The Day the Space Station Lurched

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/international-space-station-unexpected-shift/619631/

by NotSwift • 5 years ago

40 22 5 years ago

What a generous universe to give us a second gentle reminder in such short time that end-to-end software testing is important.

robbedpeter• 5 years ago

I'm not sure why Russian technology is trusted. This is the latest of several screw-ups in the last 5 years, ranging from sabotage to incompetence to bad software coming out of Russia.

It's not that their technology isn't cutting edge or valid. They simply aren't accountable to the same rigor that NASA imposes in the US. They're playing by different rules and there's no mutual recourse for misconduct or malice. National pride and reputation is all well and good, but the ISS mission deserves better.

"Oops, we killed the ISS, guess we'll do better next time" isn't something that should be so frequent a possibility.

unionpivo• 5 years ago

because they are co owners of the station. US can't just decide to not let Russians on it.

Clewza3133• 5 years ago

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Soviet/Russian space program has a much better track record than the US: the US accounts for 15 of 19 spaceflight fatalities, and 9 of 11 training or test fatalities (including 1 for Virgin, not NASA).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...

In fairness, the US has flown around 2.5x more people into space, but the Soyuz also ferried a whole lot of them up and down.

DocTomoe2• 5 years ago

The same rigor as NASA, huh? The same NASA that lost an orbiter and crew because of political pressure to launch under non-optimal circumstances, and another orbiter and crew because they fell prey to normalization of deviance when it came to damage assessment?

Space is hard, incredibly hard. We can only guess how hard space is. And all we can do, as spacefarers, is to be better. That's the same process we used to make flight safer, and it will work with space.

carlmr• 5 years ago

They're playing by different rules and there's no mutual recourse for misconduct or malice.

Does Russian have recourse for misconduct or malice from NASA? If not then I think it's a situation where both parties have skin in the game and are trying their best. Mistakes happen, and it would be counterproductive to assume malice without evidence.

If you want to make your point, I'd at least expect some kind of statistical analysis of accident frequency vs number of contributions, and then doing an analysis if there is a significant deviation in the distribution.

My null hypothesis is that the frequency of mistakes/accidents is roughly proportional to the number of modules contributed by each nation.

n_f• 5 years ago

the whole concept of the ISS is pretty crazy-- humans have had people in space there almost continuously for decades

iso1631• 5 years ago

Mir was occupied continuously from 1989 until August 1999. There was then an interlude until November 2000 when permanent occupation of ISS began.

It's a shame in a way that Mir didn't hang on for an extra 18 months

DocTomoe2• 5 years ago

In all fairness, Mir soldiered on way longer than it was designed to, and in the last year or two had basically constant issues.

ypcx• 5 years ago

And just like that, we've been set back by 10 years in waiting for a chair at the Milky Way Galactic Federation of Planets, which requires a 100 year continued presence of humans in space.

yeuxardents• 5 years ago

Skylab is pretty cool, occupied for half a year in the 1973, much earlier than I had known we had people hanging out in orbit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab

gregoriol• 5 years ago

A whole new level of chaos monkey

LeoPanthera• 5 years ago

"Lurched" is borderline clickbait. The astronauts on board didn't even notice the station was rotating until they were told.

avnigo• 5 years ago

Agreed, but apparently the situation was more serious than initially reported, according to the NASA flight director [0] and his interview [1].

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/sp...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/science/nasa-space-statio...

The Day the Space Station Lurched

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