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One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected

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Re: One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected

#161

Post by tachyonbeam »

onethought wrote: post #95
snoshy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largely because it's a fantastically expensive undertaking, and hasn't quite borne out the fruits that were speculated about over the years. USA provides a huge bulk of the funding, expertise, and personnel required to keep the program running. That's not to say that Russia, Canada, Japan, etc. don't do their part, but it's really not as much of a truly global joint effort as you might be led to believe. Then there's…

The problem with Privatised space industry is your country doesn't control the agenda. SpaceX is a pretty rare thing, the rest of the private space industry (Blue Origin, Virgin, Boeing) is as much of a money pit as NASA was. Then you have rapidly progressing government run space programs like China and India. The fact that the US banned China from the ISS and banned Non-Americans from participating in what it deems…

Electron Labs are a successful competitor to SpaceX in the satellite launch space. They don't have the same capabilities, but they are much more cost effective than Boeing. Virgin Orbit also just successfully launched a satellite with a rocket attached to an airplane. I think it's possible we could see more serious competitors to SpaceX given enough time.

Re: One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected

#162

Post by arthurcolle »

codesnik wrote: post #160
arthurcolle wrote: post #142

Can they duct tape it from outside?

from inside should be better for actually keeping air from leaking. I wonder why it isn't working 100% well

Doesn't that depend on how the crack is forming, from outside or from inside? Gosh, can you imagine being in space and knowing there's a crack? I'd be so stressed. But the Russian dude said that the integrity is within acceptable limits or something, so I guess they can just do some calculations and feel confident.

Still, it must be intimidating to know that you are performing your own due diligence for the very fabric of your own life-support systems.

Re: One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected

#163

Post by curiousllama »

lordlic wrote: post #140
curiousllama wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don’t control the agenda True, but not really in the way you describe. The US is the main (often, the only) customer of US space companies. If you control the money, you control the operational agenda. If you want a a new ISS? Just write up the contract. The way in which you don’t control the agenda is only inasmuch as the strategic interests of the space company diverges from those of the US govt. But typicall…

Gigadollar-scale space projects seem like a particularly poor fit for the private industry model, though. Conventionally the idea of free-market competition is that companies stand to gain if they succeed but have to eat the losses if they fail, and so competition eventually selects the best. But we're not talking about making widgets or sandwiches or launch vehicles. Things like the ISS, JWST, etc are all one-off pr…

>Things like the ISS, JWST, etc are all one-off projects, and they cannot be allowed to fail

True

> "Public bad private good" isn't a coherent strategy

Also true

Still, an infinite series of one-off projects comprise a continuous market. If SpaceX royally screws up one project, then yes, the public is left holding the bag _on that project_. But you know who's getting a lot fewer projects? SpaceX.

A federal gov't monopoly isn't the answer, just as abolishing NASA isn't the answer. Both are good. But... SpaceX is proving they can launch cheaper, quicker, and just as safely - isn't that a thing worth encouraging?

Re: One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected

#164

Post by rurounijones »

qayxc wrote: post #79
enraged_camel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's not just the getting things into space that's the hard and costly part. Modules take years to design, build, and test. Using the traditional approach, yes. But SpaceX is proving that there are other approaches that yield fruit far faster and also for drastically less money.

Well, how many space stations have SpaceX designed so far? And what, pray tell, is the "traditional approach" in designing space stations compared to magical "approaches that yield results faster"? Are you aware that Skylab was designed, built, and launched in under 4 years and consisted of a converted Saturn-IVB rocket stage? The total program cost was $275M per year over 8 years (including design, 4 stations, 4 Sky…

> And what, pray tell, is the "traditional approach" in designing space stations compared to magical "approaches that yield results faster"?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the huge amount of work done to keep things light, thin, self-contained and fit within existing payload bay sizes and can be constructed with minimum number of launches.

If launch costs drop through the floor there is less need for that.

You could build heavier, more robust stations because mass to orbit prices are so low. You could build it without having to minimise the number of launches. You could have much bigger and heavier sections sent up in pieces and built "on-site" so to speak.

Much easier to consider when the price to move those heavy components up to space orders of magnitude cheaper and launches take place daily / weekly.

(Yes I know I am glossing over a lot of things here).

Re: One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected

#165

Post by geocrasher »

rcthompson wrote: post #145
tomcam wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... my first encounter with "IANAMS" in the wild. Assume it means "I am not a materials scientist"? I like it.

Part of the joke is that's it's NASA. (NASA stands for Not A Standard Acronym, of course.)

Brings my mind to the ultimate acronym: PCMCIA

People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

Re: One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected

#166

Post by geocrasher »

WalterBright wrote: post #155
taneq wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A can of this should do it: https://www.holtsauto.com/holts/products/tyreweld/

Or maybe that sealant Flex Seal they advertise on TV that you can make a boat from :-)

Can you imagine the infomercial mileage they'd get out of that?

Re: One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected

#167

Post by chaboud »

coryrc wrote: post #110
HenryKissinger wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we invented a material that is resistant to these thermal cycles indefinitely, or at least within a range of temperatures of several thousand degrees? I'm never going to have my own Star Destroyer if we continue to use subpar materials.

Steel, below a certain loading (err, ~20% of max fatigue?) does have indefinite life.

Climbers and riggers should all be familiar with fatigue limits.

It can be as high as 50% max tensile strength for steel, but I use 30% as my working figure when rigging, and I regularly re-inspect and age-retire gear (at least use annualized color coded markings).

When I’ve rigged circus in the past I’ve taken to replacing aluminum gear I find with steel, especially if it’s going to be installed for a while.

That said, I climb on aluminum. I just age out my equipment. I’d hate for my last thought to be “huh... I guess aluminum really does degrade with repeated stress.”

Re: One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected

#168

Post by WalterBright »

geocrasher wrote: post #166
WalterBright wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe that sealant Flex Seal they advertise on TV that you can make a boat from :-)

Can you imagine the infomercial mileage they'd get out of that?

Full Disclosure: I have no financial interest in flex-seal.

My general experience with glues is I'll use bolts. I can't get superglue to stick anything together other than my fingers. My rear view mirror fell off again, the third time I glued it on with superglue.

Re: One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected

#169

Post by lordlic »

WalterBright wrote: post #137
lordlic wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, etc can build the ISS but they can't raise it to a higher orbit? Honestly, this cheering for privatization of space research is getting out of hand.

I'm saying that the bill for NASA doing it would be 10x what a free market operation could do it for.

It's not too expensive for governments to do it, and it doesn't have to be private enterprise. Neither of those things are true. Nor is it even clear that it would be cheaper to contract with some private provider to boost the ISS than for the space agencies to figure it out themselves with the launch vehicles they have. How do you think NASA, ESA, etc build rockets anyway? They contract with Lockheed, Boeing, Airbus, Northrop, and others to build them. Having the whole operation be under the auspices of SpaceX doesn't do much other than make other governments more reluctant to help fund it.

Re: One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected

#170

Post by redis_mlc »

curiousllama wrote: post #163
lordlic wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gigadollar-scale space projects seem like a particularly poor fit for the private industry model, though. Conventionally the idea of free-market competition is that companies stand to gain if they succeed but have to eat the losses if they fail, and so competition eventually selects the best. But we're not talking about making widgets or sandwiches or launch vehicles. Things like the ISS, JWST, etc are all one-off pr…

>Things like the ISS, JWST, etc are all one-off projects, and they cannot be allowed to fail True > "Public bad private good" isn't a coherent strategy Also true Still, an infinite series of one-off projects comprise a continuous market. If SpaceX royally screws up one project, then yes, the public is left holding the bag _on that project_. But you know who's getting a lot fewer projects? SpaceX. A federal gov't mono…

> SpaceX is proving they can launch cheaper, quicker, and just as safely - isn't that a thing worth encouraging?

No because there isn't a launch demand large enough to justify what SpaceX is trying to perfect, and all of Musk's projects are welfare queens.

HNers confuse the entertainment value of watching rockets get reused with actual space delivery - which is exactly backwards.

If you're confused by the above, what is SpaceX going to do with their launch capacity after Starlink?

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