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Comment by kurthr | Hacker News Reader

There's a giant swimming pool in Galveston which has a full underwater replica of the ISS for astronaut training. There are other scuba divers that work with the astronauts when they practice maintenance. One of their jobs (like the invisible waiter at a high end restaurant that makes dirty utensils go away) is to "retrieve" anything that the astronauts "put down". Often the maintenance jobs are multi-hour "space walks".

Apparently, it basically happens every training and the divers take great joy in putting the items on the Lost Wall for everyone to see.

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> One of their jobs (like the invisible waiter at a high end restaurant that makes dirty utensils go away) is to "retrieve" anything that the astronauts "put down".

This is fascinating. I'm not quite following what is meant by retrieval though. I assume from context the divers aren't retrieving to return the tools to the astronaut, and rather are emulating the drift that occurs in a frictionless vacuum? "Oops I set it 'down' and now it's 200m away".

> Lost Wall

I presume this is a "Wall of Shame" of sorts?

It seems that much like we become able to delegate tasks like setting down a coffee cup to our subconscious on Earth, after a while in microgravity astronauts become accustomed to "setting things down" in midair. It's could be that just like in a shop on the ground, "where did I set down that wrench" is an issue; an astronaut might "set down" a tool in midair on a spacewalk and forget that they're not in a confined space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVxaL8CAO4M

That video is a joke. Read the description.

Ah, so it is. My apologies. He's a pretty good actor!

Yes, they are providing the "experience of open space" :)

And apparently there's nothing funnier than an embarrassed astronaut.

Why not put magnets on the tools handle so they can be quickly anchored near the working space when not in use? Similar to how we would set our tools down in full gravity astronauts could set the tool "down" without it floating away.

I am a layperson but I imagine it would be because then you have magnets capable of moving around the entire craft that you have to consider the interactions of.

That would require nearby surfaces to be ferromagnetic, which generally means steel. I doubt there’s much exposed steel on the outside of the ISS. Steel is crazy heavy compared to other materials like titanium or aluminium, and given the cost of putting mass into space, it’s unlikely there’s much steel at all on the ISS.

There's one in Galveston in addition to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab at JSC in Clear Lake?

You are correct! It was the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. I only visited once.

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