It's great we can bring them down. What a terrifying experience to have a medical issue on the space station. Kidney stone? Ruptured appendix? intestinal blockage? How could you keep calm so far away!
By going through a ten-year process that selects for calm people.
It looks like there are a few astronauts that were SEALs, one returned December 9th from the ISS.
And for the preternaturally calm and confident who don't have the perfect eyesight required to enter the Air Force, many of them apparently serve instead on nuclear submarines...
> American NASA astronaut, physician, U.S. Navy officer, dual designated naval aviator and flight surgeon, and former Navy SEAL.
Note that "physician" here means Harvard MD.
Also coming down on the Soyuz is pretty routine and only takes a few hours- I’d say it was overall a far less risky situation than being in Antarctic on a deep ocean vessel with appendicitis etc
We have dozens and (hundreds behind them) of men and women monitoring those folks from a global network of control centers 24 hrs a day- The station is mostly commanded from the ground and plans and procedures exist for everything
- if anything its all over orchestrated and over-planned in my opinion, owing to national politics, corporate contracts and international bureaucracy
Is it risky- yes obviously-but I’d argue its less risky then being out at the south pole in winter
See: https://nasawatch.com/iss-news/crew-medical-telecon-summary/
Per launch? I think the "everyone died" rate is about, what, 1.2% of crewed launches?
We need a decade of accident free autonomous launches before humans will line up in mass to visit space like a Carnival Cruise.
No, we didn’t. A few who are not like us did.
I think it's one of the greatest benefits of ever working on a massive industrial project. You quickly realize how incredibly complex these things are and how utterly powerless a person alone is.
so no, not appendix
- Theres a 38 year old woman in the crew
- It’s a medical condition that likely wasn’t present when the mission started 4 months ago
- It’s serious enough to return the crew, but not serious enough that they must do so immediately
I guess we’ll find out in 9 months? (Or not…)
I’m curious at what point in the embryo’s development the zero-g becomes an issue, if its immediate vs long term thing. It’s very possible that if it was pregnancy, the embryo is already not viable but she still needs some procedures to ensure her own health (a DnC, etc) that are important but not enough for an emergency evac.
The operating depth of most submarines is ~300 -- 500m (980 -- 1640 ft), roughly one-third to one-half the depth you cite.
The two USN nuclear submarines lost due to pressure-hull failures, the Thresher (1963) and Scorpion (1968) both failed at depths of 1,200 to 2,000 ft. Threser's test depth was 1,300 ft (400m), and she was operating at about this depth when communications were lost. Scorpion likely failed at 1,530 ft. (470m).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)#Cause>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)#Disappe...>
There are other submersible vessels in the US Navy which can and have operated at greater depths, notably the submersible Alvin and bathyscaphe Trieste II, but those are not combat vessels. Alvin's test deopth is 6,500m (21,300 ft). Triest II's predecessor, Trieste, reached the floor of the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, deepest known spot in the oceans, at 10,916m (35,814 ft). Trieste II incorporated the pressure sphere from its predecessor.
A more conventional, but still experimental, submarine, the USS Dophine (AGSS-555) was a deisel-electric research submarine which reached a depth in excess of 3,000 ft (910 m), probably in 1969. The boat was in-service through 2006.
Also misspelled "Thresher" above. Proof befor submitting, dred.
There's dozens upon dozens of professions where things go wrong infinitely faster than they do in medical situations.