Military officers, brilliant scientists, physically fit and operating in perhaps the most demanding environment we've asked of the human body... and all anyone remembers is they dropped the spanner.
Anyone got a link to an official report detailing what happened? The article is kinda light on details, but I assume this is a major mishap that can only happen if multiple things go wrong simultaneously? Everything m they do up there is a precisely choreographed dance so it would be interesting to read a technical report on that.
Yes it's a bit light on details. But they do point out the most important facts, namely what gender the astronauts are and that it has not been officially confirmed whether the tool box contained a 10mm wrench. Personally, that's everything I needed to know about the situation.
An all-female space walk and the last time a toolbag was lost it was a woman...just saying...really plays into stereotypes of women around tools. But it was reported the male astronauts couldn't find a can opener in the kitchen drawer so even stevens!
I know this is really tangential, but one of my favorite lines from cartoons as a kid was from an episode of Pinky and the Brain and it included this kind of wordplay.
Their plan included forming a grunge band, which they called "Frog the Dry Widget" (a play on Toad the Wet Sproket).
Hadn't seen that one, but it is a bit of a meme. I'm not joking about working on cars though - my 2001 Toyota Corolla was full of 10mm bolts, and I have on occasion needed to pick one up from the hardware store only to find an empty spot between the 9mm and 11mm sockets.
Honda dirtbikes were almost exclusively 10mm, which was handy, because you can carry a very limited set of tools/parts and fix basically everything aside from running out of gas.
Imagine being upset by the mere mention of a persons gender. Christ you people are insufferable. Surely there are actually important things to be angry about.
There aren't very many details in that post either.
> During the activity, one tool bag was inadvertently lost. Flight controllers spotted the tool bag using external station cameras. The tools were not needed for the remainder of the spacewalk. Mission Control analyzed the bag’s trajectory and determined that risk of recontacting the station is low and that the onboard crew and space station are safe with no action required.
It's hard to have more failsafes on a single toolbag than "don't let go". The mission was successful (or it seems, partially successful, not due to loss of toolbag); losing the toolbag is the "one thing" that can go wrong without risking the real goal.
I’m not familiar with how the *nauts tether themselves to the station, but I figured it would be something similar to safety tethers when working up high in precarious situations —2 tethers with only 1 allowed to be disconnected at any particular moment. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the same thing were done for anything that they don’t want to float away. But, perhaps that adds more complexity than it’s worth.
Tools don't need to be safe, though; you need to be safe from them. IANAA, but two tethers on your toolbag sounds like a great way to accidentally fuck up the two tethers on yourself.
In this case it worked out fine, but if the tool needed to complete the task was in the tool bag, things would have worked out differently. Bonus points if one of the tools needed to undo what they had started was also in the tool bag that got away.
Why do you assume there's only one toolbag with the necessary tools? There's the kinds of things you have redundancy of (tools, food, computers), to deal with the things you need redundancy for (life, structural integrity, atmosphere).
There's a copypasta floating around - badum tish - giving an account of a particular US astronaut - https://futurism.com/the-byte/russia-threatens-nasa-astronau... - who caused this and a lot of other major problems. Accusations of misinformation, yada yada yada, but it sounds like it might have been a case of the roommate from hell, only in space.
My most charitable interpretation is that the astronaut thought the bag was attached to a tether given that it had a clip - which sadly wasn't attached to anything.
Nobody's perfect and nobody is infallible and that includes highly trained astronauts. Short of this being done on purpose (hard to believe to begin with) I'd just chalk it up to an accident.
"An emotional breakdown" is an odd way to describe burglary, assault, attempted kidnapping, and battery that had been planned out and prepared for following two months of Lisa stalking someone who was sleeping with a guy she'd previously had an affair with.
I'm not suggesting that it's similar in any way to losing a toolbox. Lisa's entire situation was clearly something very different, you're right about that, but an emotional breakdown (while not a precise medical term) is typically used to describe an episode or outburst caused by too much stress/pressure. It's strange to see it used for a series of premeditated crimes that took months, involved lots of planning, careful packing, and a journey of 900 miles by car to reach the victim.
There's a giant swimming pool in Galveston which has a full underwater replica of the ISS for astronaut training. There are other scuba divers that work with the astronauts when they practice maintenance. One of their jobs (like the invisible waiter at a high end restaurant that makes dirty utensils go away) is to "retrieve" anything that the astronauts "put down". Often the maintenance jobs are multi-hour "space walks".
Apparently, it basically happens every training and the divers take great joy in putting the items on the Lost Wall for everyone to see.
> One of their jobs (like the invisible waiter at a high end restaurant that makes dirty utensils go away) is to "retrieve" anything that the astronauts "put down".
This is fascinating. I'm not quite following what is meant by retrieval though. I assume from context the divers aren't retrieving to return the tools to the astronaut, and rather are emulating the drift that occurs in a frictionless vacuum? "Oops I set it 'down' and now it's 200m away".
It seems that much like we become able to delegate tasks like setting down a coffee cup to our subconscious on Earth, after a while in microgravity astronauts become accustomed to "setting things down" in midair. It's could be that just like in a shop on the ground, "where did I set down that wrench" is an issue; an astronaut might "set down" a tool in midair on a spacewalk and forget that they're not in a confined space.
Why not put magnets on the tools handle so they can be quickly anchored near the working space when not in use? Similar to how we would set our tools down in full gravity astronauts could set the tool "down" without it floating away.
That would require nearby surfaces to be ferromagnetic, which generally means steel. I doubt there’s much exposed steel on the outside of the ISS. Steel is crazy heavy compared to other materials like titanium or aluminium, and given the cost of putting mass into space, it’s unlikely there’s much steel at all on the ISS.
I am a layperson but I imagine it would be because then you have magnets capable of moving around the entire craft that you have to consider the interactions of.
Now you've got me genuinely curious -- does something like that exist? A space drone with gas propulsion and a grasping hand?
It seems like it would be "relatively" simple, and useful for basic tasks that don't need a full human.
I mean, now that you mention it, it really seems like that ought to be a thing, and that this would be a perfect use case for it. (Visual inspection of the ISS exterior would be another.)
Practically: it's so expensive to launch anything, much less a cleanup-bot, that it basically isn't done outside of research. This will probably change, but costs are unavoidably high so it'll probably always be rare.
For small near-station use: I'm not sure! Some uses would certainly make sense, but I would be willing to bet that the risk of it going slightly too fast and damaging something makes it undesirable. It'll probably happen eventually, but I'd be a bit surprised if it is already a thing - most that I've seen have been armed machines that "walk" around the surface by grabbing things, which is much slower and safer.
A drone would potentially be an ISS damaging missile. It could cause a whole lot more problems than it might solve. Ever have your foot nailed by an RC car? That times 100.
Also its propulsion gas could also setup oscillations in the station itself. So a lot of math would have to go into counteract this little bee flying around outside the station.
That's true for everything else near that orbit, so the tool bag will probably burn up (well, re-enter anyway) in the atmosphere within a year or two, and be a complete non-issue after the next boost takes it to a permanently-different orbit.
> A space drone with gas propulsion and a grasping hand?
Please, for this application you should use the term, "gripping hand".
To be more substantive: now you mention it I haven't heard of such a device and I also wonder why. Makes sense for inspection (but how much happens?) though retrieving lost tools sound quite difficult.
And though difficult, it seems like something worth becoming good at. Seems like a 1U might be big enough to hold a small drone and some things to retrieve. However you'd have to design your experiment carefully so that something you failed to retrieve would rather soon reenter the atmosphere and not become dangerous orbiting junk. I don't know how easy this would be: what if the drone tried to grab it and added a non-normal (i.e. sideways) component that put the target on a potentially destructive trajectory?
Aside: does the phrase "grasping hand" have a particular meaning in robotics jargon? (Or is there a different reason to avoid that terminology?)
To me a "gripping hand" is intuitively something that continuously holds an item. It might require human intervention to work, such as positioning my camera onto a universal tripod mount. A "grasping hand" (or "grabbing hand") would be something that transitions from empty-handed to holding an item.
In this case the GP is making a reference to "The Mote in God's Eye". An alien species has 2 hands that are similar to humans, but they also have a 3rd arm, which leads them to say, paraphrased, "on the one hand, on the other hand, on the gripping hand" since it's strongest.
>does something like that exist? A space drone with gas propulsion and a grasping hand
>Visual inspection of the ISS exterior
Yes, minus the gripping hand. [0]
"The sphere, which looks like an oversized soccer ball, was released by Mission Specialist Winston E. Scott during the STS-87 spacewalk and flew freely in the forward cargo bay for about 30 minutes."
But going with a humanoid form factor made it overlay ambitious and all that complexity prevented it from being useful for the kinds of basic teleop + grab tasks you're envisioning.
Apparently the howling masses love it when a woman messes up in space. Try to hold your lunch down while reading the comments here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPV9QpC1JtU
Honest question: are the authors tactically baiting the masses and thereby diverting attention from more difficult to answer questions like budget (at the expense of gender equality), or are they really this crude, nothing deeper?
EDIT I mean are they trying to elicit responses like "more men in space" to prevent responses like "less space more healthcare"?
> It reads like "looll some women did something incompetent! get a load of this guys"
I don't think the article was written that way, but I think that it's clear that's how many people would take it.
It'd have been nice if the article had listed multiple examples of things being lost during spacewalks and not just the other time a woman did it - assuming there are other previous examples anyway. Searching for that kind of information now is difficult since search engines just want to push whatever the latest story is. A google search for the word "astronauts" alone returns links to news articles about this incident.
I love that this inevitably gets mentioned on HN literally any time space debris comes up. I found out about it because of HN, and it turned out to have been very meaningful for me. I'm very grateful for that.
Probably just regular stuff but of a high enough quality that we'd consider sending it to space? Defense and space equipment procurement is usually a lot more expensive than normal because 1) companies exploit the bidding system 2) you really don't want a screw driver that fails when you're re-attaching a solar panel to something floating in LEO since the run to the local Lowe's is going to be quite expensive.
There's an old "just so" story that still pops up from time to time about how US astronauts found that normal ball point pens don't work without gravity, so NASA spent $bignum to have a contractor develop a "space pen." But the Russians used a pencil! Haha, look at these inefficient US government programs!
Except it turns out that (a) the US did originally use pencils; and (b) the last things you want floating around a space station is conductive, flammable grit. Like pencil graphite.
And also, a lot of it is low volume stuff, and fixed costs in manufacturing are huge. The reason the tools you buy at the home improvement store are cheap is because the fixed costs are spread out over thousands to millions of units. Design/labor/fixturing/tooling/etc can be brutal for low volumes.
If you want to build a single Lego, the tooling could cost you hundreds of thousand of dollars.
Not to mention that the mere act of sending it to space costs $30,000 per pound of payload, so it was probably $10k of quality tools totaling 3lbs of weight.
You're getting voted down but this is a pretty good question!
I had a tool kit in the Marines that was a basic split case with DeWalt looking hand tools and a soldering kit in it. The thing cost somewhere on the order of $60k and replacing individual parts was often more expensive than the sum of the collection. I constantly had to inventory the thing every time I took it out and I'd never let anyone use my tools or leave them laying around.
The reason is that military tools and parts are built according to a spec and often in batches. That spec has to be reaffirmed for every batch and is often specified within the item spec. There's pretty normal specs in there like size and thread count, but then there's other that require destructive testing like tensile strength, material composition, heat tolerance, etc... When you make a big order the price per unit is pretty cheap because one destroyed item per item in the collection is amortized across the rest of them. When you order a single one they make one plus one for each destructive test.
One of the most memorable examples I can think of is that I operated a special truck in Afghanistan that cost ~$1.5M. In order to build and deploy that one truck they built 4 more including all internals and hit it with rockets, explosives, and bullets to durability test the configuration of the internals. In the end, one $1.5M truck is actually $7.5M in order to ensure the safety of everyone inside.
"That tool bag, valued at $100,000, circled the planet for months until meeting its fiery end after plunging to Earth and disintegrating. Experts believe last week's missing tool bag will share the same fate as it hurtles in the upper atmosphere, which has become increasingly littered."
That makes no sense. Its like they are saying it burning up will 'litter' the upper atmosphere. I assume they meant to say that it being in orbit as debris is the litter, but I'd doubt it will be up there long due to its altitude and density.
It's clumsily written. They combined two unrelated truths into the same sentence. It should have read
> Experts believe last week's missing tool bag will share the same fate. It's currently hurtling through the upper atmosphere, which has become increasingly littered.
This isn't saying that the toolbag has become litter in the upper atmosphere, but that the upper atmosphere, in general, has become littered by other things.
There is a rumour that several years ago some tools were dropped on purpose. Because astronaut did not liked to stay on orbit, and he/she wanted to return to Earth ahead of schedule.
Are you sure that's not a half-remembered version of Russian propaganda[1], where they tried to blame NASA Astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor with drilling holes into a Russian spacecraft, ostensibly so she could get sent back to earth early for medical treatment?
They were trying at the time to deflect blame for what were clearly Russian manufacturing defects (especially in hindsight, given the number of defects and accidents Roscosmos have been responsible for lately).
