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Comment by fouronnes3 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone got a link to an official report detailing what happened? The article is kinda light on details, but I assume this is a major mishap that can only happen if multiple things go wrong simultaneously? Everything m they do up there is a precisely choreographed dance so it would be interesting to read a technical report on that.

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Yes it's a bit light on details. But they do point out the most important facts, namely what gender the astronauts are and that it has not been officially confirmed whether the tool box contained a 10mm wrench. Personally, that's everything I needed to know about the situation.

If you've ever worked on a modern car, you'd know the importance of the 10mm wrench. Maybe they had some Toyota guys consult on the ISS.

Context, possibly: https://youtu.be/2jlxO6s5N6Q?si=7iled4EV7nWWyb-A

Hadn't seen that one, but it is a bit of a meme. I'm not joking about working on cars though - my 2001 Toyota Corolla was full of 10mm bolts, and I have on occasion needed to pick one up from the hardware store only to find an empty spot between the 9mm and 11mm sockets.

Honda dirtbikes were almost exclusively 10mm, which was handy, because you can carry a very limited set of tools/parts and fix basically everything aside from running out of gas.

I love 10mm wrenches so much I bought a Japanese motorcycle :P I do so much better with whole numbers than fractions.

As well as the 10mm wrench, you may find it useful to have a 1cm spanner.

Or a metric Crescent wrench.

I know this is really tangential, but one of my favorite lines from cartoons as a kid was from an episode of Pinky and the Brain and it included this kind of wordplay.

Their plan included forming a grunge band, which they called "Frog the Dry Widget" (a play on Toad the Wet Sproket).

Does it contain a drill?

The 10mm reference is a meme. It is the most common size when working on a vehicle and is frequently misplaced.

Although it's kind of strange to see that type of writing in USA Today... I thought I was reading Jalopnik or something.

Not strange at all. USA Today has always been basic news writing for basic people.

Anna Delvey… is that you?

You forgot that what they dropped resembled a white satchel.

Both those and something else jumped out at me, for different reasons. I remember this story from newsprint days:

https://fair.org/home/al-neuharths-front-page-sexism/

Imagine being upset by the mere mention of a persons gender. Christ you people are insufferable. Surely there are actually important things to be angry about.

An all-female space walk and the last time a toolbag was lost it was a woman...just saying...really plays into stereotypes of women around tools. But it was reported the male astronauts couldn't find a can opener in the kitchen drawer so even stevens!

I swear, the can opener has some kind of Y chromosome activated cloaking device.

And the time before that [0]. That doesn't matter much though, the orbit is low and the tools will burn in the atmosphere quite soon.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-astronauts-lost-items-i...

Just need to use a Hermes berkin 35 for the toolbag and it will never be misplaced.

Was the wrench for conventional or opposite-threaded 10 mm nuts?

https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2023/11/01/astronauts-en...

There aren't very many details in that post either.

> During the activity, one tool bag was inadvertently lost. Flight controllers spotted the tool bag using external station cameras. The tools were not needed for the remainder of the spacewalk. Mission Control analyzed the bag’s trajectory and determined that risk of recontacting the station is low and that the onboard crew and space station are safe with no action required.

It's hard to have more failsafes on a single toolbag than "don't let go". The mission was successful (or it seems, partially successful, not due to loss of toolbag); losing the toolbag is the "one thing" that can go wrong without risking the real goal.

I’m not familiar with how the *nauts tether themselves to the station, but I figured it would be something similar to safety tethers when working up high in precarious situations —2 tethers with only 1 allowed to be disconnected at any particular moment. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the same thing were done for anything that they don’t want to float away. But, perhaps that adds more complexity than it’s worth.

Tools don't need to be safe, though; you need to be safe from them. IANAA, but two tethers on your toolbag sounds like a great way to accidentally fuck up the two tethers on yourself.

Good news: The tools are secure.

Bad news: You are condemned to die alone in space.

In this case it worked out fine, but if the tool needed to complete the task was in the tool bag, things would have worked out differently. Bonus points if one of the tools needed to undo what they had started was also in the tool bag that got away.

Why do you assume there's only one toolbag with the necessary tools? There's the kinds of things you have redundancy of (tools, food, computers), to deal with the things you need redundancy for (life, structural integrity, atmosphere).

Another bag was lost when an astronaut was cleaning up a mess from a grease gun - stuff happens!

There's a copypasta floating around - badum tish - giving an account of a particular US astronaut - https://futurism.com/the-byte/russia-threatens-nasa-astronau... - who caused this and a lot of other major problems. Accusations of misinformation, yada yada yada, but it sounds like it might have been a case of the roommate from hell, only in space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vXdRUIZ_EM

whoops

The video was of a different incident right and the person mentioned in the first link hasn't been on the station in years?

For a highly trained astronaut that "oops" in the video seemed extremely careless.

My most charitable interpretation is that the astronaut thought the bag was attached to a tether given that it had a clip - which sadly wasn't attached to anything.

Highly trained astronaut doesn't mean much.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak

Nobody's perfect and nobody is infallible and that includes highly trained astronauts. Short of this being done on purpose (hard to believe to begin with) I'd just chalk it up to an accident.

You're comparing an emotional breakdown to not securing a toolbox?

No, I'm trying to illustrate - apparently unsuccessfully - that astronauts are people and as fallible as everybody else.

"An emotional breakdown" is an odd way to describe burglary, assault, attempted kidnapping, and battery that had been planned out and prepared for following two months of Lisa stalking someone who was sleeping with a guy she'd previously had an affair with.

I'm not suggesting that it's similar in any way to losing a toolbox. Lisa's entire situation was clearly something very different, you're right about that, but an emotional breakdown (while not a precise medical term) is typically used to describe an episode or outburst caused by too much stress/pressure. It's strange to see it used for a series of premeditated crimes that took months, involved lots of planning, careful packing, and a journey of 900 miles by car to reach the victim.

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