In no way is this news or a scoop, but who can resist the tale of plucky cosmonauts calmly relaying such nuggets from a dead-in-the-water space station as:
Savinikh: "We're trying to turn on the light now. Command issued. No reaction, not even one little diode. If only something would light up..."
and
Savinikh: “I’ve gotten the Rodnik schematics. Pump connected. The valves aren’t opening. There’s an icicle sticking out of the air pipe.”
Yep — all the makings of a sci-fi straight to TV movie… icicles hanging out of air pipes indeed!
However, it is not. It is the tale of two cosmonauts sent to try to recover the dead in low earth orbit Salyut 7 back in 1985. The included cosmonaut to earth communication transcripts would be comedy genius had they been scripted, if only as a parody of calm professionalism in a seemingly absurd predicament.
Over to Ars Technica for the piece: http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/the-little-known-soviet-mission-to-rescue-a-dead-space-station/
(Score: 1) by forkazoo on Thursday September 18 2014, @06:30AM
An air pipe is pretty much going to be pressurized by definition, so if there was some humid air blowing through the pipe into a frozen station, you would get ice accumulation along the flow direction.