It should actually be "micrometeorite", not meteorite. Anything that leaves a slow leak must be tiny, as at orbital+ speeds even specks of dust have tremendous momentum and carry significant energy.
(Not meteorite. It's not a meteorite until it has fallen on solid ground or water :-) ).
They're objects whose size is smaller than that of an asteroid, but larger than that of a micrometeoroid or space dust particle. Basically anything larger than a grain of sand, but not big enough to be an asteroid, is a meteoroid.
And the meteorite's just what causes the light
And the meteor's how it's perceived
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void
that lies quiet in offering to thee
I would expect "glue in a hole" to fail as the sun hits the module every 90 mins, and the surface probably heats to 100C and cools to -25C. That kind of heat cycling causes expansion and contraction, causing the boundary between the metal and the glue to weaken then fail.
One can test for that in the lab, but it involves heat cycling for a long time to reproduce the same number of cycles the space station could undergo in its multi-decade lifespan.
only the exterior blankets would have such extreme temperature cycles, the inner aluminum hull would have a much more stable temperature. The diurnal would be much more benign. Still enough for CTE and fatigue to cause a failure.
An unnamed source told RIA Novosti the person responsible for drilling the hole filled it with glue instead of reporting the mistake.
"The glue dried and was squeezed out, opening the hole," the source told the media outlet.
It's fun that the astronauts did the proper/final fix with epoxy, which to most people is of course also a glue. So perhaps the worker used (or mis-used) the wrong glue to fix this, rather than tried to cover up the mistake? Of course it sounds reasonable that it should have been reported, which didn't happen, so so the working environment seems improvable.
I think "the part" in this case is the entire pressure vessel. You would have to disassemble everything and build a new capsule out of the parts.
The thing that gets me is that the glue "squeezed out" of the hole? What did they use? Hot glue? Rubber cement? Once epoxy hardens it might break up but it's not going to squeeze through anything.
Also I believe the astronauts used epoxy to glue a patch over the hole, instead of just filling the hole with glue/epoxy, so the current solution should be much more structurally sound.
You can do that on Earth if your thermal vacuum chamber is big enough. They will run accelerated hot/cold cycles while under vacuum to simulate something like 30 transitions but if the glue in the hole held out through the entire test, there would be no way to find it. That vehicle had been up there since June so it did pretty well for an unreported patch job.
I wonder what work environment exists, that would cause a worker to hide their mistakes and endanger the crew, instead of reporting it. And how many more mistakes go unreported?
I hope russia addresses the root issue, and not just fires the person responsible.
I remember when the Mir had a fire on board. They didn't tell the US crew on board until it was obvious I seem to recall (a while back now). Also, the ground crew reported all was fine, it was only when the astronauts communicated back that it was uncovered. This sort of thing has happened before and will happen again, sadly.
Related to that, currently reading the book "DRAGONFLY: NASA AND THE CRISIS ABOVE MIR", there was a fire event at the station and Russian space personals circulated in the media that it was just a 10-second fire.
Even in the most safety-conscious and blame-free work environment, I'm not sure you can entirely remove the desire for skilled professionals to cover up expensive errors. It's just a natural human instinct to want to avoid being embarrassed in front of your peers, no matter how understanding they'll be about it.
According to Rockets and People by Chertok, they've solved that issue in late 70s by properly organizing the process and setting the right balance between personal responsibility and root cause analysis. However, in the last decade or so the industry deteriorated significantly, lost much of its institutional memory, and the problem reappeared due to low wages and clueless management.
The book is a memoir of Boris Chertok, one of the leading soviet rocket and spacecraft designers, and was written in 90s. (can't recommend it highly enough, by the way) The rest is my own conclusion. It's actually quite hard to pinpoint a single cause for all russian space industry troubles, most of it goes far beyond a single industry boundary and boils down to the politics, lobbying games and lack of governmental interest in certain industries which are still 99% dependent on the government.
Since the hole was in a Russian Soyuz capsule, it seems likely that Russia will react in some way. I don't think it's "Russia-hate" to hope that they'll take steps to prevent similar issues in the future.
.... because we’re talking about a mistake in a Russian capsule. When we talk about Challenger, then we can talk about the deficiencies in American management.
This should not be a surprise to anyone. (The fact its human, the cover-up is interesting)
Leaks from human error/wear should be orders of magnitude more likely.
I'll admit I was blown away when it was not a crack but a neat hole which more confirmed the earlier meteorite/space junk theory which I found highly unlikely.
The fact the info coming out of NASA would be so incorrect does make me question other statements.
I still don't believe Oumuamua is from another solar system, that serviette math doesn't add up, but no one in the entire field seems to be willing to make the call. Equivocally I've yet to see the maths saying it's possible, if it is, where is this info?
Science is still very fundamentally broken. And if the rocket scientists can't get it right how much chance do the pseudo-scientists in psychology have?
Is this kind of derision really necessary? Americans are just as capable of making stupid mistakes, and have - many times over - during the course of their space program.
This story should be about how American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts have demonstrated time and again that they are more than capable of working together to do amazing things, in spite of the nationalistic jingoism currently ripping the American political sphere apart in its efforts to create a new bad guy to hate.
But, no: its a two-minutes hate session for Westerners to pile on Russia. Again.
This has happened before and that was catastrophic.
On June 30, 1971, the crew of Soyuz 11, Soviet cosmonauts Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev were killed after the cabin vent valve accidentally opened before atmospheric re-entry. There had been no indication of trouble until the recovery team opened the capsule and found the dead crew.
As tragic as the Soyuz 11 incident was, it's hardly similar in any of its aspects:
"The fault was traced to a breathing ventilation valve, located between the orbital module and the descent module, that had been jolted open as the descent module separated from the service module, 12 minutes and 3 seconds after retrofire. The two were held together by explosive bolts designed to fire sequentially; in fact, they had fired simultaneously. The explosive force of the simultaneous bolt firing caused the internal mechanism of the pressure equalization valve to loosen a seal that was usually discarded later and which normally allowed for automatic adjustment of the cabin pressure. The valve opened at an altitude of 168 kilometres, and the resultant loss of pressure was fatal within seconds."
For what it’s worth, that’s how a lot of critical welds are verified. X-raying welds is fairly standard practice in the field if the strength of the weld is important enough. And it’s not as much about trust as how much it is fairly easy to make a mistake while welding and not know it. A good welder paying close attention can tell whether a weld is good with fairly high accuracy. But that’s not always enough certainty and when skilled honest people make mistakes here, they won’t nevessarily know it. So, you X-ray.
10% of the pieces in a Ferrari are inspected using x-rays. This ensures the motor has no defects, the bad pieces are melted again[0]. X-raying does not cost a lot nowadays and definitely helps the quality.
This fault looks like it was not on a weld, but elsewhere on the surface. Though probably close enough to some kind of join, if the worker slipped with a drill.
They x-ray (or even gamma-ray) every cm of welds on the natural gas pipelines that crisscross the country.
These pipelines can be over a meter in diameter and perhaps (from my recollection) a couple of cm thickness. Consequently, the x-ray machines are not machines one wants to be near when operating, they are quite powerful.
I learned this during a summer job in college at the research labs for a large gas pipeline company in the early 70's. At the time a "pig" was used to provide the x-rays for checking the welds of under-sea gas pipelines while they were being constructed. This pig was a remotely controlled wheeled device that moved from weld to weld and x-ray film would be put on the outside of the steel pipe for exposure. The pipe segments were welded together on a barge that floated in perhaps the Gulf of Mexico. Because the welding took several separate passes around the pipe it was done in a continuous operation with the pig x-ray as the final stage before the pipe slid off the back of the barge into the sea.
Normally, the pig motored toward the open, working end, of the pipe as new sections where being assembled on the barge. Once, the pig malfunctioned and took off in the wrong direction; it rolled down to the sea-floor. A guy from the pig company had to be flown to the gulf. He was rolled down the pipe lying on something like a skateboard (attached to a rope) to retrieve the pig!!!
Issues with the new class of nuclear power station designed by EDF ("EPR") currently in the works in the UK, Finland, China and France have been spotted via xray as well.
The french plant (in Flamanville, Normandy) has a number of faulty parts, including the cover of the pressure chamber.
EDF is currently lobbying for an OK from the nuclear safety regulator despite the faulty welds. Earlier this week I read that the deal would be something like a reduced lifespan for the cover with yearly inspections. Some even said that the alternative is basically to torn apart the power plant, remove all the machinery, redo it, re-deliver it and pray for quality welds this time.
The chinese ones are about 1 year behind schedule.
The english one (Hinkley Point) is 15 months behind schedules, also because of quality issues.
The finnish one (Olkiluoto) is almost ten years behind schedule.
The french one (Flamanville) is 8 years behind schedule.
In most cases, EDF is liable for damages because of the large delays.
Err, nothing says the identified responsible was a Russian. The glue had time to dry off, so the drilling may have occurred a long time ago.
Let's not jump to conclusions, But the suspense is insufferable!
What does it matter if it was a Russian or not? Obviously that person should have reported it, but I'm surprised that there wasn't more QC. I imagined at least a few people inspect everything after it's "ready to go".
The only reason it matters if it was a Russian engineer or not, is so that Americans' currently engaged in two-minutes hate can use this story as yet more confirmation of their bias against Russia. There's simply no other reason to point it out and make an issue out of it.
So where did it say that a Russian did it? The only reference is to a 'specialist'. You're putting up a straw man so that you can push it down. You sound like you're from that well-known trolling group btw.
I've read all the comments. The main theme is a discussion about how a working environment can be set up to avoid such potentially disastrous things to happen - i.e. hiding technical problems and errors instead of doing it properly (report, fix, verify). It's not like it's only happened in Russia. Everybody knows about the Challenger disaster, which came about due to (in that case) management ignoring issues, so it's different, but still similar.
Or do you really prefer that things like this shouldn't be discussed or revealed, but be hidden under a carpet instead?
(and a lot of people here, including myself, are not American. Wouldn't go there if I were paid for it. So that's not what this is about. At all.)
The hole was underneath some material and that Soyuz has only been up there since June. Sure, an astronaut could have done it but they typically aren't working on the Soyuz because it's not really something you have to maintain since they are constantly sending up new ones. It's much more likely the mistake was made on the ground. Soyuz is made by Energia, a partially Russian state-owned company that manufactures in Russia.
I imagine incidents like this will become a lot more common as space travel becomes commonplace and spacecraft are built in assembly lines.
Also, the fix should be simple - either the epoxi or a small metal plate glued or welded on top of the hole (I'd suggest glue, because of the lower thermal stresses). The guy used the wrong glue.
It's just one atmosphere. Taking turns and putting a finger on top of the hole is a reasonable emergency fix.
The Expanse sci-fi novel series goes into this subject quite a lot.
The people who live on and around the outer planets ("belters") are all said to have an extreme fixation on ship maintenance, those who didn't having been "weeded out" of the gene pool by their negligence.
There's some kind of aircraft repair tape like duct tape, which is made with much stronger fibers and uses a much stronger adhesive. It's not called "aircraft tape," however. That's something else. A friend was telling me that there was a small hole in a submarine once found patched by the stuff.
I try to carry 4 strips of medical tape stuck to the back of my emergency credit card. I think I have to check it and restock.
The one used in aircraft is called speed tape. It's thick aluminum foil and a high-grade adhesive and resists well to heat, some fire, and lots of wind. There's also one called "Gorilla tape", IIRC, that's like duct tape but much stronger.
A submarine is subject to much higher pressure differentials than aircraft or spacecraft (and also from the wrong directions for easy repairs from the inside) and I wouldn't recommend relying on it for long. I'm not sure how speed tape would work if applied in a vacuum, but I guess most repairs like this would be done from the inside, under some pressurization. Speed tape would be better, but, if you have external thermal blankets over the hull, duct tape should do just fine. It's only 1 atmosphere, after all (0.25 if you can do pure oxygen).
Eventually, when you stop by a proper facility, you'll want to do something more permanent (and fix the thermal blankets/external hull, because, if it was a micrometeorite that reached the pressurized part, there must be a hole there too).
A submarine is subject to much higher pressure differentials than aircraft or spacecraft (and also from the wrong directions for easy repairs from the inside) and I wouldn't recommend relying on it for long.
The story was that the discovery was one of horror. Basically, it was a tragedy averted. Also, the tape was on the outside, but I forget the particulars.
I hope the crew knew about it and was ready to surface if it started leaking. Well... I guess submarine crews are a good model for astronauts in that they live surrounded by a lethal environment. The difference is that, if you venture outside low Earth orbit, you may be days away from safety, so an extra amount of zeal with improvised repairs may be warranted.
The same trope was used by Heinlein in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and used to explain why the population of the Moon had a higher average IQ. The title of the novel is a reference to it.
He was a great guy and was the President for the Trouts Unlimited when I was a kid. That one thing defined him for so long. Was pretty sad story to me. He did one mistake but the quality control department were never troubled like he was even though they had it right in front of them for years.
Yea, accidents and mistakes should obviously be seen as learning opportunities, and the ones making them should really be treated as heroes for demonstrating how things can go wrong. But when millions (billions?) of dollars and/or lives are put at risk you better have a good explanation, that's for sure. Putting glue in an accidental hole of a space vehicle or similar and hoping no-one discovers would probably not help your case further (if it were to be discovered ...).
The guy who miscalibrated the machinery that made the Hubble telescope (1/50th of a hairs breadth error) may have had a good explanation for all I know- care to share the details?
My grandfather worked on the HST mirror. It's both what he was most proud of, and the most ashamed of, at the same time.
He talked about this not really as a single person's fault (except in terms of a senior manager's failure), but as an organizational problem. He pointed out two things:
1. In particular, the organization was poorly designed, with QA being too close (in org chart terms) to production. If there's one finger to point, it's at the guy who was the common manager of both departments. And I think this is something that the engineering profession has taken to heart since then.
2. People at the time thought of things with somewhat different priorities because the context changed. At the time the mirror was being built, it was understood that the space shuttle would make it relatively simpler to fix serious problems (well, as "simpler" as any space missions could be). As it turned out, the space shuttle was less effective in that role than its initial requirements led HST management to believe. This probably led to a more relaxed attitude about the ultimate result of any problems.
> In particular, the organization was poorly designed, with QA being too close (in org chart terms) to production.
I see this with great regularity in my practice and it is really strange that this lesson has to be learned all over time and again. Latest incarnation: make developers responsible for their own QA. That's about as logical as asking the butcher to grade their own meat.
> QA being too close (in org chart terms) to production.
Can you explain in a bit more detail what this means in practice? I haven't worked with a QA team before and I'm curious.
Does it just mean the QA checks happen well after the specific work was being done, making it harder to go back and fix things (due to mental context switching, tooling, etc)? Or just too many last-minute fixes?
My positive experiences with QA were always when the QA team was strictly separated from the production team.
Ideally, no friendship whatsoever.
Doing QA is hard. Bouncing issues & QA reports between teams is hard. Bouncing issues between people that know each others too well or have a common manager leads to all sorts of issues.
In this specific instance, it could be as simple as the manager trying to balance things between teams and thus letting things slip past the due date or with sub-par quality.
My worst experience was when a married couple worked together on a project I was involved with: one on the sw team and the other in QA. Working together is hard, working on "antagonistic" teams is hell
> Latest incarnation: make developers responsible for their own QA. That's about as logical as asking the butcher to grade their own meat.
No, you're wrong. Self certification works when it's done properly. As with any QA system it fails if it's done poorly, but any QA will fail when done poorly, and self certification is less likely to fail.
I built safety critical equipment for coal mining, and some aerospace test equipment, and saw a variety of QA systems from very good (MTBF 14 years) and piss poor (product broken when leaving the factory).
Coal mining and aerospace have a completely different attitude to safety to begin with. Maybe my 'sample size' is too small but I'd figure with close to 100 dd's under my belt if DIY QA would work I would have seen it by now.
The only place where it sort-of worked that I looked at is where there still was another QA dept further downstream.
Yup, I knew the person who was the supervisor. From what I know it was one piece that was attached to the grinder that was actually put in upside down. No one noticed it and it wasn't labeled. It took 10 Years and even had extra time to see or fix any problems. Here is a good read - http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Telescopes/Hubble.ht...
The person who put it in wrong didn't get in trouble. The manufacturer of the part that didn't label the part didn't get in trouble. The upper management didn't get in trouble. The Quality Assurance didn't either. Just seemed stupid where the blame sits.
I always wondered how this happened, given that that the HST was far from a "one-off" product - would love to know if this was an error that affected all of the KH-11 mirrors up to that point (and went undetected), or if there was something about the Hubble mirror that was different?
Unfortunately, that information is probably still classified.
The focal length of the Hubble was certainly different, but maybe other things too... I'd be surprised if this wasn't a copy/paste error, but maybe it really was some huge miscalculation that nobody caught.
There were a lot of KHs (Keyhole) flying long before Hubble so they didn't have unfixed issues and their test fixtures were all set up (and frankly, probably passed Hubble).
The mirror was too flat in the middle and there was a slight wave. It was a mechanical issue when the polished the mirror starting in 1979 for over a year. It wasn't launched till 1990.
They state that the error in the mirror if you enlarged to to the size of the earth would not be any higher than 6 inches.
http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Telescopes/Hubble.ht... is a great article on it. Since this all happened in my area I was always interested. The fix of the mirror is one of the greatest feats I have ever read. They weren't sure how much could be fixed. It ended up being better than anyone could ever expect.
It's precisely this kind of bodging which caused great loss of life with the de Haviland Comet. Installing the radio antenna opening with punch rivets instead of drilling out the holes ended up killing two planeloads of people.
Ya. That's how things operate at my work and it works well. As much as it sucks mistakes happen, things get damaged, sometimes things worth lots of money. If feels really shitty to have to go tell someone you made a mistake, that a bunch of time got wasted, we're going to have to redo work, that you just destroyed a couple thousand dollars worth of things. It really sucks...
But... it sucks a whole lot less than when someone tries to cover up or hide a mistake. It always ends up coming out in the end, it always makes things worse than they could have been in the end and everyone ends up even more pissed off than they would have been. It's not worth it.
Actually, my parents forced me to learn this lesson young. Me and two other kids did something fairly terrible when I was in elementary school. My parents took me and made me personally apologize to the person who detrimented from our actions. It wasn't the most pleasant of experiences but in the end t was the right thing to do and it taught me, if you fuck up, the best thing you can do is admit it, try and make it right and learn from it.
I've been trying to teach the new guy at my work this. He started off worried about making mistakes, would beat himself up and try to cover them up. It's been a few months of talking to him and telling him to focus on learning and not worrying about mistakes. If they happen, I get him to work through what went wrong before anything too bad happens and i've found his attitude has changed quite a bit since he first started. He doesn't worry so much and he's been learning a lot more quickly. When something does happen, instead of panicking he just comes to tell me and i'll help him work though figuring it out.
We're all human, mistakes happen. They just need to be dealt with in a reasonable way and if you make a mistake admit it and if you can't figure out how to fix the problem there's no shame in asking for help.
That's easy to say from our position, but I'd bet that the person responsible had a pretty good idea what would happen if they reported it.
At my current machine shop, I'd have a half dozen people documenting what happened, helping to design, implement, and rush out the repaired part, adjusting customer expectations, and making sure that the process that allowed me to make the mistake is fixed so that others repeat it.
In my previous job, it depended on the day. Sometimes you'd get called into the boss' office and cussed at for a while with no consequences, sometimes you'd get something capricious like confiscating the offenders' drill bits and requiring check-out for each hole from the foreman's office for a week. (It only lasted 3 days, but that literally happened.) Sometimes the boss was having a really bad day with customers or vendors he couldn't punish, and you could have a half dozen guys bodging a repair out of the boss' view and keeping him distracted. Or fired on the spot, if it didn't work. I lasted 5 years and 37 hires and fires at that 20-man shop, should have left so much sooner.
The official story is:
> It is a technological error by a specialist. It was done by a human hand -- there are traces of a drill sliding along the surface. - http://tass.com/science/1019791
Drills should not be sliding along the surface of a part. You locate the hole by marking with calipers from a known location and hit the intersection with a punch. Especially in curvy aluminum aerospace work. And there's certainly little opportunity for anyone to go get some glue, install it, wait for it to cure, and paint/cover it up without inspection. I am surprised, though, that they didn't just weld in some filler and grind it smooth.
I suspect that NASA and some of their suppliers are nominally more like the former but practically there's still some risk to admitting error, and that Roscosmos/Energia is closer to the latter.
"Another source said a worker apparently accidentally drilled the hole, but instead of reporting it, simply sealed it. The sealant held for at least the two months the Soyuz spacecraft spent in orbit, before finally drying up and being pushed out of the hole by air pressure."
This American Life had an absolutely amazing story about how a dropped wrench in a nuclear missile silo caused a cascading series of failures that ended in utter disaster but could have been even worse: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/634/human-error-in-volatile...
It just goes through the story in bone chilling detail and shows how the natural human desire to cover up their mistakes is absolutely anathema to safety culture.
Just a few days ago people on HN were believing it was an asteroid. If anybody would have challenged that, they would not have been believed.
My point is, people believe most things, specially from space agencies, without having any means of verifying it. And they believe it without any doubt.
If I told you that these space agencies are lying to the public, would you believe it? There is so much evidence of nasa and ess fakery. It just annoys me that most people still believe anything coming from these sources.
> Just a few days ago people on HN were believing it was an asteroid. If anybody would have challenged that, they would not have been believed.
Typically people do and should believe things based upon the strongest evidence. While you can't trust them to be totally right all the time, you can assume that, barring additional information and reasonable cause for doubt, that the most credible sources information is a good place to start. Do you have a source that's more credible than NASA in regards to events occurring in space with NASA astronauts?
I bought a laser cutter from a company in Guandong for the makerspace I was involved in, and there were about a half dozen similar "bodges" I discovered in the manufacture. There were two acorn nuts which were attached to bolts that didn't go all the way through, so were effectively decorations. (The other 8 did, so I know that was a total bodge.) The bodges even included the way the bracket holding one of the mirrors was installed.
I know for a fact that you can buy epoxy which matches the index of refraction of most kinds of glass. The guy who drilled the hole and filled it with glue must have been in a bit of a hurry.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 78.6 ms ] thread* Negligence resulting in a large economic damage: up to two years in prison.
* Negligence resulting in more than two deaths or serious injuries: up to seven years in prison.
Source (in Russian): https://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_10699/33ed8a....
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A meteor is really the optical phenomena of a meteorite burning up in the atmosphere.
You taught me the names of the stars overhead that I wrote down in my ledger
Though all I knew of the rote universe were those pleiades loosed in December
I promised you I'd set them to verse so I'd always remember
That the meteorite is a source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee
-- from Emily - by Johanna Newsome
(Not meteorite. It's not a meteorite until it has fallen on solid ground or water :-) ).
They're objects whose size is smaller than that of an asteroid, but larger than that of a micrometeoroid or space dust particle. Basically anything larger than a grain of sand, but not big enough to be an asteroid, is a meteoroid.
One can test for that in the lab, but it involves heat cycling for a long time to reproduce the same number of cycles the space station could undergo in its multi-decade lifespan.
So someone accidentally drilled through an expensive space station module on earth and filled the hole with glue. Wow..
An unnamed source told RIA Novosti the person responsible for drilling the hole filled it with glue instead of reporting the mistake.
"The glue dried and was squeezed out, opening the hole," the source told the media outlet.
It's fun that the astronauts did the proper/final fix with epoxy, which to most people is of course also a glue. So perhaps the worker used (or mis-used) the wrong glue to fix this, rather than tried to cover up the mistake? Of course it sounds reasonable that it should have been reported, which didn't happen, so so the working environment seems improvable.
The thing that gets me is that the glue "squeezed out" of the hole? What did they use? Hot glue? Rubber cement? Once epoxy hardens it might break up but it's not going to squeeze through anything.
I hope russia addresses the root issue, and not just fires the person responsible.
Leaks from human error/wear should be orders of magnitude more likely.
I'll admit I was blown away when it was not a crack but a neat hole which more confirmed the earlier meteorite/space junk theory which I found highly unlikely.
The fact the info coming out of NASA would be so incorrect does make me question other statements.
I still don't believe Oumuamua is from another solar system, that serviette math doesn't add up, but no one in the entire field seems to be willing to make the call. Equivocally I've yet to see the maths saying it's possible, if it is, where is this info?
Science is still very fundamentally broken. And if the rocket scientists can't get it right how much chance do the pseudo-scientists in psychology have?
[0]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Shepard
This story should be about how American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts have demonstrated time and again that they are more than capable of working together to do amazing things, in spite of the nationalistic jingoism currently ripping the American political sphere apart in its efforts to create a new bad guy to hate.
But, no: its a two-minutes hate session for Westerners to pile on Russia. Again.
On June 30, 1971, the crew of Soyuz 11, Soviet cosmonauts Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev were killed after the cabin vent valve accidentally opened before atmospheric re-entry. There had been no indication of trouble until the recovery team opened the capsule and found the dead crew.
"The fault was traced to a breathing ventilation valve, located between the orbital module and the descent module, that had been jolted open as the descent module separated from the service module, 12 minutes and 3 seconds after retrofire. The two were held together by explosive bolts designed to fire sequentially; in fact, they had fired simultaneously. The explosive force of the simultaneous bolt firing caused the internal mechanism of the pressure equalization valve to loosen a seal that was usually discarded later and which normally allowed for automatic adjustment of the cabin pressure. The valve opened at an altitude of 168 kilometres, and the resultant loss of pressure was fatal within seconds."
[0]: https://www.evo.co.uk/ferrari/10140/making-of-a-ferrari
These pipelines can be over a meter in diameter and perhaps (from my recollection) a couple of cm thickness. Consequently, the x-ray machines are not machines one wants to be near when operating, they are quite powerful.
I learned this during a summer job in college at the research labs for a large gas pipeline company in the early 70's. At the time a "pig" was used to provide the x-rays for checking the welds of under-sea gas pipelines while they were being constructed. This pig was a remotely controlled wheeled device that moved from weld to weld and x-ray film would be put on the outside of the steel pipe for exposure. The pipe segments were welded together on a barge that floated in perhaps the Gulf of Mexico. Because the welding took several separate passes around the pipe it was done in a continuous operation with the pig x-ray as the final stage before the pipe slid off the back of the barge into the sea.
Normally, the pig motored toward the open, working end, of the pipe as new sections where being assembled on the barge. Once, the pig malfunctioned and took off in the wrong direction; it rolled down to the sea-floor. A guy from the pig company had to be flown to the gulf. He was rolled down the pipe lying on something like a skateboard (attached to a rope) to retrieve the pig!!!
The french plant (in Flamanville, Normandy) has a number of faulty parts, including the cover of the pressure chamber.
Latest article in english I could find is this http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Flamanville-EPR-weld-ch... but since, several other defects have been found.
EDF is currently lobbying for an OK from the nuclear safety regulator despite the faulty welds. Earlier this week I read that the deal would be something like a reduced lifespan for the cover with yearly inspections. Some even said that the alternative is basically to torn apart the power plant, remove all the machinery, redo it, re-deliver it and pray for quality welds this time.
The chinese ones are about 1 year behind schedule. The english one (Hinkley Point) is 15 months behind schedules, also because of quality issues. The finnish one (Olkiluoto) is almost ten years behind schedule. The french one (Flamanville) is 8 years behind schedule.
In most cases, EDF is liable for damages because of the large delays.
>well-known trolling group
Yeah, thanks for proving my point that America is in the grips of two-minutes hate right now ..
Or do you really prefer that things like this shouldn't be discussed or revealed, but be hidden under a carpet instead?
(and a lot of people here, including myself, are not American. Wouldn't go there if I were paid for it. So that's not what this is about. At all.)
Also, the fix should be simple - either the epoxi or a small metal plate glued or welded on top of the hole (I'd suggest glue, because of the lower thermal stresses). The guy used the wrong glue.
It's just one atmosphere. Taking turns and putting a finger on top of the hole is a reasonable emergency fix.
The people who live on and around the outer planets ("belters") are all said to have an extreme fixation on ship maintenance, those who didn't having been "weeded out" of the gene pool by their negligence.
I try to carry 4 strips of medical tape stuck to the back of my emergency credit card. I think I have to check it and restock.
A submarine is subject to much higher pressure differentials than aircraft or spacecraft (and also from the wrong directions for easy repairs from the inside) and I wouldn't recommend relying on it for long. I'm not sure how speed tape would work if applied in a vacuum, but I guess most repairs like this would be done from the inside, under some pressurization. Speed tape would be better, but, if you have external thermal blankets over the hull, duct tape should do just fine. It's only 1 atmosphere, after all (0.25 if you can do pure oxygen).
Eventually, when you stop by a proper facility, you'll want to do something more permanent (and fix the thermal blankets/external hull, because, if it was a micrometeorite that reached the pressurized part, there must be a hole there too).
The story was that the discovery was one of horror. Basically, it was a tragedy averted. Also, the tape was on the outside, but I forget the particulars.
That was pretty scary sentence for me. Short story, I know the guy who made the mistake on the mirror for the Hubble Telescope. https://www.nasa.gov/content/hubbles-mirror-flaw
He was a great guy and was the President for the Trouts Unlimited when I was a kid. That one thing defined him for so long. Was pretty sad story to me. He did one mistake but the quality control department were never troubled like he was even though they had it right in front of them for years.
The guy who miscalibrated the machinery that made the Hubble telescope (1/50th of a hairs breadth error) may have had a good explanation for all I know- care to share the details?
He talked about this not really as a single person's fault (except in terms of a senior manager's failure), but as an organizational problem. He pointed out two things:
1. In particular, the organization was poorly designed, with QA being too close (in org chart terms) to production. If there's one finger to point, it's at the guy who was the common manager of both departments. And I think this is something that the engineering profession has taken to heart since then.
2. People at the time thought of things with somewhat different priorities because the context changed. At the time the mirror was being built, it was understood that the space shuttle would make it relatively simpler to fix serious problems (well, as "simpler" as any space missions could be). As it turned out, the space shuttle was less effective in that role than its initial requirements led HST management to believe. This probably led to a more relaxed attitude about the ultimate result of any problems.
I see this with great regularity in my practice and it is really strange that this lesson has to be learned all over time and again. Latest incarnation: make developers responsible for their own QA. That's about as logical as asking the butcher to grade their own meat.
Can you explain in a bit more detail what this means in practice? I haven't worked with a QA team before and I'm curious.
Does it just mean the QA checks happen well after the specific work was being done, making it harder to go back and fix things (due to mental context switching, tooling, etc)? Or just too many last-minute fixes?
Ideally, no friendship whatsoever.
Doing QA is hard. Bouncing issues & QA reports between teams is hard. Bouncing issues between people that know each others too well or have a common manager leads to all sorts of issues.
In this specific instance, it could be as simple as the manager trying to balance things between teams and thus letting things slip past the due date or with sub-par quality.
My worst experience was when a married couple worked together on a project I was involved with: one on the sw team and the other in QA. Working together is hard, working on "antagonistic" teams is hell
No, you're wrong. Self certification works when it's done properly. As with any QA system it fails if it's done poorly, but any QA will fail when done poorly, and self certification is less likely to fail.
I built safety critical equipment for coal mining, and some aerospace test equipment, and saw a variety of QA systems from very good (MTBF 14 years) and piss poor (product broken when leaving the factory).
The only place where it sort-of worked that I looked at is where there still was another QA dept further downstream.
The person who put it in wrong didn't get in trouble. The manufacturer of the part that didn't label the part didn't get in trouble. The upper management didn't get in trouble. The Quality Assurance didn't either. Just seemed stupid where the blame sits.
had a former co-worker who used to say as a general rule, the quality of a code drop was inversely proportionally to the ease of updating the code.
Unfortunately, that information is probably still classified.
There were a lot of KHs (Keyhole) flying long before Hubble so they didn't have unfixed issues and their test fixtures were all set up (and frankly, probably passed Hubble).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Telescopes/Hubble.ht... is a great article on it. Since this all happened in my area I was always interested. The fix of the mirror is one of the greatest feats I have ever read. They weren't sure how much could be fixed. It ended up being better than anyone could ever expect.
A mistake is one thing. Mistakes are lessons and it's good to have people who have some solid lessons in their backgrounds.
Trying to patch it with some glue without telling anyone is a character flaw and the person needs to go, so everyone else gets the lesson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet
But... it sucks a whole lot less than when someone tries to cover up or hide a mistake. It always ends up coming out in the end, it always makes things worse than they could have been in the end and everyone ends up even more pissed off than they would have been. It's not worth it.
Actually, my parents forced me to learn this lesson young. Me and two other kids did something fairly terrible when I was in elementary school. My parents took me and made me personally apologize to the person who detrimented from our actions. It wasn't the most pleasant of experiences but in the end t was the right thing to do and it taught me, if you fuck up, the best thing you can do is admit it, try and make it right and learn from it.
I've been trying to teach the new guy at my work this. He started off worried about making mistakes, would beat himself up and try to cover them up. It's been a few months of talking to him and telling him to focus on learning and not worrying about mistakes. If they happen, I get him to work through what went wrong before anything too bad happens and i've found his attitude has changed quite a bit since he first started. He doesn't worry so much and he's been learning a lot more quickly. When something does happen, instead of panicking he just comes to tell me and i'll help him work though figuring it out.
We're all human, mistakes happen. They just need to be dealt with in a reasonable way and if you make a mistake admit it and if you can't figure out how to fix the problem there's no shame in asking for help.
At my current machine shop, I'd have a half dozen people documenting what happened, helping to design, implement, and rush out the repaired part, adjusting customer expectations, and making sure that the process that allowed me to make the mistake is fixed so that others repeat it.
In my previous job, it depended on the day. Sometimes you'd get called into the boss' office and cussed at for a while with no consequences, sometimes you'd get something capricious like confiscating the offenders' drill bits and requiring check-out for each hole from the foreman's office for a week. (It only lasted 3 days, but that literally happened.) Sometimes the boss was having a really bad day with customers or vendors he couldn't punish, and you could have a half dozen guys bodging a repair out of the boss' view and keeping him distracted. Or fired on the spot, if it didn't work. I lasted 5 years and 37 hires and fires at that 20-man shop, should have left so much sooner.
The official story is:
> It is a technological error by a specialist. It was done by a human hand -- there are traces of a drill sliding along the surface. - http://tass.com/science/1019791
Drills should not be sliding along the surface of a part. You locate the hole by marking with calipers from a known location and hit the intersection with a punch. Especially in curvy aluminum aerospace work. And there's certainly little opportunity for anyone to go get some glue, install it, wait for it to cure, and paint/cover it up without inspection. I am surprised, though, that they didn't just weld in some filler and grind it smooth.
I suspect that NASA and some of their suppliers are nominally more like the former but practically there's still some risk to admitting error, and that Roscosmos/Energia is closer to the latter.
Okay, and now do that in microgravity in a spacesuit with the thick gloves. Good luck.
https://cdni.rt.com/files/2018.09/article/5b8d416cfc7e932e72...
"Another source said a worker apparently accidentally drilled the hole, but instead of reporting it, simply sealed it. The sealant held for at least the two months the Soyuz spacecraft spent in orbit, before finally drying up and being pushed out of the hole by air pressure."
It just goes through the story in bone chilling detail and shows how the natural human desire to cover up their mistakes is absolutely anathema to safety culture.
My point is, people believe most things, specially from space agencies, without having any means of verifying it. And they believe it without any doubt.
If I told you that these space agencies are lying to the public, would you believe it? There is so much evidence of nasa and ess fakery. It just annoys me that most people still believe anything coming from these sources.
Typically people do and should believe things based upon the strongest evidence. While you can't trust them to be totally right all the time, you can assume that, barring additional information and reasonable cause for doubt, that the most credible sources information is a good place to start. Do you have a source that's more credible than NASA in regards to events occurring in space with NASA astronauts?
I know for a fact that you can buy epoxy which matches the index of refraction of most kinds of glass. The guy who drilled the hole and filled it with glue must have been in a bit of a hurry.
PSA from Matt Groening: If you drink, don't drill! http://home.earthlink.net/~foghornj/drinkand.html