Three astronauts are stuck on China’s space station without a safe ride home
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
I guess if you're already in a situation where you've got 3 astronauts on-station without a fully-healthy ride home, you may as well send the other 3 home safely.
Upvote
148
(152
/
-4)
It would be ironic if the debris that cause the damage was from China's own anti-satellite weapons testing.
Upvote
201
(220
/
-19)
that picture of the impact on an ISS window from something several orders of magnitude smaller than the crack is a level of existential horror that i would not be prepared to deal with. good thing i'm not an astronaut.
Upvote
129
(130
/
-1)
"Crews at the Tiangong outpost ventured outside the station multiple times in the last few years to install space debris shielding to protect the outpost."
Tell us more about that please.
Tell us more about that please.
Upvote
192
(192
/
0)
Also a reminder of why backup equipment, plans, and procedures (such as lifeboats) are essential in space and elsewhere.
Upvote
93
(93
/
0)
Upvote
78
(82
/
-4)
There was a short mention of that in the earlier article. I'm guessing they're installing Whipple shielding that wasn't included in the segments of the station as they launched. My understanding is the ISS is covered in the stuff already - except the Canadarm that got blasted once a while back.
Upvote
99
(99
/
0)
As mentioned in the article, the Tiangong was not designed to support 6 astronauts for long periods. It was probably essential to send 3 home rather than overtaxing the station equipment.
Upvote
160
(160
/
0)
Huh. That’s not something NASA and Roscosmos normally do is it? I feel like we’d just blame Biden or whatever, rather than having a launch at the ready (we always had a future launch on a schedule, but it wasn’t ready).
Upvote
63
(73
/
-10)
Maybe it’s time to pay attention to all of the junk up there and think about how to minimize any additional space junk.
Upvote
47
(51
/
-4)
Good idea!
It seems it would also be prudent for everyone to settle on a standard docking design, so that any space capsule can dock with any space station. That way if nation A has astronauts in need of help, nation B (which happens to have a mission nearly ready to launch) might be able to help.
Upvote
132
(133
/
-1)
Yes, I thought about adding "no reason to tax the support systems," but that was well covered by the article.
Upvote
34
(36
/
-2)
Adding shielding after launch (I'll call it after-market shielding) seems like a challenging endeavor. I wonder how it is mounted to a section not designed for it.
Upvote
27
(28
/
-1)
Oh come now. Intentionally sending a Starliner near the Chinese station would almost certainly be considered an act of war!
Upvote
141
(149
/
-8)
It all depends on how many hard points the Chinese included on their exterior for future solar panels, radiators, etc. Whipple shielding isn't a new idea so it's entirely possible the Chinese engineers accounted for it during fabrication and waited until they had on-orbit data to suggest if it was really needed or not.
Upvote
84
(84
/
0)
Does China use docking ports compatible with the ones SpaceX introduced or the one the Russian use? In either case it would allow an alternative option, even if not ideal for national pride, though I hope here we are above that.
Note, I am sure the US would have an equivalent existential crisis if they were asking China to get their astronauts back to Earth, given the current policies.
Note, I am sure the US would have an equivalent existential crisis if they were asking China to get their astronauts back to Earth, given the current policies.
Upvote
41
(41
/
0)
Maybe this is the explanation of the Fermi Paradox. All the civilisations that don't run out of available energy before they establish a colony on the next planet, fail to get there because they can't make it through their own space junk.
Bacterial colonies die when their own waste products prevent them obtaining food from outside.
Upvote
31
(47
/
-16)
Then you run out of energy getting all that mass to orbit.
Living at the bottom of a gravity well sucks.
Upvote
45
(54
/
-9)
Unfortunately, China treats lower earth orbit like they treat the ocean; as a giant trash can. Not surprised their negligence will come to haunt us all.
Upvote
4
(39
/
-35)
to be fair, everybody treats both space and the ocean as a trash can, it's not just a China thing
Upvote
96
(129
/
-33)
NASA and the United States Air Force now require upper-stage passivation, other launchers – such as the Chinese and Russian space agencies – do not.
China's government was condemned for the military implications and the amount of debris from the 2007 anti-satellite missile test,[99] the largest single space debris incident in history (creating over 2,300 pieces golf-ball size or larger, over 35,000 1 cm (0.4 in) or larger, and one million pieces 1 mm (0.04 in) or larger).
Upvote
136
(143
/
-7)
The US is getting much more clean and orderly in orbit after a history of space pollution, other nations will follow suit as they catch up technologically.
Everybody everywhere is still dumping pretty much anything they want in the ocean, directly or by proxy.
Upvote
82
(89
/
-7)
Not so. The dry mass fraction of Starship is pretty good from a historical rockets point of view (if you ignore all the flaps and heat tiles). It's just so damned big that it has natural debris shielding. So it's not that you run out of energy launching mass. It's that you have to launch in bigger chunks.
Upvote
31
(39
/
-8)
Bill Swallow
Ars Centurion
They went for the undercoating at the dealer instead of the shielding. Very persuasive salesman.
Upvote
37
(39
/
-2)
Which was the exact point of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project flight in 1975.
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo–Soyuz
EDIT 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgynous_Peripheral_Attach_System
Last edited:
Upvote
41
(41
/
0)
Kudos to the China space agency on their safety culture.
I never thought I'd say that.
I never thought I'd say that.
Upvote
41
(49
/
-8)
The fuel costs to move that much more mass around would make that utterly impractical. You can't thicken the walls ENOUGH to be "safe". You're only adding excess mass that you have to burn more fuel to move at the same acceleration rates.
REAL spacecraft are not "armored" - or are about as well as a WWII airplane was. There were armor plates that stopped lower caliber fire from penetrating the gas tanks and the pilots (except, notably, for the Japanese, which had neither and is why their planes were flying tinderboxes if they got hit).
Space stations have "armored" sections inside them, in case there's a breech due to debris. Rockets can turn their heat shields toward the debris, but that's iffy, since if the heat shield is damaged, then they have no safe way home, but they might be able to hole up on a space station until they can Uber their way to Earth again.
Upvote
18
(25
/
-7)
AFAIK they do not, but even if they did it wouldn't matter because the stations are on different orbital planes that are difficult to reach from other available launch sites.
Upvote
28
(30
/
-2)
Does this situation count as a successful failure yet? Not yet. Here is to the three remaining astronauts getting back.
Upvote
18
(19
/
-1)
I feel like we are getting closer to a point where we could have a rescue launch vehicle at the ready than we were previously. The Space Shuttle was going to be there if we continued to add to the fleet, but Challenger ended all of that.
I keep hoping we will get there some day.
Upvote
6
(8
/
-2)
IDK if this was sarcasm but China has invited cooperation but congress made it illegal.
Upvote
36
(45
/
-9)