Hacker News

Oh, so it's a live blog with updates and a dynamic headline.

For every complex, difficult and hard problem, there is a simple, easy and wrong solution.

Paint obviously is not the right tool for making seals air tight.

If you mean on the outside, paints that apply well in vacuum and microgravity probably need to be developed and tested first.

If you mean on the inside, it'd be a lot of time and disruption to devote to maintenance on a station that's already having to spend an increasing amount of time on maintenance instead of science.

The modules have a lot of stuff that has been wired between them over the years, all that would need to be sorted out, consequences understood and more before ever starting the work, and by then it'll be time for the ISS to retire anyway.

Some problems i can see with that:

It might be hard to access the actual pressure hull from the inside (there's probably insulation and padding on top)

If you use paint, you somehow have to get rid of the solvent in it when it dries, which might be a problem when painting a whole module

yeah, why can't they just make astronauts wear goggles, then stop the fans, and tell them to squirt some superglue in the air to let it clog the hole?

Some fire decal while they're at it?

Cardboard's out. No cardboard derivatives.

Paper?

No Paper. No string. No sellotape.

There aren’t even doors between sections. Airlocks are serious things, there is one or two for station for EVA. There are multiple hatches for docking spacecraft.

One of the innovations of ISS is larger docking adapter with bulkhead that is removed after docking. Russian section still uses hatches. All of the cables go through the docking adapter or hatch which makes impossible to close door or quickly disconnect.

Well, I won't claim to know the answer, but "please do not move between different airlocked sections while this work is underway" sounds a lot like the definition of "shelter" to me

If things go wrong, they're already in the vehicle supposed to bring them back. It might be upsetting to be 3 locked doors away from your best way to come back home

There are normally-open air-tight hatches between modules. Various utility connections and air ducts are normally run through the open hatches so it would take a bit of work to disconnect these connections before they could be closed.

Not exactly something you want to be doing under time pressure.

I think the service module is both structurally and functionally critical. If it is failing and you do not know why, catastrophic failure is presumably possible, not just some air loss. A hole or crack in the module is now apparently double the size it was until recently, that is a trend that presumably could continue to rapid unscheduled disassembly.

> Naively, I would assume that there are airlocks between the different sections of the ISS.

There are not. The airlocks on the ISS are either docking modules for spacecraft, for spacewalks, or for deploying satellites.

The crew shelters in the vehicles so that in case of an emergency they can evacuate immediately.

Compression loss can lead to a decompression of sorts if I had to guess... it is a vaccum out there. The force from a decompression can yield a chain reaction or strongly disrupt the entire station.

Hmm? If you mean the capitalization, that’s BBC style.

Do you mean the Bbc?

Agree to precautionary principle. Disagree to certainty of fixing because this is a long standing leak which just doubled in intensity: either it got bigger, or there are more. Either way, we have no reason to be optimistic a bigger leak problem has a faster MTTR or even triage.

Who is the "they" in your post? The ISS is a bit interesting because its a cooperation between NASA and Roscosmos.

There are of course potential failures, but not quite as violent as oceans gate. There is 1 atm of pressure difference between the inside and outside of the ISS. At titanic depths the pressure difference between inside and outside of the submarine was approximately 400 atm.

Thats why the ISS can have small leaks like this that are a problem but not catastrophic like they would be in a deep sea submarine.

Zvezda has been leaking since 2019. That doesn't seem sudden and without warning to me. I imagine its going to continue to leak until the ISS is decommissioned.

They were definitely used on Mir- in 1997 one caught fire, blocking the crew's access to their escape Soyuz, though they put it out.

It looks like NASA helped redesign it to be safer, creating the modern Solid Fuel Oxygen Generator (SFOG) system still in use on the ISS as the backup.

Yes and I believe they do regularly use them on the Russian side, at least.

They were also the cause of a fire on Mir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_EO-23

BBC were reporting 1 of 2 leaks are apparently fixed so it was at least a partial success.

... for now. Problem still being worked.

Recently started an embedded hardware/software job. Shipping firmware to the manufacturer feels like that for the device classes that have no internet.

The Zvezda module has been in orbit since July 2000.

I don't think any crewed interplanetary mission is going to last that long for the foreseeable future.

Sort of like what happened on the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. Engineers on the ground were able to devise a makeshift fix to adapt the control module airscrubber filters to fit the lunar module so the astronauts could shelter in the LM for several days before getting back into the CM and coming home.

Ideally your Mars transit vehicle hasn't been taking 90 minute heating and cooling cycles nonstop for 26 years.

A little off-topic - the movie Stowaway (on Netflix) is a good movie about journey to Mars.

There is less debris around on the way to mars and this is a known and worsening for the ISS due to its age.

A bit of a tangent, but the fictional book "Children of Time" takes this to wild extremes. Really fun read

Seems like these structural integrity problems are always inside the Russian section. So if you're on a Russian mission to Mars, yes it would be reasonable to be worried. Otherwise this seems like a non-issue.

Then you die and go into the history books.

They're not flying to Mars in a 30 year old Russian rust bucket so

Probably better to link to the article, rather than a thread that has 0 comments.

https://www.reuters.com/world/nasa-live-international-space-...

Seeing nothing wrong with it. If journalist follows inverted pyramid, it starts with crucial facts and at the end it can be mostly supplementary information. Seeing this is about "International Space Station", this adds context to why it is called "international" for an ordinary person.

It's complicated. The US Orbital Segment of the ISS consists of modules funded by and built in the US, ESA, and Japan.

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

Several of the US modules were built in Europe by Thales Alenia Space and were transferred to the US in exchange for the US launching the European modules on the Space Shuttle.

Yeah, this is their "live reporting" feed, where updates and context get posted about an in-progress event.

I don't think you'll find that type of language in the more traditionally published/edited articles.

I think it's an attempt to express that the station consists of only two segments: Russian (ROS) and US (USOS), but the US invited its allies to work together on its segment. So parts of the USOS are made in Europe, Canada and Japan, and generally lifted to space by the US, usually on the Space Shuttle.

(All this was pretty lucid of the US, but obviously the Russians did no such thing on their side. The Japanese even managed to get an ISS resupply mission launched on their own vehicle, which is no small achievement, and the ESA did a bunch of good science. And what would space be without the Canadarm :-)

A big motivation behind the creation of the ISS was an attempt to use scientific collaboration to promote peace between the two big opposing super-powers during the war, the URSS (basically Russia's communist empire) and the USA and to focus both nations resources into peaceful space research that could benefit the whole mankind.

Several other countries contributed, in an attempt to include other nations, but for all practical purposes it is an American/Soviet(Russian) project from a more civiled age of international competition. I think its appropriate the article remind us of this. A lot of people wasn't born them, and have no idea that once science had less borders.