The little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The little-known Soviet mission to rescue a dead space station (2014)

arstechnica.com

73 pointsdavid-given10 comments

This is a great story, I am glad it has been recovered from the ravages of time!

It seems we need to start thinking about orbital repair a bit. The story about the water really struck me. Do we design stations to shut down gracefully under pressure? Are hand carried atmosphere sensors built into gas masks useful for recovering a 'dead' station? Are illumination globes, LED bulbs that can be turned on and float overhead something that we should store in emergency cabinets in the station? What exactly would the low earth orbit equivalent of a tugboat have on board? Fun things to think about on a Saturday afternoon.

> The controllers, acting against established tradition and procedures of their office,

Similar to Chernobyl

I believe behaviour like this is an (almost) unavoidable result of any large, rigid structure - I see it myself at work on occasion.

Basically, the collective expectation of success is so strong that if you have to report that something didn't go according to plan, you are strongly identified with the failure whether you can be blamed or not - with loss of reputation, career crash, off to Siberia, whatever being the result.

So - when things start to go wrong, you have every incentive to try anything and everything which MAY bring the situation back under control - because, after all, you're already left holding the bag, anyway.

This is a brilliant recipe for st-fan interaction escalation.

There was an article by a crisis management expert I read where he noted that one of the first exercises he does with a group is to ask them to come up with possible scenarios for failure. Thus at least giving explicit permission to enumerate things that could go wrong.

Dzhanibekov is a legend. He did so much for the Soviet/Russian space program.

Stories, please!

With James Webb Space telescope coming - and planned for much shorter life than Hubble - I just wonder, if something goes wrong, could it be repaired, like Hubble and Salyut-7 were? Can we send Orion to Lagrange point?

Probably be cheaper to just build and launch a spare.

This is fascinating. What always will keep me admiring the Soviet heritage is that these people never did what they accomplished for money or recognition. These technical breakthroughs and victories were also spiritual.

The Soviets traded traditional religion for a faith in space and science.

For all their faults, that one doesn't seem such a bad bargain.

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