Ummm…

Really?

Astronauts were woken during the night to continue the hunt for an air leak on the International Space Station (ISS).

Crew members have been hunting for the source over several weeks. (Bold mine)

But the search was stepped up a notch when the size of the leak appeared to grow on Monday; this erroneous reading turned out to have been caused by a temperature change onboard the ISS.

Full article, HERE.

Ya know, having that O2 up there is just a ‘tad’ important. It’s not like they can open the door and get more! And to take WEEKS to trace it? A friend made this comment- The last coat of varnish and Olga’s toenails must have finally worn off of the outer shell of plywood in the Russian module. 

Why yes, he has spent time in Russia…

I think if I were up there, that’d be pretty cotton pickin’ high on my To Do list!  Sigh…

Comments

Ummm… — 17 Comments

  1. “the leak appeared to grow on Monday; this erroneous reading turned out to have been caused by a temperature change onboard the ISS.”

    So WHY did the temperature change? This ‘erroneous reading’ reeks of ‘nothing to see here’, ‘these aren’t the droids you’re looking for’.

    Sigh. I suppose it’s too cold to cover the exterior in soapy water to see where the bubbles form. And why do I have the feeling they might find more than one hole if they did that?

    Hey Georgi, pass the duct tape.

  2. It was a VERY small leak, apparently smaller than the losses by space walks and other similar operations. I don’t know the source of the temperature change, but I imagine that even a small change in orientation relative to the Sun can make a big difference. I know that the small sats I design work in ‘rotisserie’ mode because of it. Actually thermal is one of the biggest issues we have to work on, second to power from the panels.

  3. Breathing is optional. At least, that’s been the Russkie’s apparent slogan since the early days of space travel. Of course, that stance hasn’t held up so well.

  4. Having spent a fair amount of time chasing small leaks, including vacuum leaks, it’s not as easy as it looks. If the leak is small enough, it may be better to live with it. Yes the idea of living on a “leaky” space station is unnerving, but it just might not be worth fixing at this time. Monitor for sure, but don’t tear the place apart looking for a tiny leak. On the other hand, Russians.

  5. Then there was the “sabotage” furor a while back, where they said someone had drilled holes in the outer skin. Last I heard they were trying to blame it on some worker at the factory, though it was never explained why the holes hadn’t been noticed for years until suddenly it was a big deal.

    I still haven’t figured out why NASA has a larger budget than some countries, yet we’re reduced to a time-share on a Russian space station NASA can’t even get to without renting a ride on a Russian or private contractor rocket.

    Well, since we now have the redundant and useless “US Space Force”, maybe NASA will be de-funded and their budget moved over there. I don’t expect the USSF to do anything useful either, but at least they’d be a different group of do-nothings. NASA never really recovered from its “cost-plus” Space Race days when price was no object; they’ve spent the last half century trying to persuade Congress to turn the money tap back on instead of doing their job with the budget they had, which would have been more than adequate except it was mostly eaten up by bureaucratic overhead. That’s 17,000 Federal employees who aren’t building the Wheel or Moonbase.

    • Well, the ISS is mostly bought, built and assembled by the US. So, really, the whole International thing is more ‘we built space hotel and laboratory and hired cheap foreign labor to run it, and, oh, yeah, the most critical parts (life boats, powerplant) are built oversees by drunken idiots…’

      As to ridesharing? Politics. Politics all. Clinton killed any mini-shuttle possibilities of just crew transfer vehicles and lifeboat use.

      The last president killed the Ares-Orion which was about a year away from carrying passengers up to ISS orbit, with heavy lift in 4-5 years. And then Barky the Lightbringer tried to bring it all back with the SLS with the same Orion that was almost ready at the beginning of his term…

      Though, sadly, all the possible ‘get people into space’ programs that aren’t SpaceX are still just years away. NASA’s SLS, Blue Origins and their New Glen, Sierra Nevada and their Dreamchaser, Boeing and their Starliner (used to be CST100.)

  6. No definition of what was considered a small leak. Ultrasonic leak detectors have a rather high detection limit. We used a mass spec to find leaks on the PPPL fusion reactor because of the low volumes.

  7. All- Thanks for the comments. TRX- That was Soyuz, and it was traced to ONE hole that was apparently accidental and ‘filled’ to keep bosses from finding out.

    Posted from my iPhone.

  8. Temperature lowers due to lower pressure. Simple.

    As to the leak, most likely it’s a leak between modules. It could be the Hollywood style leak we always see, that is, some foreign object damage, but my bet is on a seal between a module. Most likely either a ‘European’ module or a straight-up Russian module has the leaky seal.

    Too bad they can’t do something like blanket all the modules in some sort of sealing foam blanket. Or wrap all joints in a multi-layer patch and fill the space between the wrap and the joint with some expanding foam like what was to be used on the inflatable Bigelow station pieces. (Another sad loss to the space community, that is the loss of Bigelow Aerospace.)

  9. Beans- ‘Supposedly’ isolated to the Russian module… supposedly… That’s a name out of the past!

  10. Hey Old NFO;

    Russian Quality…When quantity is a quality all its own. I’ll be glad when we have our own space station

  11. About 20 years ago when I lived in Dallas I had a friend who was a banker who had originally come from Russia years ago when they had to sneak out. He had lived in the US for over 40 of his 70 years and he tried to explain Russian humor to me. This was his joke, silly Russian humor.

    In the 1970’s the Russians decided they want to compete on the international lever with production of automoblies so they sent spy to the Mercedes factory in West Germany to learn how to make a better car. What they discovered was the special test German did with new production cars, they would put a cat in a Mercedes for a month and when they came back if the cat was still alive they would know the doors were not sealed up well enough and the doors were leaking. Excellent idea so they went back to Russian and they decided that they would put a cat in a new car and if they checked in a month and the cat had escaped the car was not sealed up well enough.

    And that I was told was Russian humor.