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What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

arstechnica.com

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Re: What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

#131

Post by BobaFloutist »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #28
wantsanagent wrote: post #17

If you hate the format of these kinds of article let me summarize: Guy builds an experiment, flies it, it doesn't work, requests more time to get it working, is denied, threatens 'not to come back', goes into a depression, worries crew that he'll open the door to space, eventually granted more time to work on the experiment, gets it working. There are consequences for letting this kind of person fly and dealing with…

> If you hate the format of these kinds of article You mean long-form articles? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-form_journalism I don't think the problem is with the format, but with your expectations. Somehow you were expecting a straight answer to the question in the title; instead, it's a detailed look into the incident and the context around it.

To be honest, I find feature articles exhausting. I just want the information, not everything has to be narrative!

Re: What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

#132

Post by gumby »

justrealist wrote: post #81
gumby wrote: post #71

> On the second day of the mission, Wang floated over to his experiment and sought to activate the Drop Dynamics Module. But it didn't work. He asked the NASA flight controllers on the ground if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. Every crew member has a detailed timeline, with a long list of tasks during waking hours.…

> Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed How many experiments got aborted so he could spend the time to get his pet project working?

Indeed, I was thinking of this too when I wrote my comment.

It's natural to tightly schedule people when you think of the mission cost in $/minute. The problem is too tight a schedule is an engineering problem related to other ones we know like too thin a supply chain, too small a cache etc.

You need to put slack in your schedule to account for unplanned events -- the whole point of having humans there is to be able to respond to unplanned events, right?

Startups go into crunch mode when certain deadlines approach, but knowingly abandon other goals in the process (when companies don't, you end up in a death march). These missions are short enough that crunch is valid -- but another way of restating my point is: shouldn't the goal be that as many of the experiments you paid to get into orbit actually happen?

Re: What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

#133

Post by lupire »

gadders wrote: post #130
wantsanagent wrote: post #17

If you hate the format of these kinds of article let me summarize: Guy builds an experiment, flies it, it doesn't work, requests more time to get it working, is denied, threatens 'not to come back', goes into a depression, worries crew that he'll open the door to space, eventually granted more time to work on the experiment, gets it working. There are consequences for letting this kind of person fly and dealing with…

>>There are consequences for letting this kind of person fly and dealing with mental health while on a mission, but that's the basic plot. See also the woman that (allegedly) tried to drill holes in the ISS so she could return to earth early.

Speculation at best. Russian propaganda at worst.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9897471/NASA...

Also what is "the kind of person" who develops a blood clot in orbit"?

Re: What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

#134

Post by gumby »

munchler wrote: post #76
gumby wrote: post #71

> On the second day of the mission, Wang floated over to his experiment and sought to activate the Drop Dynamics Module. But it didn't work. He asked the NASA flight controllers on the ground if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. Every crew member has a detailed timeline, with a long list of tasks during waking hours.…

> The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet. That is a justification, but surely not the only one. For example, humans will eventually want to colonize the moon and other planets.

I'm interested in science so am only interested in robots which are demonstrably far more appropriate for the work: the evidence is pretty clear from Voyager to Webb to Ingenuity and so on.

If we want to colonize far away planets, much less other solar systems and ultimately galaxies, why send a human when a robot is far more appropriate to the problem?

Most of the science humans do in orbit is about keeping humans alive in orbit. Important, if you think putting humans in space is important. I don't, apart from tourism and other recreation. Let the private sector pay for that while government research can do the important stuff of value to all humanity.

Re: What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

#136

Post by aquova »

wackget wrote: post #67

When did Ars Technica start splitting articles into multiple pages? I thought that stupid trend died out 10 years ago. It just results in me abandoning the article on page 1.

I've always been confused on when they do and don't break it into pages. If I go to the article now, it's all in one long page, but under certain circumstances, like if I view the comments then go back up, it's in pages.

Re: What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

#137

Post by grow2grow »

prewett wrote: post #26

The article was interesting, but wow, reading that page used up 20% of my battery and required a reboot stop whatever it was causing excessive lag throughout the OS. I’ve noticed news sites are basically unusable on mobile. Sure I’m using an iPhone 7, but it’s fine for every other use except news site. If even Ars is this user hostile, I think I have to consider news sites as fundamentally user-antogonistic, and not…

This is why I read the comments before the article, and this is one of the rare exceptions where I've posted prior to reading an article.

Re: What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

#138

Post by gumby »

Robotbeat wrote: post #85
Denvercoder9 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet. This was pre-Challenger, back then we also flew with humans because (we believed) they were more versatile and cheaper than robots.

They ultimately are, if we manage to get launch costs down. Starship is a second crack at trying to do what Shuttle failed to do with affordable space access (for both humans and payloads).

An ironic comment for someone called "Robotbeat" :-)

Robots have been traveling to Mars for over 60 years. Humans? Maybe another 60. And most of the mass sent won't even be the humans, but all the support crap they need.

And Pluto, or the heliopause? What human is going to hang out for half a century to go there?

Re: What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

#139

Post by gumby »

stcredzero wrote: post #112
gumby wrote: post #71

> On the second day of the mission, Wang floated over to his experiment and sought to activate the Drop Dynamics Module. But it didn't work. He asked the NASA flight controllers on the ground if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. Every crew member has a detailed timeline, with a long list of tasks during waking hours.…

The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet. JAXA did an experiment, where a volunteer teleoperated a device with a 1 second lag. If there's enough demand, human labor could fill the gap with teleoperation for any station out to the near side of the Moon, and machine learning looks like it will be able to pick up the rest of the slack. If we go any farther,…

You don't need to be so dramatic ("rebel and exterminate their biological forbears" lol). Robots are perfect for interstellar probes; for example they can go to sleep indefinitely and can easily recharge at the destination with solar.

We are traveling on a spaceship for which we are perfectly adapted (unless we set fire to it, which we are in the process of doing). Why not send our robot progeny to do the unpleasant work for us?

Re: What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

#140

Post by lupire »

wiredfool wrote: post #97
_Algernon_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalism is intended to inform, which is why the inverted pyramid[1] is a thing. Withholding the important information is, IMHO, bad journalism. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

The whole point of the inverted pyramid was that editors/layout people could chop off the article at any point to fit the space available and have it still make sense, back when newspapers were laid out in columns and on physical pages. It's not an idealized platonic form information transfer.

"Studies of 19th-century news stories in American newspapers, however, suggest that the form spread several decades later than the telegraph, possibly because the reform era's social and educational forces encouraged factual reporting rather than more interpretive narrative styles.[2]"
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