NASA could have averted near DROWNING TERROR in SPACE

inorganic contaminants

Inorganic? Will the cover-ups never cease?

Hoover in space?

With all that lovely vacuum outside?

Could Not Have Prevented

You can't really say something 'could have been prevented'. Well, I guess you can say it, but it doesn't help anything. It isn't really fair that somebody(ies) at NASA have to fall on their own sword and say something they know is patently false. Just so they can appease some Bible thumping Congressperson who sees NASA as nothing more than a potential way to rid the country of poor people by launching them into space.

The ISS is the absolute worst case, nightmare scenario, for fault analysis on anything. As a rule, things beyond the Maintenance Boundary (a physical limit on routine service: space, deep ocean, mountain tops, really deep holes, deserts, dense jungle, etc...) don't have people there as well. People screw everything up.

They don't (usually) do it on purpose, but they do it and nobody knows they are doing it. That's not intended to insult anyone, it's just the way things work. If you are in the same place, constantly, (jail cell, hospital room, interment crypt, submarine, space station) for more than a few days your brain starts fucking with you. Even if you write down each and every action you perform after about five days you start to lose temporal location ability and yesterday becomes the Monday after your shoelace broke (last memorable event is what most people mess up first).

What that all means is that when you start fault analysis you never have a good picture of what is actually happening and 97% of the time it's going to be something mundane, that everybody has been doing for years and it ultimately caused a failure to occur. But it's so mundane nobody realizes they are doing it.

Like bracing their hip on the corner of a cabinet and the cabinet is just a teensy bit loose and is pushing a pipe behind it and the joint sealant on the pipe is crumbling due to mechanical stress and the parts are falling into the filter for the water system and reacting with the bag.

Who knows, and the answer in a situation like this is quite often 'nobody knows and nobody finds out with certainty because it's cost prohibitive. Just replace the drink bags and be done with it'. Hopefully that woks, but it doesn't always happen.

Anyway, so you've got a bunch of Humans having to make themselves as comfy as possible so they're doing 'unintended' things to other things, their sense of time is just broken and for anybody to get good answers they've got to send the broken thing back to Earth which means you can't get good answers. If mechanical failures aren't incredibly obvious at first glance you destroy any real chance of high-confidence analysis if you move the broken thing, at all. Boxing it up and lobbing it through space and back to Earth in a Russian beer can then flying it to Houston (or wherever spacesuits are serviced) pretty much guarantees that good answers can't be found.

There are just too many variables to say with certainty what caused the fault. We make a lot of things that go into high risk systems with all potential failures are catastrophic and I'm comfortable signing off on those things. But I wouldn't sign off with confidence on this issue unless a huge set of data was available to set those variables. I know for a fact the ISS doesn't have the capacity onboard to do that though so a really, really good guess is all you're going to get.

That's guess isn't a function of capabilities or knowledge, the exact opposite actually, it's just the reality of a bunch of top tier engineering challenges coming together at a single point. That's why I don't think NASA should take a beating on this. Nobody should. It's the most unsafe thing in the world to make safety second guesses like that. It creates false assurances that (x) is fixed, now everything is perfectly safe. Well, no, fuck no it isn't. Whatever you've changed has set in motion a new set of events that will lead to failure elsewhere and you've already proven you'll fall on your sword.

The problems in this scenario are made about 500x more complex because small batches of things (like spacesuits) don't lend themselves to good analysis processes. If you've got 1 of something, of huge quantities of something, you can sort a lot of issues with just good quality statistical analysis. But not small batches. There are far too many variables to get useful results.

I'm glad nobody died, but even if they had, it still doesn't justify anyone accepting responsibility for physics and chemistry. It's high risk science and weird wacky things are supposed to happen. It really is rocket science and the idea that anyone is at fault here is unfair, unsafe and unproductive. Besides, now there's a proven process for escaping a spacesuit full of liquid while you're in space. They should call it the 'Parmitano Maneuver'!

Bah!

Simply fit all space helmets with a drain tap in the same place the air regulator goes on a diving helmet.

Helmet fills, tap spills.

Also: improvised thruster application possible.

I see no downside.

Read the damn report before blowing off

Don Jefe's post is complete and 100% bullshit.

If you had actually read the actual report (which is very interesting reading)

http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Suit_Water_Intrusion_Mishap_Investigation_Report.pdf

then you discover that they tracked down all the variables and determined the many things that went into the problem. It's nothing statistical. It's "this happened, that happened, someone did this, and boom" and we have the records of it all.

NASA does this sort of fault analysis all the time. Heck, they do fault analysis BEFORE they build/launch anything to get a grip on the scope of possible problems and how difficult the solutions would be. It's originally borrowed from the processes the USAF used to discover why they now have a smoking crater instead of an airplane.

You'll also discover that the investigators check how many times the drink bags have leaked, and the number has been zero, except for minor droplets when the mouth valve is bumped. As a matter of fact, they get a little annoyed at the number of times they were told this (many) and the number of times they were able to back it up (zero)

They did take the drink bag out afterward and squeeze it, and it didn't leak. You can't do that on an EVA though, because it's inside the suit.

The 1st problem is the suits are not designed for ISS. They were designed to go up in the Shuttle, do a couple EVAs, come back down and get cleaned up & maintained. They weren't designed to go more than 3 weeks w/o work.

How did they get approved for 6mo stays on ISS? "We don't have anything better" - wrong answer.

As a result, the ISS crew does what it can without the specialty tools & knowledge to really do a good job.

The next Dragon flight this month is carrying the first new suit to go up since the Shuttle.

Why was opening the purge valve a last resort? "We think it might damage the suit, we don't know, we've never actually tested it" - wrong answer.

Why was the CO2 sensor dying (because of the water, but they didn't know it) OK? "oh they do that all the time! it's not a problem!" - wrong answer.

The 2nd problem is that nobody knew what the water would do in zero-gee. They thought it would get blown by the fan onto the visor looking like rain on a windshield. They also thought the fan/sep would stall out because that's what it did on the ground. They thought it'd be a visibility problem, and that'd be it.

Instead, in zero-gee, the water collects at the outlet behind the head, then when you get enough, it capillaries onto his head and into his scalp, ears, eyes, nose, etc as it happened. This was a completely different outcome and threw the troubleshooting process out the window.

Mission control dicked around trying to do troubleshooting for too long, but they did finally realize "we don't know WTF is going on, we need to bring him back in"

The rest of the problems are mostly people, like nobody ever talks to the EVA office, therefore the EVA office doesn't talk to anybody else, and the normal organizational issues. One of the issues of course is that there's no funding for improved suits, and since the Shuttle ended, they've lost at least half their suit-experienced personnel. Another issue is you no longer train with flight hardware, so the training isn't completely realistic. People used to work with real suits, but now they only see flight hardware at a distance through a layer of bubblewrap.

This is great news.

Mucking about in space isn't going to get cheap until we move away from this "everything must be triple checked and triple redundant" paradigm. A bit more of a suck it and see attitude to space travel will do wonders for the human race.

The main reason Chris Hadfield is so well known is due to his habit of fucking about on the ISS, during which time he solved at least one long standing scientific problem by putting shit in a bag and shaking the hell out of it.