Astronauts on the ISS brace for emergency evacuation after NASA finds 50 'areas of concern'
NASA has raised the threat level to the highest rating
NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station are preparing for a possible evacuation as they face a worsening air leak problem.
The US space agency and its Russian counterpart, Roscomos, are tracking 50 'areas of concern' related to a growing leak aboard the station.
In a recent report from NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the cracks in a Russian service module have reached a 'top safety risk,' marking it a five-out-of-five threat level.
This story is the only one I can find. Can someone please corroborate this?
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Astronauts on the ISS Brace for Emergency Evacuation after NASA Finds 50 'Areas of Concern'
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Tuesday October 29 2024, @04:28PM (1 child)
I can't tell if hoax, unverifiable rumor, or just really early in the cycle.
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(Score: 5, Funny) by Frosty Piss on Tuesday October 29 2024, @04:36PM
But it's the Daily Mail! The solid granite of British news media!
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Username on Tuesday October 29 2024, @04:45PM (1 child)
It's Roscosmos BTW.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday October 29 2024, @06:29PM
Honestly if I want a conspiracy theory, it's that NASA is tired of paying to maintain the ISS when they've already said they're basically done with it, and they're inflating some maintenance item to "Disaster" in order to get approval to just drop the thing in the pacific.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Tuesday October 29 2024, @04:50PM (12 children)
There's not (yet) a real need for an urgent evacuation. Apparently it's an incomplete closure of a hatch in the Russian Zvezda module which at peak (April this year) caused a daily leak of 1.68kg of air from the ISS. It's concerning, together with the 588 parts, for September alone, which are overdue for replacement. Quote [msn.com]:
(Score: 4, Informative) by quietus on Tuesday October 29 2024, @04:56PM (4 children)
The Zvezda module provides half of the station with oxygen and drinkable water, and it's also equipped with a machine that scrubs carbon dioxide from the air. The module contains the section's sleeping quarters, dining room, refrigerator, freezer, and bathroom. The leak started in 2019, was pinpointed to the Zvezda module in 2020, and has doubled in size since begin of this year.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday October 29 2024, @05:15PM (3 children)
If they know there is a leak, it's doubling in size then why don't they locate it and seal/plug it? Wouldn't a little smoke or something be enough to have it sucked towards the leak?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by quietus on Tuesday October 29 2024, @06:13PM
They originally used an ultrasonic noise detector to detect the escaping air, then tried to plug it with kapton tape; now they seem to suspect brittleness/stresses within the Pfk section -- a vestibule between the actual docking station and the rest of the Zvezda module. (If you've ever owned an Alfa Romeo with a roof window you might sympathize: the sealing rubber around that window grows brittle with time, causing leaks.)
Note that the ISS is not completely airtight, but continuously loses tiny amounts of gas to space: which is why it is regularly repressurized using nitrogen tanks brought up by cargo spacecraft.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 29 2024, @07:11PM
Your stereotypical car engine has a mass air flow sensor in the intake and "uh maybe 5 grams/sec" is reasonable at idle. Not for a giant bus or an ocean ship, but a little car, sure. If you figure a g/s is about a hundred kilo/day (to about one sig fig) that means an idling car engine pumps about "five hundred" kilos/day of air. So this leak is about 1/500th the air flow out of a car muffler at idle. I don't think I could detect that. Maybe if REALLY well insulated you'd see it get slightly cooler there, but probably not.
Let's check my crazy math. 500 kilos of water, is 132 gallons. Figure a 15:1 air:fuel ratio and if cars burned water and gas that would be "ten-ish" gallons of gas burned per day at idle. Plausible.
So yeah the leak is about a thousandth the feel you get of air blowing out of your muffler when a car idles.
Another idea, probably not right. probably not entirely wrong, could be some kind of intermittent leak. Lets say you have double thickness windows (to make the explanation really simple) and the inside window "sunrise" side leaks when it heats up at sunrise and the outside window "sunset" side only leaks at sunset. Old seals, thermal expansion and contraction, etc. So its like a pump, filling the space between windows with air and dumping it out once every orbit, but it never leaks continuously. Maybe a simpler more realistic example is some random cooling fan bolted to the wall runs one minute every hour and it only leaks when it vibrates... would instruments be sensitive enough to detect the pattern? I am not sure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30 2024, @09:55AM
They forgot to bring the duct-tape last time.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 29 2024, @05:25PM (6 children)
So, it's in the vein of the Thwaite "Doomsday Glacier" which has has "broken away and will raise sea levels 100'" What the headline and first five paragraphs fail to say is: "in the coming centuries."
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(Score: 4, Touché) by Tork on Tuesday October 29 2024, @05:42PM (5 children)
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 29 2024, @06:35PM (4 children)
I've been hearing murmurs for a while now that the ISS is getting ditched... this may be an attempt to build public acceptance of that...
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(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday October 29 2024, @07:17PM (3 children)
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 29 2024, @11:42PM (2 children)
>Russian shenanigans
I live approximately 60 miles south of a major nuclear submarine base. I think it was 2017 when Putin was loudly touting his new "super torpedo" tipped with a 20MT warhead. Of course, targets for such a torpedo are basically bases like that one north of us. 20MT detonated underwater 60 miles away, not a pleasant thought. Yeah, sure, we (at least the top 3) all have all manner of these toys, secret and advertised, but doing a press blitz in the Western channels about it? Go F yourself, the Cold War ended in 1990 and starting it up again will go just as poorly for you next time. So, instead, we have had a hot war since 2022... hopefully we have enough follow-through to show everyone that massive military conquest isn't the way to win anything anymore.
Here's a more recent article with a little more realistic timelines, but still some unbelievable hype:
Color me skeptical about a 1.6 meter diameter torpedo pushing 100 knots evading acoustic detection... 100MT yield also seems a bit over-the-top in this article, I'm fairly sure the flak I was reading back when said 20.
https://thebulletin.org/2023/06/one-nuclear-armed-poseidon-torpedo-could-decimate-a-coastal-city-russia-wants-30-of-them/ [thebulletin.org]
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(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday October 30 2024, @03:35AM (1 child)
The novel "Act of Defiance" published under Tom Clancy's name is based on such a device.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 30 2024, @11:25AM
I like how you say published under Tom Clancy's name paperback publishers really piss me off when they go around using popular authors names and use Shadow writers produce a bunch of weak garbage it barely resembles the original author's abilities.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by Freeman on Tuesday October 29 2024, @04:54PM (3 children)
Most recent press releases also show nothing:
https://oig.nasa.gov/oig-press-releases/ [nasa.gov]
The OIG's most recently posted report is for 2020:
https://oig.nasa.gov/investigation-reports/ [nasa.gov]
I'm unable to find any official source for the "Emergency Evacuation notice".
In fact the link in the quoted section below is just a link to the article's site with other news on "NASA".
None of the news sources that I've found have any corroborating evidence.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Informative) by Freeman on Tuesday October 29 2024, @05:05PM (2 children)
Article on Arstechnica from July 2024 titled "As leaks on the space station worsen, there’s no clear plan to deal with them" https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/06/on-the-space-station-band-aid-fixes-for-systemic-problems/ [arstechnica.com]
The article from July hits all of the "hot news" I've noticed on the recent uncorroborated "Evacuation Notice" news articles.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Tork on Tuesday October 29 2024, @05:45PM
Making old news new again... is that a new journalism business model?
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(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday October 29 2024, @06:17PM
My bad, it's from June 2024, not July 2024. For the sake of an edit button.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29 2024, @05:06PM
https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/iss-leaks-among-50-areas-of-concern-for-astronaut-safety-report [livescience.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Wednesday October 30 2024, @12:36PM
I think the astronauts/cosmonauts (don't think there are any taikonauts in the ISS) are continuously 'braced' for evacuation. I'd be astonished if they were not. Commercial aeroplane pilots are continuously 'braced' for untoward events, train for them frequently, and have 'memory items' to follow in the event of nasty situations that they drill so you don't need to find page 37f of supplement C of the flight manual in a gale of depressurisation.
I suspect the risk of catastrophic failure in the near future caused by the air-leak is regarded as manageably low. The air-leak is not the only thing that could trigger an emergency evacuation of the ISS. Being hit by a micro-meteoroid could do it. At any time. So could an on-board fire. So the crew need to practice what to do - in other words, be 'braced'.
Sensationalist headline. Bah! Humbug!