How NASA Kept the ISS Flying While Harvey Hit Mission Control | Hacker News Reader

How NASA Kept the ISS Flying While Harvey Hit Mission Control

theverge.com

162 pointsTomte49 comments

In case anyone wonders how long ISS could survive completely unattended - it averaged 1 debris avoidance manouver per year before 2011 and 4 in 2012. Its orbit is around 400km which is low enough do decay slowly, but boost burns happen only every few years. Both of those events are planned months or years ahead.

NASA must have decided there was no real danger to the operators apart from some longer shifts and sleeping in the office. Otherwise, even without the backup ground control, ISS wouldn't be in any significant danger if disconnected for a few days.

Boost burns happen significantly more frequently than every few years. At 400km and a drag profile as large as the ISS, decay would take around a year or less, depending on attitude. A little bit more reading:

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9087/how-often-doe...

Wow, the height chart there is excellent. I was looking at a 2013 post where someone mentioned the next burn is scheduled for 2015. Clearly it was inaccurate.

When they're avoiding debris that's not something that would have directly struck the station, rather they're aiming to keep debris from entering a 1.5 x 50 x 50 kilometer imaginary box with the station placed in the center[1].

So the inability to avoid debris realistically just increases the risk of running the station, it doesn't mean that if they'd skip the next maneuver that there's anything but a trivial chance of the station being struck.

1. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debr...

I imagine the Russians have flight control too. Only the Russian segment of ISS have boosters.

The ATV's from the ESA have boosters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle#Use

*had

They've been retired some time ago.

"Retired" as in burned up over the Pacific.

Now this is the kind of information that should have been in the article. Thanks for sharing!

Agreed. The Verge articles' are quite bland lately... The HN discussions around them are more informative.

My favorite part of this is the mission patch they came up with for the team that had to stay at JSC: http://imgur.com/a/9YiQZ

A pun in Latin! Thanks for the smile

For the more thick of us, what makes that a pun? Looks like they just modified the aphorism.

To the stars through/from water, it's a play on the phrase ad astra per aspera which means to the stars through (or in the context despite) hardship. The original phrase also is fitting but since the water in this case is their hardship I think is what makes it a pun.

I'd call it a play on words, but it's not a pun—only a single meaning is possible here.

I've talked myself into thinking it's actually a pun. Ad astra per aspera is a set phrase in English, so any modification to it is punning the phrase. In this formulation, aquam still carries the original meaning of ardua, hardship. While this wouldn't be a pun to a native Latin speaker, I haven't met too many of them.

I kind of wish my work had mission patches like this, though "Deployed Client X" doesn't sound so dramatic.

Have you looked at this? https://openbadges.org/

It's usually "ad astra per aspera" -- to the stars through hardship rather than water.

Noting that the plans they made were all as a result of having enough advanced warning of the storm to 'bring in big camping backups and setup cots (assume those were there already?'. I would think that the planning should or would include a case where there is no warning at all. In other words personnel would be required to keep items onsite like hospitals do with crash carts for emergencies maybe storage places or bomb shelter esq. After all if one thing this storm taught (the chemical plant with the generators on the ground) is that you can't really predict the unknown unknowns. It doesn't seem, relative to the cost of space missions, a big deal for each employee to keep onsite (at JSC cost) items that would be needed (including medicine; refreshed as needed) in the event of no ability to plan ahead.

My wife works as a doctor at a hospital. I am always amazed at how they make no plans at all in bad weather to have a system in place to make sure she gets to work. It was actually my idea to tell her to buy an SUV so she wouldn't have problems when it snowed. It's literally left to all employees. They don't even have a way to reach her in the case of a mass county wide emergency. For example we don't have a landline and they don't have my cell phone and so on. It's all very ad hoc.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect employees to be able to figure out their own contingency plans for things that happen commonly. Eg, cars can drive on snow (no, you don't need an SUV, snow tires will suffice, and in flat places you can get away with all seasons just fine). Bus lines typically have snow routes. And so on. So basically the hospital's plan is "hopefully no more than x% of employees will be so thick as to screw up a response to a totally expected event".

Similarly, getting ahold of you is not one of their primary concerns.

As for how they handle an ACTUAL disaster, I'm not an expert. I do know that public hospitals have plans and standards, but I'm sure it is not the same nationwide. And, at the end of the day, all the planning in the world won't help if the employees simply refuse to show up. Perhaps they plan for the things they know that they can control (eg, infrastructure such as generators and supplies) but not for those they can't?

Obviously you wouldn't expect to the hospital to buy everyone motor boats so they can get to work in the event of a flood (for example). If the employees can't drive themselves to work, I'm not sure how to plan around that -- a private transportation service wouldn't work.

For JSC, what sort of event are you imagining where they can't swap out staff, with no warning, but will be able to continue operating?

The chemical plant seems to me to be less of thing than the media is making it out to be. They've isolated the peroxides from the rest of the plant and they don't release especially nasty smoke when they burn. It probably costs an awful lot to be prepared to not ever release soot.

It seems, from reading about the recent attacks in London and Manchester, that it's assumed for a major situation, that most of the staff will hear about the situation through other channels, and make their way to the hospital on their own accord.

There's also a very interesting article from Stanford about how they handled their response to the Asiana Airlines crash a few years ago: http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/07/this-is-not-a-...

Basically, they paged everyone to come in, and roped in everyone who was in the hospital to help out.

"Pagers" (if you mean that literally) aren't used anymore. The difference between pagers and cell phones is that pagers work practically everywhere and cell phones as you know are spotty.

That said I think it depends on the crisis and the community size. Not everyone is even watching the news during the day I remember I heard about 911 as a result of someone making a comment on a group that I followed that was almost quite accidental.

Part of the problem with any of this is that disasters aren't that frequent so not much thought is given to a host of 'what if's'.

No, pagers are very much still used by doctors. My wife is a doctor. In both hospital systems she's worked, she has carried an actual physical pager. Sometimes more than one!

Same here but my wife doesn't have one where she works.

> But when it comes to sending commands to the orbiting lab, that has to be done on site at JSC.

> There’s the option of moving Mission Control temporarily to a hotel in Round Rock, Texas, before transitioning control more permanently to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. This facility has a lot of spaceflight infrastructure and could potentially support operations for weeks.

This seems very surprising, as it sounds like there's not really a plan if something disastrous were to happen to JSC. I don't mean to say they couldn't figure it out -- I have no doubt of that -- I am just surprised that the best plan backup plan is migrating to another facility "for weeks" after a short transition in a hotel (is this a literal hotel, or something more akin to a 'carrier hotel'?).

There are also Russian and ESA mission controls. Normally it seems they do more science support missions than supporting the facility itself, though Russia of course runs support for Soyuz and Progress docking, but if something truly disastrous were to happen to JSC those mission supports could be transferred to another location. That comment is more 'this is how we have the security setup and for a temporary situation like Harvey it's not worth changing everything when we have an alternative plan' than 'there is absolutely no other way to control the station than physically logging in from JSC.' That's pretty clear given that their primary backup site is just a hotel.

tl;dr They were prepared to and did modify their operations as necessary to meet their SLA. They did their jobs.

Emergency preparedness isn't rocket science even if your organization's mission happens to be rocket science.

In fact most of the corporates have this part of their internal audit called BCP Business continuity Process, asking team members not to come to office but continue working.

What's inescapable I think is things like Malware attack and not these things

I worked at a small business that made working from home mandatory one day a month for all employees (whatever day was convenient for each employee, not all at the same time). On multiple occasions they'd tell people to just stay home. Bad snowstorms and power outages, mostly. It worked really well, because everyone know how to get stuff done when remote.

Headline seems click-bait-y, doesn't it? "Kept the ISS Flying"? Last I checked the ISS doesn't fly. Even if we concede that as a term of trade, it isn't going to fall out of orbit because it gets no love from earth for a few days.

"ISS, we have a problem."

"This is Houston, we have a problem"

Inertia?

Stable orbit above the troposphere?

It's not really that stable, but it can hold for a while.

Space is so disappointing because everything humans do there is super complicated and fragile.

Disappointment is generally a sign of misplaced expectations.

It's a bit like the dancing dog.

It's not that he dances well, it's that he does it at all.

So it is with manned space flight.

It's due to a lack of cheap, readily available energy. We have to constantly worry about fuel and debris because maneuvering isn't cheap, and any form of electromagnetic shielding that's could even theoretically be useful would have incredible energy usage.

This from the race of clever monkeys extracting liquid sunshine at 5 million times the rate of formation.

The Saturn V stage 1 engine produced 166 GW of power, roughly the electrical generating capacity of France at the time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)

The total net metabolic rate of 7 billion humans is about 700 GW. 18.1 TW -- only 100x the first stage power, is the total average human power consumption as of 2013.

The 770,000 litres of RP-1 (kerosene) represent some 18.3 million tonnes of primaeval plant matter converted over tens to hundreds of millions of years into petroleum. Per unit volume, it's very nearly the highest energy-density fuel available from chemical reactions (hydrogen does better on a unit-weight basis, but even that buys you only a factor of three. Oh, and that's what the Saturn V used in its upper stages (where the volume requirements for LH2 were viable).

What you're wishing for is what you've already got.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-IC

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026391317686

?? No. It's due to lack of mass (for shielding and fuel). We produce lots of energy in orbit.

Getting mass into orbit is also difficult due to a lack of cheap, readily available energy.

Energy costs are a tiny fraction of launch costs. If rocket fuel could be had for free, it wouldn't noticeably change overall costs.

NASA? It's maintained by Russia.

No. The vast majority of Station is the USOS, the US side. Station overall control is handled by NASA.

Control in what sense? Paperwork? Only the Russian segment has any engines that could change ISS's orbital position.

Control as in day to day operations. Who organizes visiting vehicle ops, consumables, etc.

Those Russian engines are only used occasionally. Mostly, Station relies on US-side control moment gyros for attitude control. Also, the huge solar arrays (USOS, again) act as controllable aerosurfaces. In a pinch, you could actually use the solar arrays alone for desaturating the gyros. Until Shuttle retirement in 2012, Shuttle was also used for reboosting Station. It's possible for other visiting vehicles (ATV, HTV, Cygnus, Dragon, Proton, Soyuz, Starliner, Dream Chaser) to reboost as well. Mostly Proton does the reboosting, but that's just an operational decision.

Something like 75-80% of the mass of Station is USOS. Something like 80-90% of the power as well. Zarya, a Russian-built module that was the first part of ISS and which contains propulsion systems (Ukrainian-developed control systems), was actually bought and is owned by the US.

I guess it's good when a team member doesn't mess up team's effort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com