[HN Gopher] Astronauts take shelter in Starliner, other spacecra...
___________________________________________________________________
Astronauts take shelter in Starliner, other spacecraft after
satellite breakup
Author : belter
Score : 87 points
Date : 2024-06-27 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.space.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.space.com)
| belter wrote:
| https://x.com/Space_Station/status/1806162645424189945
| RaoulP wrote:
| "Shortly after 9 p.m. EDT, @NASA instructed crews aboard the
| space station to shelter in their respective spacecraft as a
| standard precautionary measure after it was informed of a
| satellite break-up at an altitude near the station's earlier
| Wednesday. Mission Control continued to monitor the path of the
| debris, and after about an hour, the crew was cleared to exit
| their spacecraft and the station resumed normal operations."
| sunk1st wrote:
| What makes the one spacecraft safer than the other?
| houseofzeus wrote:
| The ability to evacuate in it.
| headcanon wrote:
| Its not so much that as it is their escape pod if the station
| has a catastrophic failure.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| The specific answer to OP's question is manoeuvring
| thrusters, a heat shield and a landing system.
| croddin wrote:
| They could emergency return to earth right away if needed.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Smaller.
| rolph wrote:
| the assigned crew has been trained to operate it.
|
| the logistics [crew mass, crew capabilities] have been factored
| into S.O.P. of the mission.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Thickness of the walls.
| brookst wrote:
| One of them is a Boeing.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Just great, even more risk of debris.
| solarpunk wrote:
| starting to see symptoms of something that could lead to Kessler
| Syndrome
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| At that altitude? I don't know. This debris should clear out in
| a few years, right?
| dotancohen wrote:
| Maybe twenty years, after taking out the Starlink
| constellation and most other satellites below ~400 KM.
|
| I'm sure that we'd still risk unmanned launches to higher
| altitudes during this time, but manned launches would very
| likely be restricted, at least by risk-adverse NASA.
| WJW wrote:
| A starlink satellite has a life expectancy of only about 5
| years anyway, and that is WITH station keeping ion
| thrusters. Anything smaller than a starlink satellite will
| likely have an even shorter lifespan due to having worse
| mass vs surface area ratio because of the square cube law,
| and should be gone within a few years. Anything larger can
| easily be tracked with radars etc and should still be gone
| relatively quickly.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Yes, but we won't have use of the functionality that the
| Starlink satellites provide for the duration of the
| natural deorbits from ~400 KM.
| treyd wrote:
| Smaller debris deorbits faster, Starlink is in VLEO.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Yes, but the ISS debris would be raining down on it from
| about ~400 KM - so it will take a bit longer for all that
| to come down.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Yes.
|
| "At around 400 kilometers and into the 500-km realm -- home
| to ISS and the SpaceX Starlink satellites among others --
| atmospheric drag plays a major role. Dead satellites and
| debris usually slow and burn up in the atmosphere in just a
| few years. This natural cleansing process accelerates when
| the sun becomes more active and solar coronal mass ejections
| strike Earth and cause the atmosphere to swell."
|
| https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/understanding-
| the...
|
| Still, if the events occur not once in a decade but multiple
| times a year that could mean trouble for space travel:
|
| "Linares sees a potential future where 'humans probably don't
| have any incentive to launch satellites, because we're losing
| 50% of them' to collisions with debris, he says."
| WJW wrote:
| How can you possibly tell that from something that happens
| regularly anyway?
| belter wrote:
| "One bacterium is put in a bottle at 11:00 a.m. and it is
| observed that the bottle is full of bacteria at 12:00 noon.
| Here is a simple example of exponential growth in a finite
| environment. This is mathematically identical to the case of
| the exponentially growing consumption of our finite resources
| of fossil fuels.
|
| 11:58 a.m. -> Bottle is one quarter full.
|
| 11:59 a.m. -> Bottle half-full !
|
| 12:00 noon -> Bottle is full !
|
| https://www.albartlett.org/articles/art_forgotten_fundamenta.
| ...
| WJW wrote:
| This does not answer my question, unless you also have
| proof that the amount of cases of the ISS crew having to
| take shelter is also increasing exponentially. Since the
| astronauts went back to work after 1 hour instead of moving
| back to Earth, we can infer that the perceived danger has
| passed.
|
| (That is quite beside the point that Kessler syndrome at
| that altitude is definitely _not_ the type of "exponential
| growth in a finite environment" that the linked article
| describes, because orbital decay means that the smaller the
| particles get, the faster they will deorbit themselves)
| tedunangst wrote:
| And at 12:01 there's two bottles of bacteria!
| feoren wrote:
| That shows such a poor understanding of exponential growth
| that it makes me think this person should not be teaching
| physics.
|
| First of all, exponential growth basically doesn't ever
| actually occur in nature: everything has a carrying
| capacity. Sometimes the carrying capacity is so high it
| doesn't matter, but clearly in the case of the bottle it
| does. The growth will slow down significantly as the
| bacteria approaches the capacity of the bottle. The bottle
| could easily be half full as early as 11:30 as the
| available food for the bacteria starts becoming scarce
| enough to limit its growth.
|
| Secondly, 2^60 bacteria would weigh about 1,100 kg.
| Assuming the bottle is 1L (larger than a standard wine
| bottle), you'd need over 1000 bottles to house that much
| bacteria. So no, if it doubles every minute, then the
| bottle has been full for the last 10 minutes.
|
| I'm being generous and assuming some process is keeping the
| flask continuously well-mixed, otherwise you don't even
| have exponential growth in the ideal case (it's limited by
| the expanding surface area of the colony).
|
| You might think I'm being pedantic, but the entire exercise
| is to put some "real world" context to blow the minds of
| people and illustrate how exponential growth "really"
| works. But that's _not_ how exponential growth really works
| in the real world, _at all_. Instead it 's just taking a
| model of spherical cows to an absurd conclusion that only
| serves to further confuse people's understanding of the
| world. It's like those awful anti-intuition-pumps
| (intuition sinks?) about stretching all your DNA from end-
| to-end.
| belter wrote:
| https://www.albartlett.org/
| htrp wrote:
| > The incident illustrates what NASA officials have been
| emphasizing about the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which is more
| than three weeks into what was expected to be a 10-day Crew
| Flight Test mission. Starliner is on a test mission with two
| astronauts and is authorized to leave the ISS in case of
| emergency. (The other two crewed spacecraft docked to the ISS are
| a SpaceX Dragon carrying four astronauts, and a Russian Soyuz
| with three people on board.)
| tedd4u wrote:
| >what NASA officials have been emphasizing
|
| Anyone understand specifically what this is referring to? I
| read it several times and I don't see a hint. Normally this
| phrase would be followed by an explanation like
|
| >this illustrates what Alice has been emphasizing -- that Bob
| has excellent OpSec
| auspiv wrote:
| The Boeing Starliner craft has had multiple issues (IIRC 5
| separate thrusters not working and at least 2 separate helium
| leaks) since docking with the ISS. NASA continues to stress
| that Starliner is authorized to return astronauts to earth in
| the event of an emergency. NASA, at the same time, delayed
| the return of said Starliner indefinitely until they can
| analyze more test data.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/06/nasa-indefinitely-
| dela...
| abadpoli wrote:
| I don't see what that has to do with this story, though.
| Starliner's issues have nothing to do with the breakup of a
| satellite nor do the issues affect Starliner's usage as a
| shelter.
|
| This article and headline just reek of the author grasping
| at straws to try and shoehorn Starliner into this story.
| The headline could've easily said "shelter in Soyuz" and
| nothing would've changed about the actual story at hand.
| vondur wrote:
| I'm guessing that the fact they are still up at the ISS
| when they should have returned to Earth at this point.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| They are there by choice. The parts of Starliner used in
| deorbiting are all functional. But the parts that leaked
| will get discarded and burn up themselves in the
| atmosphere, which prevents examining them. So the
| astronauts are hanging around to do that examination
| while they can.
| rdtsc wrote:
| NASA and Boeing have been battling criticism, fair or unfair
| you can decide, over how Boeing spent a lot more money and
| time and sent Starliner to the ISS with a bunch of engine
| failures and leaks.
|
| So the author went for an awkward attempt at saying "Look how
| great Starliner is, astronauts are even sheltering in it from
| all that Russian debris and will fly it back if needed".
|
| > this illustrates what Alice has been emphasizing -- that
| Bob has excellent OpSec
|
| The answer is below a bit:
|
| > "Starliner [...] is authorized to leave the ISS in case of
| emergency"
|
| I guess it would be something like:
|
| "As we all know, Bob has had a few slip-ups recently: he
| leaked his admin credentials in a public github repo, and
| then he also asked for a salary increase, but we'd like to
| emphasize that in an emergency Bob is fully authorized to
| respond to incidents and operate the system"
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| According to both US Space Command and LEO Labs, the satellite in
| question was a 6-ton non-functional Russian satellite known as
| "RESURS-P1": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurs-P_No.1
|
| https://twitter.com/LeoLabs_Space/status/1806140666222948679
|
| https://www.spacecom.mil/Newsroom/News/Article-Display/Artic...
| happosai wrote:
| According to astrophysist and space historian Jonathan
| McDowell, Resurs-P1 passed over Plesetsk, a test launch base
| for the Russian Nudol anti-satellite system around the time of
| its debirs-generating event.
| sjburt wrote:
| Note that his tweets indicate that he does not believe it to
| be an ASAT test.
|
| https://x.com/planet4589/status/1806333953617334688
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| "Another comment on Resurs-P1; the sat is 5600 kg. That's
| huge. It would be crazy and very bad of the Russians to use
| such a massive sat as an antisatellite target. Now it may
| be true that the Russian govt is indeed crazy and v. bad,
| but still, am leaning towards 'not ASAT'."
|
| is the whole tweet.
|
| If Putin were doing something stupid because he can, that
| would sound pretty in keeping to me.
| floatrock wrote:
| How often do satellites break up into clouds of orbiting
| debris?
|
| Or another angle -- what percentage of satellite EOL events
| is "breaking up into a debris field" (vs "burning up in the
| atmosphere")?
| Keyframe wrote:
| and of those how many do it on the hour "at approximately
| 1000 MT (1600 UTC)"?
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Leolabs says the fragmentation occurred between 13:05 UTC
| 26 June and 00:51 UTC 27 June.
|
| https://x.com/LeoLabs_Space/status/1806140666222948679
| itishappy wrote:
| More often than I would have expected:
|
| > Space debris (also known as space junk, space pollution,
| space waste, space trash, space garbage, or cosmic debris)
| are defunct human-made objects in space - principally in
| Earth orbit - which no longer serve a useful function.
| These include derelict spacecraft (nonfunctional spacecraft
| and abandoned launch vehicle stages), mission-related
| debris, and particularly-numerous in-Earth orbit,
| fragmentation debris from the breakup of derelict rocket
| bodies and spacecraft.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris
|
| > There were 190 known satellite breakups between 1961 and
| 2006. By 2015, the total had grown to 250 on-orbit
| fragmentation events.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_debris_producin
| g...
| amelius wrote:
| Makes me wonder what is the half-life of space debris.
| itishappy wrote:
| > The higher the altitude, the longer the orbital debris
| will typically remain in Earth orbit. Debris left in
| orbits below 600 km normally fall back to Earth within
| several years. At altitudes of 800 km, the time for
| orbital decay is often measured in centuries. Above 1,000
| km, orbital debris will normally continue circling the
| Earth for a thousand years or more.
|
| https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/faq/
| exabrial wrote:
| This is actually something that happens fairly regularly.
| Sometimes they even rotate the space station so the smallest
| frontal area is facing the debris cloud.
| belter wrote:
| Sounds stressful...Wake up, shower, dress, then have breakfast
| with your ISS colleagues, while keeping up with the latest
| edition of the Orbital Debris News!
|
| Orbital Debris Quarterly News:
| https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/pdfs/ODQNv...
|
| Nasa Orbital Debris Program:
| https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/#
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Slightly tongue in cheek, but the astronauts on board are not
| going to be the ones doing the mission planning around debris
| checks - that will be coordinated from the ground.
| Oarch wrote:
| "This happened, for example, after Russia deliberately destroyed
| a satellite in November 2021 as part of a surprise anti-satellite
| test that other countries (including the United States)
| condemned".
|
| Funny they singled out Russia. From Wikipedia:
|
| "...a few countries (China, India, Russia, and the United States)
| have successfully shot down their own satellites to demonstrate
| their ASAT capabilities in a show of force."
| dylan604 wrote:
| the "for example" is the bit in the first quoted sentence to
| make it weird. if the debris is directly from the most recent
| Russian "test", then it would be right to call it out.
| wil421 wrote:
| China shot a satellite from the ground.[1] Sometime after the
| US destroyed a satellite from a Navy ship [2].
|
| Before these times the US did it from an F-15.[3]
|
| [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-
| satellite_...
|
| [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost#:~:tex
| ....
|
| [3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Solwind&diffonl
| ...
| crubier wrote:
| It depends on the orbit of the targeted satellite. If all
| debris are going to be at low altitude, reentering quickly and
| not crossing busy orbits, it's fine. If debris are going to
| cross highly congested orbits often and for a long time, it's
| bad. IIRC the Russian test was pretty bad in that regard
| surfingdino wrote:
| Other countries generally try to limit potential impact on
| other high-value objects that might be affected by such tests,
| Russians don't care.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| It was a Russian satellite that broke up as it passed over
| Russian territory.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Specifically, the bit that might be the launch site for anti-
| satellite weaponry.
| brookst wrote:
| The word "surprise" might have relevance.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| What does it take to create a magnetic shield? Given unlimited
| rare earth metals and such
| belter wrote:
| If you would limit to debris up to 250 grams, and not
| forgetting they arrive at a speed of at least 10 to 15 km/s,
| you would need a magnetic field of 2 to 4 Tesla. That is more
| than inside an MRI machine. Not feasible....
| capitainenemo wrote:
| How about just a sacrificial shield well in front of the
| station along its orbital path? and/or a weaker magnetic one,
| also further ahead (further ahead would allow for deflecting
| slightly at lower power surely).
| swamp40 wrote:
| A large disc of lead or steel. With thrusters to position
| properly. Or multiple discs that spread out like flower
| petals.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Problem #1 with the ISS having a shield "out front" - both
| the station and things that might hit it are traveling
| ~8km/sec. With the latter approaching from random-ish
| directions. That means the shield needs to cover a ~180
| degree arc in front of the most of the ISS. (Which _still_
| would not intercept everything.) At such a size, even a
| pretty-very thin shield would have a huge mass.
|
| Problem #2 - at those velocities, even puny bits of debris
| can punch through serious thicknesses of armor. (The "high
| velocity" shells that modern tanks use to kill each other
| are slow-pitch softballs by comparison.) And the "friendly
| fire shotgun blast" of debris created when a small piece of
| orbital junk goes through the shield can be far deadlier
| than that bit of junk would have been all by itself.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| aerogel? plus something in front of it to fragment the
| larger bits? https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20130012682
| found this idea searching for that actually..
| wlesieutre wrote:
| If you fragment the larger bits now you have a bunch of
| small bits that cross your orbit, are harder to track,
| and are still going very fast
| capitainenemo wrote:
| no. like the proposal in the article above. a sandwich of
| thin light layers that fragment, plus much thicker layers
| of aerogel behind it to catch the tiny bits. All in one
| piece, so no bits flying off anywhere. Similar strategy
| to bullet proof vests actually (deform, then catch), but
| with a lot lighter of materials.
| Kye wrote:
| How do you keep it from tumbling out of control or into
| the station every time it takes a hit? All that energy
| has to go somewhere if you catch it.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Hm.. my impression was that most orbital debris was very
| very small, and the issue was more about making small
| holes with a lot of energy, than about knocking larger
| masses around. In any case, if it's transferred enough
| energy to alter a trajectory, presumably maneuvering
| thrusters could fix it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the issue was more about making small holes with a lot
| of energy, than about knocking larger masses around_
|
| You're not letting it pass through with an aerogel-backed
| whipple shield.
|
| I wonder if you angled the whipple members you could
| preferentially deflect it at a high angle. That way it
| can carry most of its momentum away from the shield and
| the shielded station.
| bell-cot wrote:
| It certainly would not be a point-defense system,
| but...I'd suggest placing a bunch of maneuverable little
| satellites in LEO, each one capable of making & high-
| precision dropping smallish cubes of a fast-evaporating
| aerogel. Game plan: Have those satellites drop cubes in
| front dangerous little bits of LEO space junk, to drop
| each bit of junk's perigee to the Karman line. No need to
| match orbits, and you don't need to care (much) about
| debris from the high-velocity collisions, since all of
| that will reenter or evaporate within an hour.
| aeternum wrote:
| The problem is you need a lot of fuel and delta-v for
| that. IMO lasers is a much better solution.
|
| High-power thermal laser ablates a key portion of the
| space-junk to slightly change its trajectory and
| preferably help deorbit it. All you need is energy since
| the reaction-mass comes from the space-junk itself.
|
| Maybe you could combine the ideas and instead of ablating
| to deorbit, you modify the space-junk orbits to collide
| with a large aerogel satellite. You could potentially
| even boost it in the process.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > The problem is you need a lot of fuel and delta-v for
| that.
|
| Why? If the Bit O'Junk is within ~90% of its apogee, and
| it hits the aerogel cube at more than ~90 degrees, the
| impact will yield a fatal drop in Mr. O'Junk's perigee.
| Ion thrusters on the cube-laying satellites, high-
| precision orbital tracking, and a few racks of computers
| on the ground (to calculate orbits and impacts) should be
| enough. _Low_ -powered lasers would probably be useful in
| the precision-tracking systems.
|
| Blasting space-junk with high-powered lasers is
| cool...but those immediately get into issues with dual-
| use, space weapons treaties, and arms race scenarios.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a sacrificial shield well in front of the station along
| its orbital path_
|
| Whipple shield [1]. You'd want it as close to the station
| to save mass because that's how spheres work.
|
| [1] https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/W/Whipple_sh
| ield....
| HanClinto wrote:
| Could it at least be a partial shield to help slow things
| down?
|
| And maybe not directly on the station itself, but perhaps as
| a cloud of drone-ship defensive satellites to provide a
| defensive array around the space station -- almost like a
| fleet of smaller boats providing a perimeter around a larger
| aircraft carrier?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Most current MRIs operate at around 1.5T, but this is also a
| measure of cost vs performance and results, not feasibility.
| Many will go up to 6T or so.
|
| I believe some of the more research oriented MRIs can hit
| 10T+.
| bigfudge wrote:
| In a small area, Inside a tube the size of a large truck.
| Not facing outwards from a large space station ...
| oceanplexian wrote:
| With room temperature superconductors it would not only be
| possible but probably wouldn't require any energy input to
| maintain the magnetic field.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Much more than room temperature is required. The exterior
| of the ISS gets up to 120 degrees C:
|
| https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/universe/is-it-hot-or-
| cold...
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Sure, but if we're inventing things from science fiction we
| might as well avoid debris by phasing into the 4th
| dimension.
| kabdib wrote:
| That would be a STRONG magnetic field. Not a safe
| environment for people (think about living in the same room
| as an MRI magnet).
|
| Also, not all satellite debris is metallic. Any ceramic /
| glass / plastic would zip right through.
| 12thhandyman wrote:
| I interned with GE a while back maintaining their MRIs around
| sf Bay Area. Think most machines are 1.5T (tesla) with a
| large minority being 3T. Believe there are 7T machines used
| for veterinary research/care.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Thank you for the mental image of a horse inside an MRI
| machine before his big race day
| hagbard_c wrote:
| A magnetic shield would not keep away non-conductive objects.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| That's what the 30mm point defense cannon is for.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| How does the recoil work out?
| serf wrote:
| the same way they ever make ballistic weapons in space
| work in fiction, an aim-able exhaust port and
| accompanying verniers.
|
| or, for bonus points during an extra busy war,
| symmetrical cannons firing synchronized volleys.
| klyrs wrote:
| If you paint them with an electron beam, the magnetic shield
| will deflect them marvelously
| autoexec wrote:
| Would sending out an electron beam move the space station?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| At the energies needed to power a magnetic shield, and the
| precision needed to tag hipersonic debris with an electron
| beam, why not vaporize/deflect them with lasers instead?
| thangalin wrote:
| Why not aerogel?
|
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19990116769/downloads/19...
| chiph wrote:
| Recently some parts of a Crew Dragon landed in western North
| Carolina. The largest piece found so far is about the size of a
| car hood (~2.3 square meters) (insert joke about strange
| American measurement units here), and appears to mostly be
| carbon fiber.
|
| https://www.space.com/nasa-confirms-debris-spacex-crew-drago...
|
| Which sent me on a path to find out if carbon fiber is
| magnetic, and it appears to depend on the weave, the angle
| relative to the field, the strength of the field (naturally),
| and whether the magnetic field is static or alternating, and at
| what frequency.
|
| https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012JAP...112k3921G/abstra...
| mihaaly wrote:
| From only 9 days ago from HN:
|
| 'The missunderstood Kessler Syndrome'
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40716235
| eagerpace wrote:
| Lots of comments about what a shield would need to look like to
| protect against this. That's not the way to think about this in
| the very near future. The space station and nearly everything in
| space up until now, is designed with very small mass and
| tolerances because it's so expensive to get there in the first
| place.
|
| As the cost of mass to orbit lowers by orders of magnitude in,
| likely, the next decade, we can begin seeing spacecraft that are
| far more durable, redundant and agile. They will have ample
| propellant to move out of the way and they will have life support
| systems and failure modes designed to withstand and allow for the
| repair of small impacts.
| maxerickson wrote:
| One wonders if we will then have lots of big robust space junk.
| relativ575 wrote:
| Perhaps. We'll also have big robust space junk removers
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| How much shielding exactly is needed to defend one item moving
| at 17,500mph vs another moving towards it at 17,500. I agree
| propellant will become increasingly valuable but durable
| against impact seems almost fleeting of a goal
| javiramos wrote:
| I recently learned about this company that is designing a
| satellite to remove debris from space:
| https://www.starfishspace.com/
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