons of potential reaction mass as garbage each year. At the same time, it also discharges waste methane from the co2 scrubbing and oxygen recovery process.
Lifting those many tons per year not only costs money, it also displaces other cargo waiting to be lifted up there.
There’s enough excess solar power available to simply toss the garbage overboard with a km/s velocity, leaving enough to burn up on reentry, but at the same time providing plenty of delta-V to keep the station in orbit.
You could get all fancy with pyrolytic conversion and a plasma gasifier, or a linear mass accelerator, but really you need nothing more than a simple gas gun: Load the barrel with refuse, charge up with the waste methane, and just fart it out the backside. From the Russian end of the station, obviously.
Well, you also have to consider that the equipment to accelerate garbage to a km/sec has mass, and that doing so will take considerable energy, which is in limited supply.
i mean gaseous and liquid wastes can be accelerated with a simple arc jet. solid wastes are trickier in that you must send them on trajectories that re-enter. i imagine compacting it and stuffing it into shotgun shells. then just have a guy in a space suit shooting them in the right direction. source: taufledermaus
of course falling short means space debris that might hit you later, and its only a matter of time till the astronauts make a game of trying to hit starlink sats.
Hanging out on the deck shooting at starlings as those satellites will become. That’s an American view of course about those birds.
It’s a gas gun. Charge a receiver with the waste methane. Yes, that takes some compressor power.
Put your garbage in the barrel, add a sabot or wad made of whatever. Close breech. Open other end’s airlock. Then open the gas valve from the receiver to discharge.
It’s just a potato gun.
Add a little oxygen if you want a bit more oompphh.
Kick it out the backside at 1 km/s and it will reenter in 20 minutes doing 7 km/s. No question of it burning up.
The ISS makes about 1 kg of waste per hour. Kick that out the back at 1 km/s and you’ll give the space station a boost of about 0.5 m/s per week.
VASIMR and MPD thrusters are very flexible as to what kinds of reaction mass they run on. Even water vapour is mentioned as a possibility. It sounds like anything that can be ionized can be fuel. They’re also not very big or heavy. In my opinion, station-keeping thrusters that consume garbage are realistic.
Is there something I’m not getting here. Just because the Dragon capsule is reusable doesn’t mean it can’t take the waste back with it. What else is it going to be carrying on the way back down?
I was kind of under the impression that this is what already happened, each cargo mission takes up fresh supplies and brings back down the waste from the last supply.
Not going to do much proliferation with small sizes.
“Color us skeptical, though, that the company would willingly allow its single most valuable asset to be drained.”
Aside from the privacy issues, I can see handing them around like a business asset could cause trust issues for anyone else trying to get into or run a like business.
While I would like to believe that, the majority people have demonstrated over and over that they don’t care at all about their data privacy and, in fact, will actually pay companies to take their data and do with it what they please. But one example pretty much any app that uses GPS data (why?!).