Even if you’re not normally interested in what’s happening in low Earth orbit, you probably heard that last week NASA ordered its personnel aboard the International Space Station to button themselves up in the docked Dragon spacecraft and await further instructions should they need to make a hasty departure. Known as Safe Haven, this emergency procedure is performed whenever there’s an elevated risk of damage to the Station.
NASA has provided an update on what happened, but it arguably leaves more questions than answers. Usually, crews go to their Safe Haven because some bit of space junk has wandered to close to the orbiting complex, but this time it was because Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev were getting ready to start cutting into the walls of the PrK transfer tunnel in an effort to address its persistent air leak.
After about an hour and a half, the Russians called off the effort and NASA gave their people the OK to leave the Dragon and return to their normal duties. NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens later posted on social media that the space agency would “look forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative approach to address the leaks” in the future. There’s currently no word on what a future repair attempt may entail, or when it would be attempted.
This is one of those things were we might not hear the full story for some time, but it sure does sound like not only did the Russians want to do something that NASA didn’t think was safe, but that the whole thing was sprung on them at the last moment. To give you an idea of how serious Mission Control was taking the situation, they decided to cram five people into a Dragon capsule that only has four seats — it certainly would have made for one wild ride down to Earth if they were given the order to evacuate.
What do you want to bet there were some frantic international calls taking place while the astronauts were hiding out in their designated lifeboat?
This was a planned maintenance event on the part of Roscosmos; NASA knew all about it and provided procedural input long beforehand. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment “emergency” but a repair to fix a long-standing problem. They have been “band-aiding” it for years because of what needed to be done. This “evacuation” was done out of an abundance of caution and there’s nothing “scandalous” about it.
The module in question has been there for a long time – it was one of the first – just another sign that the station is sadly showing its age.
I can’t wait until we finally get rid of this piece of space junk. Billions upon billions of dollars poured into the ISS and what are its scientific gains? If that money was spent on Earth, we could’ve had 5th generation NPPs; electric cars with 2000+ km range, 1000 core CPUs or impact power tools the size of a pencil. Instead we keep propping up this old bit of cold-war dick measuring contest that was cojoined after The Wall fell in 1990s.
Yes, all those dollars just vented into space, not a penny invested in technology and skills development on earth. And the shocking cost: Almost one percent of the daily expenditure to secure that strait in the gulf. You’re absolutely on the money — it’s an awful misallocation of resources.
Tell that to the Iranian people and the future free world that will need to deal with this terrorist regime for the next 4 decades if nothing is done. Tell that to the Israeli people in 20 years, oh wait there won’t be any people in Israel because the area is inhabitable due to radiation, not to mention the massive number of people nuked. Tell that to the people of Europe and the rest of the Middle East who will live in fear of getting nuked every day in the future. God you people are so short sighted – or just maybe you want this? It’s sick…
Keep politics out of HAD!
Stand down, stop reflexively frothing, and re-calibrate your sarcasm detector.
The point is that the money spent on the ISS are spent right here at home paying good salaries to people, play a role in developing technical skills, and are a pittance compared to other costs.
There is the question of whether that’s the most efficient way to allocate a finite pool of funds, but that applies to those other expenditures too.
You know, NK can already nuke us. And in theory Iran could have used tons of chemical and biological weapons against Israel and anybody else, since those are easy to make and well within their skill. (yeah, there is the technicality that they’d be nuked if they did that.)
Also: Free world? What is this free world you speak of? Where is it located? A secret you say? How do you get invited? Are those UAP’s the transports to it?
Last remark, the only reasons people complain about the attack on Iran are twofold, one is that Iran is an enemy of Israel, and there are so freaking many jew-haters that you wonder if they got the world population count right.. And secondly because Tr*mp did it.
Oh and he didn’t do the usual BS preamble to get the public riled up, true enough.
Well, if for some reason there arent israeli people, one can safely say they definitely had it coming.
The hell are you talking about? If we didn’t have one space station we would have invented magic? This reads like the “you only use 1% of your brain” monologues
Maybe it’s his way of showing that if we didn’t spend the equivalent of SpaceX’s burn rate on space stuff, we could afford to give everyone a decent science education.
Or maybe be able to pay for gigabit fiber to the home for everybody, so we didn’t have to launch all those satellites with their ridiculously expensive upkeep.
Also I assume you mean when the soviet union fell, the berlin wall fell a while before that
Soviet Union didn’t fall, they just decided to disband it.
But I suppose that clashes with the US’s we ‘won’ the cold war nonsense.
CCCP went bankrupt, in its final days you were hard pressed to find anything to eat in moscow.
I agree with part of your post. The science results form the ISS mostly center around finding out how humans degrade in space. Even the antimatter search with the AMS has yet to give any definitive results. It sure has detected a lot of particles though.
I’m sure that there are a lot of smaller scientific results but nothing profound in my judgement. When you search for scientific results from the ISS the first entry is on Wiki, the second is NASA. I’m sure the NASA site is full of glowing reports.
One small point, the money was spent on earth. Just not in ways that “might” have made more impact.
Cheers.
RE: billions upon billions —-> https://technology.nasa.gov/patents
The more often I read such comments the more I’m convinced that colonization of the american continent was a mistake.
Imagine how the present would be if Kolumbus didn’t go there and how the
$$$ could have ben spent in better ways.
The native Americans would be a lot happier. I’m certain they think it was a mistake.
Cheers.
i want to see a movie set in that alternative timeline
it would be in bombs or somewhere in private stock papers.
You forgot to add: anti gravity, taps that pour out liquid gold, cure for all disease and a pill for eternal life, maybe even a cure for the common cold; that doesn’t do more harm than good.
Oh and and we could have ended the scourge called religion. And invented FTL travel (or was that implied in the anti-gravity thing already?)
Sounds plausible
Dont be so dramatic, the money spent on the ISS is a drop in the sea compared to the amounts of money the us military burns through annually.
When You are RIGHT….. Everyone can see your works.
Door Plug is just the simple tell of the garbage you as a collective have been up to.
You can’t delete MY IDEA.
But you can try.