Space station leak caused by drill, not meteorite
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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).
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.
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.
I hope russia addresses the root issue, and not just fires the person responsible.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
>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.)