Codraroll

There's also the ongoing pressure from having extended the mission duration by an order of magnitude already. The story of the "stranded astronauts" have already made it around the mainstream news and into public consciousness. That means that any mishaps involving Starliner would be a lot more damning to NASA than what would otherwise be the case. I mean, the loss of a crew on day 8 of the 8-day mission due to a vehicle fault would have been a catastrophe in itself, but if it happened after a dozen weeks of examining the spacecraft and giving the thumbs up, heads would roll all over the administration (more so than usual, that is). It would be spectacularly bad PR. Risk is, after all, a combination of probability and consequence. Even if the probability of failure wasn't significantly higher than for a normal mission, the consequences of it have still kept rising all summer. Never mind that it's an election year. By moving the return to Crew-9, NASA has offloaded quite a bit of risk. If Starliner fails to align and burns in the atmosphere on the way back, it'd be a massive loss of face for Boeing, but NASA's decision would be vindicated and they'd be applauded for making the right call. If it returns without a single hitch, NASA still would not face much blame. "We couldn't know that for certain, we couldn't take the risk" would still be an acceptable justification. And even if the Dragon capsule of Crew-9 were to fail for whatever reason, that'd be on SpaceX and largely unrelated to the current debacle (and, thinking cynically, it'd be after the election). Boeing leaves this with a soiled reputation either way, though. At least they've avoided the very worst-case scenario, a loss of vessel with crew on board. But if the empty vessel were to fail, everybody could quickly surmise what would have happened to the crew if they had been on board. And if it were to succeed without a hitch, well ... the fact of the matter is that NASA has decided they couldn't take the risk, which is a damning conclusion in itself. A vote of no confidence, as you put it. I bet there are currently a lot of higher-ups at Boeing who bitterly wish they had never gone into this whole Starliner business in the first place. There's no way it will be certified for operations now, without another - and flawless - demonstration flight.

Well, Gump did become an astronaut in the original novel ...

Your call as the thread owner. I think I'd take out the "737 Max" bit and just leave the rest. "The saga continues" is an apt summary of the situation Boeing is in, really.

I think RCgothic was referring to Soyuzes carrying an entire crew, not the exchange program where singular astronauts join the launches of the other space program.

That's a remarkably apt summary of the history of the Soyuz (and the various programs to replace it) in general.

That being said, if Starliner gets certified and proven to work like it should, it would probably be considered for further spaceflight missions after the end of the ISS too. More space stations are planned, and (except for Lunar Gateway, which is specifically designed to give Orion a purpose) they wouldn't need a completely new craft design to ferry astronauts to them. If Starliner can fly six flights to the ISS, it can fly a seventh and further flights to Orbital Reef or Axiom or whichever station gets up there first. As shown by Soyuz, once a workable LEO taxi has been developed, it can be used to fly to any conventient LEO destinations its launch vehicle can reach.

Let's just hope the lack of consensus is due to group A saying "We are as certain as we can be that everything is fine, save for the inherent background risk of space travel" and group B saying "Just to be sure, we should send it down empty", instead of group A saying "we shouldn't do this" and group B saying the 2020's equivalent of "The O-rings have disintegrated before without issue ..." Either way, though, Boeing doesn't come out of this looking good. This was supposed to be the certification flight. The quick shakedown cruise to show that the capsule is working as intended and ready to use. Instead, it has become a test flight, running close to two months overdue. I wonder whether that certification is attainable now or that another flight would be required. Which would be a bit of a bummer, since the spacecraft is only contracted for a handful of flights *ever*, so a delay now would cut a substantial chunk out of its operative service life. If it really needs to be reworked and go through more certification flights before operability is declared, it might not be worth to continue funding it at all.

Summary of Russian orbital launches so far in 2024 (8) and the planned missions for the rest of the year (6, although I suppose more could be announced on short notice - although so could delays): https://www.russianspaceweb.com/2024.html At least the numbers seem to be going the right way compared to 2023.

Oh, Russia is far off the deep end of trauma inflicted by centuries of mismanagement already, followed by a conga line of ineptitude and degradation over the past thirty years. Hopefully, the aftermath of their current actions will suffice to end the madness by way of removing the political construct that perpetrates it.

Breathing what? If nothing passes through the vocal chords, no vibrations would be made, hence no sound.

Literally the only thing Spacescifi posts about, almost making a thread a day in some periods.

It's Take-Two's forum, and if they don't want to continue the expense of upkeep now that the game it concerns isn't being marketed anymore, they could literally just send a couple of emails and have it taken down.

By 1946, the greatest morale boost would be that the war was already over. Beer at nine dollars per pint would probably do more to harm than increase morale.

For whatever reason, matters of air quality usually goes into the hands of the ventilation people. Building physics, at least as it's practiced in the Nordic countries, is about preventing fungal growth inside the building structure itself, often from the outside. Ironically enough, doing thermal calculations that involve only snow is trivial. Your temperature will be 0 °C or colder. The question is how long the structure lasts.

Definitely a cool field! I was drawn to it because it's a very practical subject with lots of everyday applications. I mean, practically everybody is involved on the user side of building science. The international research community is surprisingly small, though. Outside of the Nordic countries, few have even heard about building physics as a discipline (it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page), and the subject of moisture in buildings is mostly only studied in northern Europe. I don't think even the UK has an active research community working on building moisture, which is kind of strange considering it's the primary degradation mechanism for all buildings that feature organic materials or experience freeze-thaw cycles. Anywhere you go in the world you find institutes researching building energy use, or sustainability, but mention degradation (outside the context of preserving historic architecture) and you just get funny looks. It's almost so I'm asking whether buildings even degrade in those climates, or if they just accept it as a default fact of life.

The ISS is on Google Street View, if you know where to look for it. That's not quite the same, but still. But yeah, I think it would be vastly easier to build a full-scale replica ISS for museum purposes than to try to save the one in orbit. It would not be the same, but it would be similar enough for a fraction of the fraction of the price.

I just thought of a fun-ish story from my (admittedly not very long) academic career. Sometimes, the most innocuous questions turn out to be the hardest to answer. In my case, it was as simple as "I need to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations. What's a suitable value for the thermal conductivity (λ value) of snow?" That was a rabbit hole. Snow is flipping impossible to examine theoretically. Okay, I might as well explain the context too. Like everything fluffy that contains air, snow has rather good insulating properties. That means there will be a temperature gradient through a snowdrift accumulated on a roof. If you consider the roof-with-snow as the building envelope, you've got the indoors temperature on one side, the outdoors temperature on the other side, and the temperature in-between is something in-between. If the outdoors temperature is right below the freezing point, the temperature inside the snowdrift can theoretically reach above (although in practice it will of course not exceed) 0 °C. That's the point where snow begins to melt. The snowmelt runs off the roof, and since the outdoors temperature is below freezing, it will re-form into icicles and be a hazard to passers-by on the street below. My simple question as a building scientist was thus how much snow needs to accumulate on the roof before that can happen. It's a very simple calculation in principle; all you need is the thermal conductivity of the snowdrift. And then I found that the estimates for that thermal conductivity spanned roughly two orders of magnitude. They range from λ = 0.06 W/mK to λ = 3.6 W/mK. That gives the calculation a margin of error of thousands of percent, making it not a very useful one. So why is this so difficult? As we all know, a snowflake is a pretty, tiny ice crystal. But snow in bulk is a mixture of ice (λ = 2-3.6 W/mK), air (λ = 0.02 W/mK), and liquid water (λ = 0.6 W/mK). The ratio between the three ingredients depends on all sorts of factors, including the temperature during the snowfall, the air humidity, the rate of snowfall, and wind. Of course, two of the ingredients frequently turn into each other and back. As snow builds up, it compresses under its own weight, changings its porosity, and hence its density. As it melts, it soaks up its own melt water like a sponge. It can partially melt and re-freeze; in fact it does so all the time. After all, it's a material that can only form at temperatures close to that of its phase transition. A deeper snowdrift will consist of many different layers of snow, each with a different composition and possibly a different structure. And of course, the thickness of the snowdrift and/or the individual layers changes as the snow compresses and/or melts. Exposure to sun and/or wind will of course mess things up too. And there's probably even more stuff that plays in to change the thermal conductivity. In fact, you can't even measure it reliably. All the standard methods involve creating a thermal gradient through the material, and you can't do that without either melting some of the ice or freezing some of the water - which will also change the porosity of the snow. You can't measure the porosity and the water content of the same sample either. The best you can do is putting some thermometers below and on top of the snow drift and do some calculations based on their readings, but you can't insert them into an existing snowdrift without disturbing its structure. And any thermal simulations that involve snow will necessarily have to include a dynamic thermal conductivity, dynamic layer thicknesses, account for the energy required to undergo phase transitions, and deal with liquid water and capillary action. Of course, the capillary properties also change as the snow melts and freezes, so good luck with that bit. Not to mention that most simulation algorithms just throw their proverbial hands up when liquid water appears. Snow really is a material that hates being simulated. What I ended up with was making some assumptions (λ = 0.16 W/mK, based on some work by an American meteorologist back in the 90's), but they proved rather difficult to test in practice. The best guess is "you'll start seeing some icicles if you have more than 10 cm of snow and temperatures right below zero on a roof insulated to the building code specifications", but heck if I know whether that's correct in general terms. I guess one just has to wait through several winters to see. But then you're likely to just find an answer that works for one specific roof in one specific climate.

And in the lower lunar gravity, windmill blades could be made even more slender while still bearing their own weight, further reducing material usage! Uh, wait a second ...

Russia didn't lose territory. The supernational entity Russia used to be a member of, split apart. It's not like if the EU was split up, Belgium could claim Italy as a lost territory. French Guyana is an administrative region of France. Kazakhstan is an independent country. Considering the state of the fire ladder, it's probably safer to take a chance with the lift.

"Why keep using the old and unsafe lift, or stress about building a new lift? The Russians have a stair we can use, and they're being all sporty about it." *later* "Oh, that's why we had a lift of our own in the first case. Probably should have hurried up a bit with that new lift. Well, good thing we never have to use that stair again!"

A situation that was largely caused by the decision to retire the space shuttle before a replacement was ready, a decision that was influenced by the Russian service being available in the first place. The US had a fallback option and decided to go for it to save money. What happened next was that the Russians set prices to extortion levels once they were the only supplier. And then things began to fail in a bad way when their increased spending on new spaceports, reduced income, and the corruption problem finally trickled down into quality control.

Would Rogozin even have the authority to post security in an area not under Russian custody? Wouldn't that be a matter for the authorities in Kazakhstan?

Rather, Orbital Reef or Axiom. There is zero reason to involve the Russians on the next station, seeing how it worked out on this one.

It's not an easy module to replace, though. A few other modules are also attached to it, and would have to be moved around (if making new, tight seals with their decade-old docking adapters are even possible) or discarded (in which case the station would need a new life support system). And even if repairs are somehow successful, the ISS remains very old with only a few years left in its lifespan. Other modules are also showing their age. It's like changing the engine on a very old car: it's expensive, and only a matter of time before something else breaks, so the effort might be for naught. So rather, it's the time for NASA to give money for a replacement station. Along with ESA, JAXA, and CSA, of course.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/06/on-the-space-station-band-aid-fixes-for-systemic-problems/ So, apparently, the ISS is doing kind of badly. As in "Scoring fives on the five-point scales of consequence and probability in the risk matrix" badly. "1-in-10 or higher odds of catastrophe" badly. A small module located next to the Zvezda module is leaking, which is worrying, and they haven't found out why, which is horrifying. The station is planned to be in operation for five more years, but the chances of getting any serious maintenance on these systems in the meantime are kind of small. I'm kind of sad that the plans for its replacement have not come any further than they have, because the odds of having to abandon the ISS prematurely are getting uncomfortably high.