It's great we can bring them down. What a terrifying experience to have a medical issue on the space station. Kidney stone? Ruptured appendix? intestinal blockage? How could you keep calm so far away!
It's great we can bring them down. What a terrifying experience to have a medical issue on the space station. Kidney stone? Ruptured appendix? intestinal blockage? How could you keep calm so far away!
How could you keep calm so far away
By going through a ten-year process that selects for calm people.
I can’t imagine any other group who would be as calm as NASA astronauts. Maybe SEALs or other special forces.
It looks like there are a few astronauts that were SEALs, one returned December 9th from the ISS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonny_Kim
Jonny Kim was indeed a SEAL, and a few more things as well, with a CV almost as impressive as Johnny Sins:
> American NASA astronaut, physician, U.S. Navy officer, dual designated naval aviator and flight surgeon, and former Navy SEAL.
Note that "physician" here means Harvard MD.
This guy is the Chuck Norris of NASA. His Wiki page is wild.
In the US, many astronauts start as Air Force pilots.
And for the preternaturally calm and confident who don't have the perfect eyesight required to enter the Air Force, many of them apparently serve instead on nuclear submarines...
The point of training someone to their breaking point is not to make them immune to breaking. It's to give them experience with a realistic battlefield situation and their own physiological responses during it so they stand a basic chance when it does occur.
Somewhat related to this topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zo62S0ulqhA
Totally, they put a bunch of people in those giant spinning chair things and weed out the ones that puke or freak out. Those are the astronauts, they have the right stuff.
I used to work in ISS mission control, this is not an emergency return but an early return
Also coming down on the Soyuz is pretty routine and only takes a few hours- I’d say it was overall a far less risky situation than being in Antarctic on a deep ocean vessel with appendicitis etc
We have dozens and (hundreds behind them) of men and women monitoring those folks from a global network of control centers 24 hrs a day- The station is mostly commanded from the ground and plans and procedures exist for everything
- if anything its all over orchestrated and over-planned in my opinion, owing to national politics, corporate contracts and international bureaucracy
Is it risky- yes obviously-but I’d argue its less risky then being out at the south pole in winter
See: https://nasawatch.com/iss-news/crew-medical-telecon-summary/
Then why did you mention Soyuz when Dragon is coming down early?
or on the way to Mars.
Astronauts are of a breed apart. They're strapped onto a literally bomb which launches them into a vacuum, and windows where there is no chance of a mission abort. They've pretty much accepted a risk of death that most would simply not tolerate. Ex-military is common for astronauts for a reason.
Not that it really changes the point but modern spacecraft do have an option to abort (begin returning to earth) at just about any time. There's still contingencies where that won't save you of course.
And that abort envolves another bomb being fired under or over you.
This is the reason I cringe every time I hear or read statements like “we went to the moon”, “we’ve split the atom”, “we developed antibiotics”, …
No, we didn’t. A few who are not like us did.
Not really, no. The point of the "we" is too highlight the incredible collective effort which was required from all these massive endeavors. It goes all the way from the steel cool astronaut to the great machinists which had to build the parts.
I think it's one of the greatest benefits of ever working on a massive industrial project. You quickly realize how incredibly complex these things are and how utterly powerless a person alone is.
Add to this all of us who pay taxes to subsidize the effort.
And basically everybody working to make such an advanced society possible.
ok you have reduced my cringe.
Going on a spaceship is probably safer than driving a car.
Per mile, sure.
Per launch? I think the "everyone died" rate is about, what, 1.2% of crewed launches?
Not a good sales pitch for commercial space flights
While I’m confident we will probably have large scale commercial spacecraft in my lifetime, I suspect I will be long retired by then. I’m 31.
We need a decade of accident free autonomous launches before humans will line up in mass to visit space like a Carnival Cruise.
Don't dismiss the yearning for space/new frontiers/adventure that a lot of us have. If you offered tickets to the moon today for the price of a cruise, you would probably have people standing in line from Cape Canaveral to Tallahassee.
Being an astronaut is about 50x more risky than riding in a car
You know what they say: the most dangerous part of space flight is the car ride to Cape Canaveral.
Over what time period?
whatever is the cause, it is not immediate - or they would've been on the ground couple days ago
so no, not appendix
Pregnancy?
This is what I keep thinking.
- Theres a 38 year old woman in the crew
- It’s a medical condition that likely wasn’t present when the mission started 4 months ago
- It’s serious enough to return the crew, but not serious enough that they must do so immediately
I guess we’ll find out in 9 months? (Or not…)
As I understand it, the studies done with mice suggest that microgravity prevents normal embryo development. The ISS should therefore be regarded as a teratogenic environment, and I'd be shocked if women of childbearing age weren't prescribed highly-effective contraceptives (ie. IUD/IUS or implant) before, during, and after spaceflight.
I’m sure they were prescribed, but it’s always possible for them to fail.
I’m curious at what point in the embryo’s development the zero-g becomes an issue, if its immediate vs long term thing. It’s very possible that if it was pregnancy, the embryo is already not viable but she still needs some procedures to ensure her own health (a DnC, etc) that are important but not enough for an emergency evac.
There are probably a hundred ailments or illnesses that can fit this description, maybe someone noticed a swollen lymph node or lump somewhere
Yeah it’s definitely just a thought. Getting pregnant in space the sort of sordid thing that’s fun to speculate on, but ultimately we just don’t have enough information. We’ll probably never know, either.
Are you implying that the pregnancy condition occurred onboard?
Yes. Sex isn’t allowed on the ISS due to complications with pregnancy, but it’s not crazy to imagine that maybe they just did it anyway. (Who wouldn’t want to? It’s sex in space and it sounds amazing.)
[dead]
You are imaginary levels of mad at a hypothetical situation.... Go outside
They should have just taken some research notes to let them leverage the Mythbusters excuse: "The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down."
From an alien?
Maybe testicular torsion triggered by zero-G conditions?
That's a "needs to be in the OR in 6 hours" situation; no way they waited several days for it.
it's only 250 miles
Maximum operating depth of a Nuclear submarine is 3,350 ft.
Source?
The operating depth of most submarines is ~300 -- 500m (980 -- 1640 ft), roughly one-third to one-half the depth you cite.
The two USN nuclear submarines lost due to pressure-hull failures, the Thresher (1963) and Scorpion (1968) both failed at depths of 1,200 to 2,000 ft. Threser's test depth was 1,300 ft (400m), and she was operating at about this depth when communications were lost. Scorpion likely failed at 1,530 ft. (470m).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)#Cause>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)#Disappe...>
There are other submersible vessels in the US Navy which can and have operated at greater depths, notably the submersible Alvin and bathyscaphe Trieste II, but those are not combat vessels. Alvin's test deopth is 6,500m (21,300 ft). Triest II's predecessor, Trieste, reached the floor of the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, deepest known spot in the oceans, at 10,916m (35,814 ft). Trieste II incorporated the pressure sphere from its predecessor.
A more conventional, but still experimental, submarine, the USS Dophine (AGSS-555) was a deisel-electric research submarine which reached a depth in excess of 3,000 ft (910 m), probably in 1969. The boat was in-service through 2006.
I like to imagine GP just accidentally leaked classified info.
That would hold more weight if this was the War Thunder forum
The Dolphin is on display at the Maritime Museum of San Diego.
s/Dophine/Dolphine/
Also misspelled "Thresher" above. Proof befor submitting, dred.
Gah! Error in correction. I quit!
(250 miles is about 400km and 3350 ft is about 1km)
I think the responses to your comment speak volumes about how insular the office worker filter bubble of HN is.
There's dozens upon dozens of professions where things go wrong infinitely faster than they do in medical situations.
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Everyone on the ISS needs to have a seat reserved for them in a docked spacecraft, in case they need to evacuate the station quickly (or for a medical issue like this). You can’t bring back just one person from a 4-person crew; the other 3 would have no way to leave.
Well, yes? The medical issue is apparently severe enough to warrant return. Because the crew dragon is the only way for those astronauts back, barring sending another one up shortly, they also have to come back.
The reason they are bringing the whole crew back is most likely cost related. The whole crew was due back in February anyway. They are bringing everyone home a bit early; otherwise they would need another flight a few weeks later.
And nobody is retreating: there will be 1 American and 2 Russians left on ISS. All of this from the article.
It's not that the entire crew is compromised medically, it's that logistically if one goes home they all have to.
Bruh, you're talking about one of the most protocol laden risk averse organizations known to man. That's an absurd speculation compared to the thing you would naively expect, which is exactly what is happening.
This mission doesn't matter to any normal human in any relevant way that NASA would need to hide anything.
I'm completely lost on your way of thinking
Why the conspiracy theory?