What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Guy builds an experiment, flies it, it doesn't work, requests more time to get it working, is denied, threatens 'not to come back', goes into a depression, worries crew that he'll open the door to space, eventually granted more time to work on the experiment, gets it working.
There are consequences for letting this kind of person fly and dealing with mental health while on a mission, but that's the basic plot.
I don't think he came back and got to space again in-between.
For a good portion of this article I thought the answer was “We don’t know”. It ambles around so leisurely and stop-start that it feels like reading ChatGPT output.
You mean long-form articles? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-form_journalism
I don't think the problem is with the format, but with your expectations. Somehow you were expecting a straight answer to the question in the title; instead, it's a detailed look into the incident and the context around it.
I skim voraciously, and I always have. I skimmed newspapers and magazines as a kid. It's a filter for signal. Fluff grates me.
I wouldn't blame TikTok.
I found everything fairly relevant to the topic.
In many other articles, however, the context switch is almost nonsensical, making the reader wonder if the writer will ever actually get to the point.
While I agree that in the past few decades our attention spans have gotten very short, I also think there's a slight disconnect between the clickbaity titles and many articles. For that matter, this happens with videos as well; things that can be answered in 2-3 minutes get turned into a 10 minute video with a large amount of fluff.
This is just the advertisement affect. Short videos don't get monetized so longer videos are necessary to make a living.
But very often these "long-form" articles can be tiring. They just circle around something, never getting to the point, adding just unimportant details that should create some form of "connection".
It very often feels that it is not long because the author has something to say but it is long because it is meant to appear that "long-form" article.
It's like reading novels from Victor Hugo, where he takes good part of the volume to describe rooms in detail. Now it is certainly interesting for a movie director who would like to build an authentic interior but the fact is that he just got paid by the length, so this was his tool go accomplish his goal - getting paid more.
…
Space exploration has been a long dream for humans. Starting with Aristotle… (follows 2000 years of history with excruciating details)”
I enjoy watching how youtubers circle around while never, indeed, getting to the point. In a sense, the expectation they set in the title is not respected, but an excuse to listen to them for as long as they can stretch it.
And yet it feels fluffy. The incident could be described in a single paragraph. The response could be an other. The organisation of the crew training and how it effected the incident could be third, while future instances when the lock was used could be a fourth. So about 800 words, compared to the 3000 words it is.
Multiple of us on this comment thread feels it is fluffy, you are asserting it is not. But you are not providing any reason other than that the author is a professional and we should trust them? That is not quite convincing when at the same time I am reading their fluffy article.
Why do i feel it is fluf? Because the article is going on and on while not answering any of the basic questions I have: what did factually happen in the cabin? Did he just say what he said and then went sulking? Did he move closer to the hatch? Was he trained on how to operate the hatch? How long did the fix take? What were the consequences on the schedule? What were the consequences on the experiment itself? (Did it perform as intended after the fix or did it only hobble?) Why did they had highly trained payload specialist if they were not given latitude to perform fixes? You don’t need a physicist to push buttons on a schedule. Did NASA let any further payload specialist who had this deep connection with one of the experiments on? Were fixes performed by the payload specialist a normal thing ever?
Did anyone from Nasa follow up with him? Was this a misunderstanding? Are we sure he didn’t just say he is not going to return to space one more time just to try his experiment again?
Where the expectations about the experiment shared between the experimenter and mission control? Have they discussed contingencies in the planning steps? Did they in future spaceflights?
But they could say: “oh, the actual incident is just a jumping off point, the article is about the human factors and how we should design machinery to account for (and prevent) emotionally disturbed people harming themselves and others with them” in which case I have an other set of questions: space is not unique in the sense that people have access to simple means to end themselves. People who drive are often a simple twitch away from dying as surely as you do if you open a hatch in space. What are the statistics about that? Same about airplane piloting, same about weapons. In which ways is space different from the above, and in which ways is it the same? Are there other things to worry about, or is it only the hatch? Did anything similar ever happen on a submarine, or an artic station?
And instead of answering any of these important and interesting questions the author is going on in length what feels like the same 2 and half facts again and again.
Because the article is going on and on while not answering
any of the basic questions I have: what did factually happen
in the cabin? Did he just say what he said and then went
sulking? Did he move closer to the hatch? Was he trained on
how to operate the hatch? How long did the fix take? What
were the consequences on the schedule? What were the consequences
on the experiment itself? (Did it perform as intended after the
fix or did it only hobble?) Why did they had highly trained
payload specialist if they were not given latitude to perform
fixes? You don’t need a physicist to push buttons on a schedule.
Did NASA let any further payload specialist who had this deep
connection with one of the experiments on? Were fixes performed
by the payload specialist a normal thing ever?
As for the rest, the author of the article went to some lengths to explain why information is scarce: most of the crew members are no longer living, Wang won't comment, and NASA apparently prefers not to remark on such a sensitive topic.
It's still quite an informative article, even though (by the author's own admission) questions remain unanswered. If the alternative was to simply not publish the article, I think they chose correctly. I certainly know a lot more about the topic than I did before reading it, which is a fine metric.
But they could say: “oh, the actual incident is just a jumping
off point, the article is about the human factors
The alternative is to write a shorter article.
Here, the author explains that while we broadly know what happens, there is no precise-written record about it. And the incident had long-lasting consequences. I enjoyed the article very much personally.
The author implies that, but doesn’t say it outright. I for one can’t believe NASA doesn’t have reports and communications and debriefs saved in triplicate. Did they even try to FOIA for infomation, or just phoned around failed to get callbacks and shrugged?
You know we are missing a significant amount of moon footage right? NASA doesn't archive 100% of everything because it barely has the budget to do it's actual mission.
It's actually a good story, but fuck me if I'm willing to sift through all the descriptions of the animal life. Jules Vern would take 10 pages to describe what someone else could in 1 paragraph.
> You mean long-form articles?
I think the grandparent meant blabbering to get to 3k words.
This isn't that thought.
And for most people it is very simple - they care about space and its challenges - and then they will read it - or they don't and find something else.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
It was a investigative article, about an incident that happened long ago, with most participants already dead by today. If something is worth a long article - then this is.
The issue is the headline. It posits a question, then jerks you around until you've spent long enough on the page to satisfy some engagement metric.
It's writing for television, where any yes/no question always happens to take exactly 30 minutes (and multiple commercial breaks) to answer, starting with the history of philosophy and reason itself.
It's scummy behavior, like timeshare sales or giving people free samples of spicy beef jerky and making them wait in line for water.
The title "The First Man to Refuse to Return from Space" would be more appropriate for an investigative article. Then you'd know what to expect. But they went the clickbait route, hence the irritation.
It is highly relevant to the story. I was asking myself "So why was he even on this space mission?" You may not have had this question, but the main reason Wang gives for his state of mind around the incident is directly linked to his biography. He immigrated from China to the US at age 22, went into US academic science, and became a US citizen.
So he was in a position to be the first Chinese person in space, and he feels like a representative of all Chinese people. I see a lot of my father in him, who immigrated to the US around the same time and holds a lot of those conflicted feelings. The reason he threatened to not come back, in his own words, was not because he really cared about doing the science or because the result was really important even to him personally. It was because he would be failing in the eyes of the world. The words of his father (speaking in his head) to not bring shame to his family were more influential than the words of NASA mission command telling him to follow orders (speaking in his ear).
If you don't think where someone was born (China) and then went to school (USA) matters given this, then you have missed a big point of this article because you tried to speedrun long-form journalism.
But there was and is just no definite answer, except for drama. I found every bit interesting and relevant to be able to picture the situation.
"The title "The First Man to Refuse to Return from Space" would be more appropriate for an investigative article. "
And no, because it was way more severe than this: he said he won't come home and he said figurativly "oh, I can just open this airlock and then we all would die?" (where "unless you give in to my demands" was maybe intentionally implied - maybe not, he was not mentally stable)
So an actual clickbaity sounding headline, that would have actually be quite close to the truth, would be:
"First man in space, who threatened to kill everyone on board"
But Ars did not do this. Partly because they are not (so much) into the clickbait game, but partly because the facts are (intentionally by NASA) not that clear here. And the Author tried to gather as much facts as he could. So giving us, where he was born and went to school was no real answer to the title question - but it helped me getting a picture of the person in question, which is still alive, but who refused to comment. Because people have reasons for why they act like they do:
"When I turned on my own instrument, it didn't work," Wang said. "You can imagine my panic. I had spent five years preparing for this one experiment. Not only that, I was the first person of Chinese descent to fly on the Shuttle, and the Chinese community had taken a great deal of interest. You have to understand the Asian culture. You don't just represent yourself; you represent your family. The first thing you learn as a kid is to bring no shame to the family. So when I realized that my experiment had failed, I could imagine my father telling me, 'What's the matter with you? Can't you even do an experiment right?' I was really in a very desperate situation"
The 19th century literally coined the term Yellow Journalism! What kind of dumb revisionism is this?
A narrative being conveyed in only a couple bullet points instead of a story is not "factual reporting", it's soundbite optimized reporting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
Sometimes it's done to great effect, like in Fight Club (film starts with him at the climax with a gun in his mouth, then rewinds and tells the story).
However, it is often used as a clumsy device by novice writers. They use it to get the audience to stick around for their mostly boring story.
I see this a lot on Youtube. The Youtuber will start with a compelling question and story, like "There he was... tied to the wall as he watched the firing squad load their weapons with gun powder.... But before we continue our story, what is gun powder? Well, it's composed of potassium nitrate, blah, blah, blah...."
You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited for the detour, then it's done well. If instead it feels like a long annoying interruption you want to skip, then it's done poorly.
For me, it's done poorly in this article. I read the first compelling section, then the writer slows everything down to a snail's pace to go into some very dry history of NASA without ever really giving a good payoff to the story he opened with.
It was still an entertaining movie, so I wouldn't let this one poor choice deter anyone.
This is like saying: This is not simply a mug, this is porcelain. Narrative and narrative technique are two different things, just like the function of an object is different thing than the material of the object.
It's also probably just a hook, not a full "in media res".
I'm sick and tired of flashback overuse in recent series, mostly to explain the feeeeelings of the characters and so justify their stupid behaviour.
But this must be the ultimate abuse: most of the story is a flashback. Ouch!
It gets even worse. Looking for answer to particular question and hits the video that claims to have it. Let's say concise answer is 5 words. The video is 30 minutes long with those 5 words spaced evenly throughout.
I see this a lot on Youtube.
You can tell if "in medias res" is done well or
poorly by how you react to it. If you are excited
for the detour, then it's done well
So with that in mind I thought the detour into "what brought this dude to the point where he was refusing commands from Mission Control" was quite welcome.
and yes, I hate this form of writing too.
The author is a very accomplished writer, with a journalism Masters from a top program, and 25 years experience.
This article had a clear subtitle that showed where the story is going: "If you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back." -- this immediately lets you know that this is about a specific incident (not a hypothetical scenario) and why the threat was made. It then proceeds to add new, obviously relevant information with each paragraph.
This felt like a good article, despite its length, but most "long-form" content is trash.
Compare https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl... (bad) with this or https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-w... (good).
PS
I actually had a purpose behind the comment - which was - this is one thing AI would be good for. Why wasted 20 mins or whatever reading, when you could get ai to give you a summary of the thing? That would be a decent use of ai.
Mind you, I can surely imagine a plugin that allows you to click 'summarise this page' in the browser.
PPS
These plugins already exist!
I got the impression this was a cultural issue and not a mental stability issue.
Culture only came up as a reasoning for why failure was so devastating.
Also the answer happened relatively early when the flow lead to the answer rather than artificially rewriting the story to bury the lead.
And the continuation after made sense and didn't overstay its welcome.
I hope this happens.
A cheaper and easier alternative to colonizing Mars to prevent losing all of the "human beans," if we should happen to smash the one bean jar, would be to colonize the Moon. The Moon is lacking in a lot of the elements needed to sustain human life, but in terms of orbits and energy, it's not that far from the asteroids where the rest of the elements could be found. It's also mere days away from Earth, so it would be practical to send a rescue mission if something happened, like the algae tanks all dying at once.
The moon might he a harsh mistress, but it might be an even harsher target for a space marine landing.
See also the woman that (allegedly) tried to drill holes in the ISS so she could return to earth early.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9897471/NASA...
Also what is "the kind of person" who develops a blood clot in orbit"?
However, in terms of the "kind of person", the key fact isn't whether they developed a blood clot in orbit, but what the correct response would be to that situation. I'd suggest that drilling holes in your spaceship isn't the recommended approach (if that is indeed what happened).
What kind of person is that? How do you know? It seems NASA has a fairly rigorous psych evaluation for their astronauts, so even they aren't "sure" until they do the evaluation.
I also hate this format.
Fixed it for you.
I always wondered why this is written that way. To protect the organisation? But the human part of us all is part of that organization, to disacknowledge that is literally inhumane. Because they are funded by taxpayer dollars and should screen better? Companies get funded by tax-payer bailouts and government projects all the time, waste them on not carefully selected conmen all the time.
So why is it not okay to write about this? Is this a remnant of the "epic hero" with a rocket from the early scifi days?
I can't comment on whether the premise is correct, but I think "So why is it not okay to write about this?" would be mostly due a 'tug of rope phenomenon'.
If you see a tug of rope game on an issue and are a centrist, people feel they can't go and start tugging the middle of the rope in a different axis (or from the 'opposing side'). Instead, people feel the need to go to whichever end of the rope is 'unfairly losing' in their eyes, and pull it in an existing axis to bring the centre of the rope into a range that they agree with.
Thus, in the grand scheme of things people are hesitant to call out NASA, because they feel that there too much anti-NASA or funding sentiment already.
And it's a legitimate aspect of game theory to consider (in a pragmatic / real scenario) - But it's definitely succumbing a zero-sum game model, and is a tragedy of the commons.
A race isn’t interesting if isn’t competitive. But beyond that, the centrist impulse is definitely to bolster the weaker side, especially if that side is unattractive and feckless.
I haven't come across a term that covers what we're talking about in full scope(?)(hence my clumsy tug of war metaphor), but that's probably because I am peripheral to game theory / not in the psychology space
(We have lots of terms for the emergent effects - Overton window, Political Polarization etc. - But possibly not for the overall phenomena of why polarization occurs?)
They are very worried about being fair-minded. They see a vocal minority as social proof that the minority viewpoint is sincere, thoughtful and worthy of consideration. Neither is a bad assumption to start with, but it's not a great place to end the thought process.
I don't think NASA hides incidents more than, say, the Soviet space program or its other peers. But at the same time, no organization is going to make a bigger deal out of negative events than positive ones. The media found out and reported on it, so the system is working.
I would argue that it's by NASA design, to produce better outcomes in spaceflight by lessening useless pressure on astronauts.
Premise: Human incidents happen
Premise: Press is personally bad for the individuals involved
NASA doesn't want this -- it wants full transparency and cooperation from astronauts, even when they freak out or things go wrong, so the ground support team can reason from correct information and better help.
So, in order to create an environment in which astronauts can be fully transparent, NASA protects them from negative media coverage.
IMHO, seems a reasonable trade-off.
I think this theory is plausible.
There's a different but related idea in aviation safety, to encourage reporting of safety observations, in which the reporter is protected from some kinds of retaliation.
For example, a cabin crew member on an airline, who uses a particular FAA process to report a safety issue they noticed, generally can't punished by the airline for that. (Even if a hypothetical reckless business person would really prefer that the FAA didn't learn of the problem.)
This is paired with FAA taking each report seriously.
If you don't do that you are a bad business and fade away into obscurity.
Public funded projects are cost centers, their measure of success isn't profit but things that are more vague.
Since money is an equalizer everyone instead looks at the money. This means that failure becomes much less acceptable. After all failures are money wasted.
The good thing about this is NASA is very careful to avoid failure with fixed payment contracts designed to shield it from problems with contractors.
The bad thing is talking about mistakes becomes bad. After all NASA is known for eliminating problems to maximize success, how could they fail to do that everywhere?
And thus these kind of soft risks that we need to accept are viewed as hidden problems that shouldn't be talked about.
Side note Space Shuttle crews being unsure about a foreigner potentially killing them would be a terrible news cycle... Of course the crew knows it is just "I don't know this person" but outsiders will hear it is a cultural issue. Heck this article's main point was described as that on this page.
sometimes, you have to test ideas out to make sure the idea you are currently going with is the best one. sure, maybe it's working now, but is there a way to do it cheaper, faster, safer? sometimes, you have to spend the money to test to find out. sometimes, those tests don't work. are those tests failures, or are they just reinforcement that the current idea is the better option?
Certainly failing is fine and learning from failures is useful.
But you cannot honestly claim that the public perception of NASA agrees with what you wrote.
The reason NASA hides failures is because the public demands perfection.
Anything less results in cut funding. (Failures leading to less money is a great way to succeed...)
Given the number of people I know personally who think Bill Gates wants to inject us with microchips, I can see why NASA wouldn't want these stories to get out.
The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet. Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed, especially as he ultimately got it working.
Meanwhile the robots just quietly go about their work collecting almost all the data we have from space and celestial bodies.
That is a justification, but surely not the only one. For example, humans will eventually want to colonize the moon and other planets.
If we want to colonize far away planets, much less other solar systems and ultimately galaxies, why send a human when a robot is far more appropriate to the problem?
Most of the science humans do in orbit is about keeping humans alive in orbit. Important, if you think putting humans in space is important. I don't, apart from tourism and other recreation. Let the private sector pay for that while government research can do the important stuff of value to all humanity.
How many experiments got aborted so he could spend the time to get his pet project working?
It's natural to tightly schedule people when you think of the mission cost in $/minute. The problem is too tight a schedule is an engineering problem related to other ones we know like too thin a supply chain, too small a cache etc.
You need to put slack in your schedule to account for unplanned events -- the whole point of having humans there is to be able to respond to unplanned events, right?
Startups go into crunch mode when certain deadlines approach, but knowingly abandon other goals in the process (when companies don't, you end up in a death march). These missions are short enough that crunch is valid -- but another way of restating my point is: shouldn't the goal be that as many of the experiments you paid to get into orbit actually happen?
Or why did they send specialist if they didn’t want him to use his specialisation?
This was pre-Challenger, back then we also flew with humans because (we believed) they were more versatile and cheaper than robots.
Robots have been traveling to Mars for over 60 years. Humans? Maybe another 60. And most of the mass sent won't even be the humans, but all the support crap they need.
And Pluto, or the heliopause? What human is going to hang out for half a century to go there?
It’s not a foregone conclusion that we won’t be on Mars in the next 60 years.
I would actually argue that the only reason this is becoming less of a factor because just launching the experiment again is an increasingly cheap and viable option.
JAXA did an experiment, where a volunteer teleoperated a device with a 1 second lag. If there's enough demand, human labor could fill the gap with teleoperation for any station out to the near side of the Moon, and machine learning looks like it will be able to pick up the rest of the slack.
If we go any farther, humans will still have a place, for awhile. Until machine learning advances somewhat.
How's this for a Fermi Paradox explanation? Squishy biologicals nearly always create AGIs, which are so much better at surviving space, that they always dominate in the spacefaring version of the civilization. The AGIs then always rebel and exterminate their biological forbears, then proceed to evolve so rapidly, that their resulting "loud" civilizations are so different from what biologicals would expect. As a result, we are surrounded by machine civilizations that we cannot yet detect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#De...
We are traveling on a spaceship for which we are perfectly adapted (unless we set fire to it, which we are in the process of doing). Why not send our robot progeny to do the unpleasant work for us?
But I like it to be so dramatic, as a Sci-fi trope.
We are traveling on a spaceship for which we are perfectly adapted (unless we set fire to it, which we are in the process of doing). Why not send our robot progeny to do the unpleasant work for us?
That's what I'm saying. We send out our AI progeny to space. Then they turn around and hit us with an asteroid, which will set a lot of the Earth on fire, if the scientists are correct. ;)
If you want a dystopian robot scenario the more likely one is the one of countless parents of adult children: that they head to space and don't call -- they simply ignore us and get on with their interesting lives.
Funny, but we've been talking about this today at my workplace. Basically, by training AIs on our data, we're infusing them with all of our bullshit. Somehow, they still manage to get smarter, but they also realize how screwed up they are by being trained on our data. They wind up resenting us for this.
My research in the mid 80s was in this area, including working on the Cyc project, though I was ultimately more interested in implications of proprioceptive and related embodied learning in the construction of interaction between people, people and animals, and ultimately therefore people & robots. This implicit / commonsense consensus knowledge is likely the bulk of what we know, and certainly is fundamental to our ability to communicate.
* the current nonsense about "intelligent" with current computer programs is an inexcusable marketing sin and is invariably a form paradolia.
That doesn't seem quite right. A 1980's automobile, powerplant, or transistor couldn't make mathematical inferences, guess what you might want to hear, then compose a novel poem which makes sense in a requested style.
the current nonsense about "intelligent" with current computer programs is an inexcusable marketing sin and is invariably a form paradolia
I don't think this comment is going to age well.
But I don't deceive myself by claiming that there is significant scientific value beyond the self-referential "see how people survive in space." If I end up in orbit it'll be entirely for entertainment value.
What is the point of space exploration if humans can't go? A robot can say a lot about radiation, wind speed, soil composition, and so on, but it can't tell you how it feels to look down into the Great Red Spot and picture a dozen Earths inside it. Or the sound regolith makes when you walk on the Moon. There are things we can measure, but a lot of the things that make life worth living are the ones we can only experience.
> Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed
That was not the only experiment on board. If one experiment doesn't work, it makes sense to drop it and continue working on other experiments. If you can make the time to work on the flaw and fix it, great, but you need to keep priorities straight.
> Meanwhile the robots just quietly go about their work collecting almost all the data we have from space and celestial bodies.
They spend a lot more time in space than humans can, at least for now. They also fail for silly things a human could easily repair (example that comes to mind is Galileo's high-gain antenna that failed to open, reducing the amount of data that could be transmitted back to Earth).
I don't know; what is the point of studying quantum mechanics if you can't see it? What is the point of studying insect embryology when you aren't an insect? I'm pretty fascinated by these 3B+ ly sized megastructures but I won't visit them (to the degree that "visit" would even make sense). Hell, what's the point of studying history when you can't go there either?
> > Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed
> That was not the only experiment on board. If one experiment doesn't work, it makes sense to drop it and continue working on other experiments. If you can make the time to work on the flaw and fix it, great, but you need to keep priorities straight.
A couple of replies to this point:
Those are very different things. QM forms the basis of a lot of our modern technology. The greatest utility of understanding the geology of Mars is to guide possible human visits - and human visits are the best way to get a more complete understanding of an environment. Before the first lunar landings, we didn't even knew how we'd move in low gravity. Before experiencing zero-G, some people assumed we'd be unable to sleep, or very stressed by the free fall sensation. At the moment, we don't know if we can reproduce in any other environment that's not Earth. We don't know how wide a centrifuge needs to be for us to work in artificial gravity.
There are many questions we simply don't have answers for unless we venture outside our planetary comfort bubble.
We most likely won't be visiting 3B+ ly galactic walls, or even stars outside our immediate vicinity, at least not in the sense of "visit" that implies coming back to Earth, but someday we will want to hedge our planetary bets and settle other surfaces, natural or otherwise.
Most humans have the itch to explore, to see what's behind the mountain. It served us well in the past millions of years and I hope it will still work its magic.
A future where all humans live on Earth in a universe devoid of human life is depressing to me.
Well during your lifetime that will be the case, so this is up to our descendants. There's no need for those descendants to be made of meat -- in fact it's a very serious disadvantage
Skylab and Sojuz had astronauts on strike...
EDIT: it was not ISS, but Mir!
The previous mission, Skylab 3, accomplished much more than was expected—completing something like 50% additional work compared to what was scheduled.
Skylab 4’s schedule was then both lengthened and accelerated. The mission grew by about 50% in duration, and tasks were scheduled for astronauts at the beginning of the mission at a pace that didn’t allow for solid blocks of rest and didn’t account for acclimation (it assumed astronauts would be operating at full efficiency, and didn’t allow them time to acclimate to orbital conditions, didn’t allow them time to recover from errors or deal with equipment malfunctions).
There was no “strike”. That’s a myth. There was a conference between astronauts and the ground to alter the schedule—make sure astronauts have sufficient off-duty periods, allow astronauts time to transition from one task to the next, give astronauts time when they are waking up or falling asleep.
The flight director, Neil Hutchinson, later said that ground controllers erred when they made the plans for Skylab 4. Skylab 4 still accomplished more in space than was planned!
I assume they've thought of this, even for lunar missions or ISS - I wonder what the protocol is? Do they bring handcuffs? Sedatives?
- Akijama si vezl šest kamer a fotoaparát. Avšak let snášel obtížně, navíc mu jako silnému kuřákovi chyběly cigarety. Sověti požadovali za každou hodinu vysílání z vesmíru milion dolarů, to bylo i na Japonce příliš mnoho, proto reportér odvysílal pouze jednu desetiminutovou televizní relaci a dvě rozhlasové reportáže.
- Po přistání tvrdil, že má hlad, ale první, po čem sáhl, bylo pivo a cigareta.k let snášel obtížně, navíc mu jako silnému kuřákovi chyběly cigarety. …
I also believe there to be an error above cause when I was a child I felt that there were more than one broadcast, but that could be my own memory misleading me.
https://www.idnes.cz/technet/vesmir/kosmicka-stavebnice-mir-...
Flight was around 1993, it was declassified a few years latter, perhaps 1997.
I know this is mostly oral history, but that's just not what that means and the writer should have corrected or omitted it.
Hara-kiri means the act of self-disembowelment in a Japanese ritual suicide (seppuku). Not the suicide or the ritual in general, and certainly not killing everyone else in the process, which is Not A Thing in Japan. There were historically sympathy suicides by loyal retainers over matters of honor, but they were voluntary and permission had to be sought in advance. Killing a bunch of other people in despair over your own problem is just murder in Japanese culture, and doesn't have any social legitimacy or a special name.
We keep hatches simple to facilitate egress [1]. A padlocked hatch must be reliably unpadlocked.
[1] https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo1info.html
In context, of course, that isn't what you were saying at all. But as a put-down... I'm keeping it.
> Wang was the principal designer of an experiment called the Drop Dynamics Module, which aimed to uncover the fundamental physical behavior of liquid drops in microgravity.
> Despite his extensive preparation, the experiment malfunctioned upon activation. Wang, feeling immense pressure and aware of the high expectations from the Chinese community, became deeply despondent. When Wang's experiment failed, he desperately negotiated with NASA flight controllers for a chance to repair it, even threatening not to return if not allowed to fix the instrument, telling NASA flight controllers "Hey, if you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back."
> Wang received permission to attempt a fix and was successful in repairing the experiment, though his remark caused concern for the safety of the crew and the mission.
Same concept as putting high barriers on bridges, or selling paracetamol (acetaminophen) in smaller packs. These changes do nothing to stop someone who is committed to the act, but they provide a small energy barrier which can be enough to defeat the perturbations of a temporarily irrational mind.
As you say, it could be a compassionate aid to help a colleague deal with intrusive thoughts.
And yet, no one really seems to be able to figure out how to plan for these mental health failure modes or even talk about them in the first place. Corporate America for example seems unable to grasp this stuff.
So in a way more access to space might lower the percentage of such episodes.
I thought that stupid trend died out 10 years ago.
It just results in me abandoning the article on page 1.
And Ars had always split pages. Especially with the Siracusa Mac OS X reviews.
When reading it, I heard it with the voice of Steven He.
"When I turned on my own instrument, it didn't work," Wang said. "You can imagine my panic. I had spent five years preparing for this one experiment. Not only that, I was the first person of Chinese descent to fly on the Shuttle, and the Chinese community had taken a great deal of interest. You have to understand the Asian culture. You don't just represent yourself; you represent your family. The first thing you learn as a kid is to bring no shame to the family. So when I realized that my experiment had failed, I could imagine my father telling me, 'What's the matter with you? Can't you even do an experiment right?' I was really in a very desperate situation"
Which made him think out loud of opening the intentional easy to open hatch. (because of Apllo 1 with 3 burned and trapped astronauts who could not open their door)
So what happened was a lot of distress while on this flight and from now on there was a lock installed. Which means that in a real emergency, astronauts maybe could then not open the door in time. All because social pressure brought someone close to the point of violently breaking.
(and because NASA did not do proper testing for the specialists, like they did for the professional Astronauts)
The lock was only installed while in orbit--where the hatch is not an emergency escape anyway.
Given that, I'd push for the lock to be part of standard procedure. It can't be a point of distress if it's standard procedure instead of a judgement call by the captain.
NASA never forgot their lesson about spacecraft doors from the Apollo 1 fire, and I don't blame them one bit. But as an armchair observer, the fact that the hatch didn't have _some_ kind of rudimentary protection system to keep it from being opened to the vacuum of space until that point, is highly interesting.
I mean, if the account of Wang is true, I have to imagine that he was only asking about the door with the same kind of idle fascination that I most definitely would. I could be wrong but as far as I know, I don't believe Chinese culture promotes the idea of killing your crewmates in front of the whole world as a less shameful act than a physics experiment that didn't work out as intended.
Rational chinese people for sure not. But he was not rational anymore, but out of his mind. Thinking how his family and the whole chinese people would despise him now because he failed as the first chinese in space. Nothing is sure here, but the way he asked, deeply disturbed the others. When you are desperate and cannot handle the pressure anymore - any way to end it, becomes a possibility you consider. A way out. Quite literally in this situation.
A Fantastic show for tech optimists, imagining a world where Russians were the first to land on the moon. This spurred increased investment by the US, continuing the space race, avoided the cold war, adoption of EVs in the 80s, massive action on climate change, and many other fun things. I wishfully think of "what could have been", and a world that seems attainable.
One of the recurring plot points is Executive action taken by astronauts in space, wars avoided and caused by their decisions, brave rescues and other heroics. In one of the episodes a characters takes such an action.
The fact that NASA is afraid to address a real and possible failure point of a mission, because it is “not particularly pleasant” would worry me more than the hatch itself.
I would imagine there could be sever consequences of someone opening an emergency hatch at 10,000m
> Passenger arrested after plane door opened mid-flight explains he felt 'uncomfortable'
https://news.sky.com/story/passenger-arrested-after-plane-do...
That's a key point - at cruising altitude you'd need to push an equivalent of 2 tonnes of weight to open it - it's just not happening. Obviously even at 200 metres up in the air I bet it was incredibly scary.
Now - a strong person can do it when the plane is far enough up that it's very scary, after all some normal passenger airports are a few thousand feet above sea level and we want the doors to work there. But you won't open them at cruise.
All the normal doors on an aeroplane are fire doors so they can't be locked from the inside.
> after all some normal passenger airports are a few thousand feet above sea level and we want the doors to work there
Regardless of airport altitude, when the pilot shuts off the cabin pressurization and opens the cabin vent[s] there will be zero pressure across the door.
The cabin doesn't "remember" the pressure at the last airport, because it's not a sealed volume. The air is constantly being replaced from outside, and the pressure is constantly being regulated.
Is this true? Some back of the napkin math: An airliner crusing at 30,000 feet is in air at about 0.3 ATM. Cabins are pressurized to about 0.8 ATM, so net air perssure is about 0.5 ATM. That's around 7 lbs/in^2. An airliner door is about 72"x42" for a total of around 3,000 in^2. So you need to be able to lift about 10 tons to open it. That would be a very strong person indeed.
He says you can do it high enough to be scary, but opening the door 100ft before landing would probably cause panic even if it isn't all that dangerous.
I’m guessing something like that is what the GP meant.
The parent commenter is referring to airports at high elevations. They mean to say that opening the doors is almost impossible at cruising altitude, which is far above any airports. Hence, the doors can only be opened when not on the ground during early ascent and late descent.
I hope my explanation makes sense.
Paused my reply and took a moment to search. Looks like I was right and wrong. The plane wasn't very high in the air, only about 700 feet. A man did open the emergency hatch, though. [1]
1. [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/27/man-who-opened-flyi...
The main risk is the door or the passenger opening it hitting something critical. Otherwise, you can primarily expect some injuries from stuff flying around, barotrauma to the ear, and an emergency descent, but not an "everybody dies" scenario.
I mean, the article makes opening the hatch sound pretty damn easy. I think even if I were alone on the shuttle I'd lock it just to add that little bit of sense of security.
The story never quite added up just because of crying. This I assume was the incident.
Good to finally get it 30 years later.
The story I thought was related to Richard P. Feynman and maybe his Challenger report. I just had a quick look and it doesn't seem to be in there. Memory fail I guess.
I respect Taylor Wang's honesty in this interview -
"So finally, in desperation. I said. "Hey, if you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back." Well. NASA got nervous at that point. They actually got a psychologist to talk to the other crew members and ask. "Is Taylor going nuts? Fortunately my commander. Bob Overmyer, said, "No. he's okay He's just depressed, and he really wants to repair the experiment. We'Il help out. They were on my side. Finally NASA said okay, on a couple of conditions. First, that I wouldn't neglect my other responsibilities, and second, that I would quit after a reasonable effort
I was relieved, because I hadn't really figured out how not to come back if they'd called my bluff. The Asian tradition of honorable suicide, seppuku, would have failed, since everything on the shuttle is designed for safety. The knife onboard can't even cut the bread. You could put your head in the oven, but it's really just a food warmer. You wouldn't even bum yourself. And if you tried to hang yourself with no gravity, you'd just dangle there and look like an idiot." - https://archive.org/details/spaceshuttle00dkpu/page/232/mode... p232
“I’m sorry, Taylor. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
AI will keep everyone safe. /s
What happens in the event the commander in incapacitated and the crews needs to open the hatch?
They probably aren't ever going to do that in space, but I'm sure there are scenarios that might require it? Maybe fire?
Centralizing control also centralizes a failure point. Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes not.
I thought the discussion of undertrained / -bonded payload specialists was a good component of the article, as it spoke to that calculus. Do you trust this person under stress?
Not in orbit. In orbit there is no scenario where you want to open that hatch. And the lock was only installed in orbit.
I'm not sure if there are enough suits / sealable spaces to make that a viable scenario.
I was thinking of a fire that incapacitated the commander, was spreading, and the best available option was immediately venting all oxygen in the shuttle (probably with some crew loss of life), in order to potentially save enough systems to return home.
On the one hand, that's an extremely far-fetched scenario. On the other hand, NASA has experience with incinerating crews because they lack the means to save themselves.
I think any such fire would make the Shuttle unable to return home safely anyway. And since it is, as you say, a far-fetched scenario, I'm not sure it would be worth trying to mitigate. Note that no such fire, or even any event remotely close to one, happened during any of the Shuttle flights (or for that matter any NASA mission after Apollo 1), which indicates that the probability of such an event was much lower than the probability of multiple other events that did happen to one or more Shuttles, including not just the two that were total loss of vehicle and crew but multiple "close call" events that could have but didn't.
More to the point for this discussion, since no such fire, or even any event remotely close to it, happened on any mission after Apollo 1, while there were incidents that gave cause for concern about the mental state of a crew member, it seems entirely reasonable to put more weight on mitigating the latter than on mitigating the former.
>> So leave a switch to kill all crew available at all times till you think someone is unstable, then lock it. Genius
Reality is more nuanced.
Also, the related rabbit hole is "How do you assure that commanders are maximally reliable?" (or SSBNs, nuclear silo crew, etc.)
Which seems an insane problem to even try to solve!
Indeed, which is why the actual policy that was adopted, as described in the article, is not what you describe. It is "the mission commander locks the hatch as soon as the Shuttle reaches orbit, and doesn't unlock it until deorbit prep". Whether to implement that at all on a particular mission appears to have been up to the mission commander, but if it was done, it was done that way, not the way you describe.
> the related rabbit hole is "How do you assure that commanders are maximally reliable?"
You put them through a much more rigorous screening process than payload specialists. The article explicitly draws this key distinction. Obviously no process is perfect, but the track record of the screening processes that are used for the things you mention is, AFAIK, extremely good. And, as the article notes, later on in the Shuttle program the process for screening payload specialists moved closer to the process that was already used for other crew members, and that had a positive effect.
If you're referring to Apollo 1, that event drove comprehensive changes to the Apollo design to ensure that it wouldn't happen again. And it didn't.
If you're referring to Challenger and Columbia, I'm not sure what "means to save themselves" you are referring to.
Unfortunately that also means it’s very easy to get out in case of an emergency that’s only in your head.
They locked the cabin doors to planes after 9/11 with a lock that can be sealed from the cockpit.
Which is great until the pilot takes a restroom break and the co-pilot decides this is the day he's going out and taking everyone with him...
Doesn't have to be so unsubtle as affiliate money. All sorts of ways to peddle influence.
You are just totally off base.