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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?

#191

Post by anon25783 »

picadores wrote: post #86

NASA seems to have a long standing tradition of sweeping problems under the rug. No skylab mutiny, no depressed payload specialists, all fine here gentleman, nothing to see here. I always wondered why this is written that way. To protect the organisation? But the human part of us all is part of that organization, to disacknowledge that is literally inhumane. Because they are funded by taxpayer dollars and should scre…

Is it so shocking that a government agency might take an inhumane approach to managing their public image?

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

#192

Post by JohnBooty »

mattjaynes wrote: post #98
GeoAtreides wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res" where the story starts at a heightened moment of tension, then abruptly stops and rewinds to go back to fill in details of how they got to this exciting moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res Sometimes it's done to great effect, like in Fight Club (film starts with him at the climax with a gun in his mouth, then rewinds and tells the story). How…

    I see this a lot on Youtube.
Purely subjectively, I find it way more egregious and annoying on Youtube (because YT won't monetize shorter articles) and less convenient to skim past if you don't like the structure of the video.

    You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or 
    poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited 
    for the detour, then it's done well
I was a maybe little frustrated here, but we already know the ending of the story, right? The guy did return from space. The guy did not open the hatch and kill the crew. Pretty sure we'd all remember that.

So with that in mind I thought the detour into "what brought this dude to the point where he was refusing commands from Mission Control" was quite welcome.

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

#193

Post by gumby »

rbanffy wrote: post #165
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. What is the point of space exploration if humans can't go? A robot can say a lot about radiation, wind speed, soil composition, and so on, but it can't tell you how it feels to look down into the Great Red Spot and picture a dozen Earths inside it. Or the sound regolith makes when you walk on the Moon. There ar…

> What is the point of space exploration if humans can't go?

I don't know; what is the point of studying quantum mechanics if you can't see it? What is the point of studying insect embryology when you aren't an insect? I'm pretty fascinated by these 3B+ ly sized megastructures but I won't visit them (to the degree that "visit" would even make sense). Hell, what's the point of studying history when you can't go there either?

> > Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed

> That was not the only experiment on board. If one experiment doesn't work, it makes sense to drop it and continue working on other experiments. If you can make the time to work on the flaw and fix it, great, but you need to keep priorities straight.

A couple of replies to this point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090601

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

#194

Post by ethbr1 »

pdonis wrote: post #182
ethbr1 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uncontrolled fire inside the shuttle? I'm not sure if there are enough suits / sealable spaces to make that a viable scenario.

In such a case the crew would be dead whatever they did. Even if we assume there were enough suits for everyone to evacuate the Shuttle through the hatch (which AFAIK there weren't), and that people were able to evacuate before the fire caught them (which is unlikely), they would still be stuck in orbit with suits having only enough air for a few hours (the length of an ordinary EVA) and no way to get back to Earth.

Both of us are reasoning from a lack of access to shuttle schematics, but I'm always hesitant to say "never."

I was thinking of a fire that incapacitated the commander, was spreading, and the best available option was immediately venting all oxygen in the shuttle (probably with some crew loss of life), in order to potentially save enough systems to return home.

On the one hand, that's an extremely far-fetched scenario. On the other hand, NASA has experience with incinerating crews because they lack the means to save themselves.

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

#195

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

mattjaynes wrote: post #98
GeoAtreides wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, this is not simply "long-form", this is "in medias res" where the story starts at a heightened moment of tension, then abruptly stops and rewinds to go back to fill in details of how they got to this exciting moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res Sometimes it's done to great effect, like in Fight Club (film starts with him at the climax with a gun in his mouth, then rewinds and tells the story). How…

yeah, I basically skipped over everything looking for the answer to "what happened after that" because I didn't give a shit about anything else.

and yes, I hate this form of writing too.

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

#196

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

genman wrote: post #46
GeoAtreides wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think hating something is kind of personal matter. But very often these "long-form" articles can be tiring. They just circle around something, never getting to the point, adding just unimportant details that should create some form of "connection". It very often feels that it is not long because the author has something to say but it is long because it is meant to appear that "long-form" article. It's like reading…

20k leagues under the sea is like that.

It's actually a good story, but fuck me if I'm willing to sift through all the descriptions of the animal life. Jules Vern would take 10 pages to describe what someone else could in 1 paragraph.

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

#197

Post by stcredzero »

gumby wrote: post #139
stcredzero wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't need to be so dramatic ("rebel and exterminate their biological forbears" lol).

But I like it to be so dramatic, as a Sci-fi trope.

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?

That's what I'm saying. We send out our AI progeny to space. Then they turn around and hit us with an asteroid, which will set a lot of the Earth on fire, if the scientists are correct. ;)

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

#198

Post by kyriakos »

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…

Thank you

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

#199

Post by munchler »

gumby wrote: post #134
munchler wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Because Earth is currently a single point of failure. If we want humanity to survive planet-wide catastrophe, we need to send human civilization to other planets.

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

#200

Post by pdonis »

ethbr1 wrote: post #194
pdonis wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In such a case the crew would be dead whatever they did. Even if we assume there were enough suits for everyone to evacuate the Shuttle through the hatch (which AFAIK there weren't), and that people were able to evacuate before the fire caught them (which is unlikely), they would still be stuck in orbit with suits having only enough air for a few hours (the length of an ordinary EVA) and no way to get back to Earth.

Both of us are reasoning from a lack of access to shuttle schematics, but I'm always hesitant to say "never." I was thinking of a fire that incapacitated the commander, was spreading, and the best available option was immediately venting all oxygen in the shuttle (probably with some crew loss of life), in order to potentially save enough systems to return home. On the one hand, that's an extremely far-fetched scenari…

> I was thinking of a fire that incapacitated the commander, was spreading, and the best available option was immediately venting all oxygen in the shuttle (probably with some crew loss of life), in order to potentially save enough systems to return home.

I think any such fire would make the Shuttle unable to return home safely anyway. And since it is, as you say, a far-fetched scenario, I'm not sure it would be worth trying to mitigate. Note that no such fire, or even any event remotely close to one, happened during any of the Shuttle flights (or for that matter any NASA mission after Apollo 1), which indicates that the probability of such an event was much lower than the probability of multiple other events that did happen to one or more Shuttles, including not just the two that were total loss of vehicle and crew but multiple "close call" events that could have but didn't.

More to the point for this discussion, since no such fire, or even any event remotely close to it, happened on any mission after Apollo 1, while there were incidents that gave cause for concern about the mental state of a crew member, it seems entirely reasonable to put more weight on mitigating the latter than on mitigating the former.

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