Nine Unplanned Months in Space

Nonsense!

A sub-heading reads “Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are back on Earth after spending nine unplanned months in space”

Unplanned? At the first hint of trouble nobody at NASA runs around in circles. A monotone USA voice intones “Please turn to section 32 A of procedures manual seven” or similar. Everything at NASA is planned. There are teams called Systems Analysis and/or Operations Research which are paid to spend their working lives coming up with even more ideas of What Can Go Wrong.

If you and I sat over a coffee for half an hour, eighteen hundred seconds, we would come up with eighteen ideas of what could go wrong; and you and I do not know that seven nine-sixteenths BSW hexagon head bolts clamp the backing-ring “J” to the flanges “K” atop the structure defined on page 397.

Part of the text reads “And when this happens, it can mean making some really tough decisions. … But Butch and Suni’s response - to adapt to a new situation and throw themselves into life on the space station - is part of being what an astronaut is all about. To have a plan - and be prepared to change it.”

There is a plan for everything that anyone can dream up. As head of NASA I would have a cash bonus of $5,000 for every new idea of a problem that pops into anyone’s mind. Five thousand dollars is chicken-feed to the cost in publicity alone of a failed mission.

And I find nothing tough about a decision that concerns “Returning by means of a spacecraft with a known fault” and “Consuming the emergency cans of sardines until the next food-supply craft arrives?

What? You think that the ISS is run like a Just In Time auto-assembly plant back here on Earth? Come now! “The space station has been continuously occupied since November 2000.” The humans up there are game-players. I’ll bet that by now every new arrival – even if it is their fifth trip – joins in the game of “find a new nook” where a can of sardines could be stashed. The prize will be an extra can of sardines with supper tonight OR a block of chocolate.

One of the bonuses of converting warships from coal to oil in the first decade of the twentieth century was that oil is fluid, and will fill every spare cavity of a tank; relieving battleships and destroyers of a coal-shoveling food-eating team of stokers was an auxiliary benefit.

“This will be their first breath of fresh air in a long time.”

In a reverse sense this too will be found to be untrue. Earth’s atmosphere is not only polluted, but it is not Fresh. Every breath you take is refurbished air. The air that you breath out in your home is breathed in by your visitors within a few minutes. That car spewing out Nitrogen oxides as it accelerates out of town? Those fumes will be in your lings before nightfall, albeit diluted, And they will drift westwards, past the Azores, and mingle with the airs of Europe, Asia, and Western California as they begin their monthly cycle that carries them to Australia. ‘Twas ever thus.

I venture to suggest that the finite volume of breathable air aboard the ISS is of a better quality than the air in California, Ontario, or Kent. This web page tells us “Habitable Volume: 13,696 cubic feet” and also “The living and working space in the station is larger than a six-bedroom house (and has six sleeping quarters, two bathrooms, a gym, …)” My six-room cottage holds about 8,000 cubic feet of air. The only air freshening technology is a few leaky windows and two leaky doors, but I seem to survive OK.

With all that said, the news that Butch and Suni would be stranded occurred around 24 hours after launch , at the most. One of the options would have been presented as “Stay up there for a while”, which translates into “You won’t be meeting with your spouse, offspring, and colleagues for a while”.

This is little different for heading off for a week’s skiing holiday in the Perisher Ski resort and learning on arrival that the road to Jindabyne has been wiped out by the largest landslide in Australian history. Email the office and tell them that you’ll return to work next month, maybe, looking like a sardine!

I concur that Perisher is nowhere near as remote as the ISS; further that a sufficiently large team of bulldozers, road graders and cases of gelignite can be assembled quickly in New South Wales. Rocket-ships not so quickly. And given that your 99.99% dependable ship has just let you down, your recovery vehicle had better be 99.9999% dependable. Recovering from egg on your face is different from recovering from botched facial surgery.

I believe we can all agree that launching into space atop enough fuel to keep Bonavista happy for a decade suggests the possibility of death, and that insurance companies and lawyers will have done a calm but painful job or writing wills, asking about the ages of children, and the likelihood of all them graduating from University. I suppose that the night after signing your will is a somber night.

There again, ISS candidates must be well-versed in contingency plans. The wedding anniversary gift will have been purchased well before the launch and left in the hands of the Best Friend with explicit instructions. Before your trip to Alaska in your camper-van you left a spare set of keys to your home with your neighbour; also the key to your Post-Office box.

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