** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

Another one of Endeavour and Discovery at KSC:

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Discovery will go to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia and Endeavour to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.
 
Skii said:
The Space station is in a Low Earth Orbit, basically its travelling at 17,200 miles per hour , held there because at this speed Earth's gravity can't pull it back down, and it isn't going quite fast enough to move away - with nothing to slow it down because space is essentially a vacuum it will theoretically stay going around the earth for as long as we like, just as the moon goes around the earth and the earth goes around the Sun.

Basically any Astronaut who 'falls off' - ie accidentally lost his tether and drifted away from the space station would end up in a permanent orbit around the earth, just another piece of space junk. I guess if his direction of 'drift' was in the direction of earth he would eventually be low enough for atmospheric drag to slow him down at which point he'd start to re-enter the atmosphere and he's turn into a fiery meteor, a long time after his oxygen and life support had run out.

Always a good idea to hold on tight in a space walk :)
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Thanks for all the replies.

So basically you are done if you come loose. Is there no way that you can 'swim' back towards the space station. I say swim, I know there isnt any water, but I mean like you see them inside the space station sort of swim/floating around.

Also has any astronaut actually had this happen to them? And if so, you mentioned they would become just space junk.. would the body decompose like normal?

Finally is there any reason (other than costs) as to why we dont send up spaceships of dangerous materials ie nuclear waste, to just float around the earth. Especially as you mentioned if it falls back, it just burns up.... surely its a win-win?
 
mehuk said:
Thanks for all the replies.

So basically you are done if you come loose. Is there no way that you can 'swim' back towards the space station. I say swim, I know there isnt any water, but I mean like you see them inside the space station sort of swim/floating around.

Also has any astronaut actually had this happen to them? And if so, you mentioned they would become just space junk.. would the body decompose like normal?

Finally is there any reason (other than costs) as to why we dont send up spaceships of dangerous materials ie nuclear waste, to just float around the earth. Especially as you mentioned if it falls back, it just burns up.... surely its a win-win?
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As i said, i remember reading something about the gravity of the station pulling you back towards it after a certain amount of time.

Nobody has ever died in space, some astronauts (and cosmonauts?) have been on EVA without a tether.

There's a very good reason - the main one being that rockets are dangerous. Even if it's just a 1% chance of it failing, it's far too high when you consider that if it exploded on the pad or during launch it would spread nuclear waste for miles. Similarly if you let it burn up in the atmosphere you risk essentially spreading it across entire continents. You'd really have to launch it beyond Earth orbit, to the Sun, Venus or maybe a Gas Giant - but there are laws regarding the contamination of space and celestial bodies. Just seems they don't apply to the one we're on :rolleyes:


Anyway, i just finished 'When We Left Earth'. Really good, i do recommend watching it if you haven't already. It does highlight the fact that somewhere between Apollo and Shuttle spaceflight sort of became routine. You can't for a second forget just how amazing it is that we went from barely being able to fly a rocket in a straight line, to strapping a human to one, to letting that human get out of the craft, having the craft meet up with another and then flying it TO THE MOON and back safely, all the space of about a decade.

But i guess that has something to do with (as Charlie Bolden says) the general public being plain fickle. If they think it's just an everyday thing that they're only interested in when something goes wrong then that's what the people in the business will treat it as. I don't think that's a good thing, really.
 
Skii said:
The Space station is in a Low Earth Orbit, basically its travelling at 17,200 miles per hour , held there because at this speed Earth's gravity can't pull it back down, and it isn't going quite fast enough to move away - with nothing to slow it down because space is essentially a vacuum it will theoretically stay going around the earth for as long as we like, just as the moon goes around the earth and the earth goes around the Sun.

Basically any Astronaut who 'falls off' - ie accidentally lost his tether and drifted away from the space station would end up in a permanent orbit around the earth, just another piece of space junk. I guess if his direction of 'drift' was in the direction of earth he would eventually be low enough for atmospheric drag to slow him down at which point he'd start to re-enter the atmosphere and he's turn into a fiery meteor, a long time after his oxygen and life support had run out.

Always a good idea to hold on tight in a space walk :)
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Unless they have a Manned Maneuvering Unit :)

This is probably one of my favourite photos from space. I just love it.

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If thats real, thats amazing! Id never have the bottle to do that, knowing that if the thing failed that you are doomed.

So to accompany whats been said in the telescope thread, whats the best thing to read/watch to learn about the space station and what NASA actually do/we know about the planets?

It would be good to see them but also understand them a bit.
 
PermaBanned said:
As i said, i remember reading something about the gravity of the station pulling you back towards it after a certain amount of time.

Nobody has ever died in space, some astronauts (and cosmonauts?) have been on EVA without a tether.

There's a very good reason - the main one being that rockets are dangerous. Even if it's just a 1% chance of it failing, it's far too high when you consider that if it exploded on the pad or during launch it would spread nuclear waste for miles. Similarly if you let it burn up in the atmosphere you risk essentially spreading it across entire continents. You'd really have to launch it beyond Earth orbit, to the Sun, Venus or maybe a Gas Giant - but there are laws regarding the contamination of space and celestial bodies. Just seems they don't apply to the one we're on :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply, I suppose I didnt think the question through really in case the thing failed.
 
Another one of these amazing pictures of earth taken from the ISS, this time Southern Italy. The image has been rotated through 180 degrees:

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This astronaut photograph highlights the nighttime appearance of the southern Italian Peninsula. The toe and heel of Italy’s “boot” are clearly defined by the lights of large cities such as Naples, Bari, and Brindisi, as well as numerous smaller cities and towns. The bordering Adriatic, Tyrrhenian, and Ionian Seas appear as dark regions to the east, west, and south. The city lights of Palermo and Catania, Sicily, are also visible.

The International Space Station (ISS) was located over an area of Romania, close to the capital city of Bucharest (approximately 945 kilometers to the northeast) at the time this image was taken. Part of a solar panel array on a docked Russian spacecraft is visible in the foreground. The distance between the image subject area and the position of the photographer, as well as the viewing angle looking outwards from the ISS, contributes to the foreshortened appearance of the Italian Peninsula and Sicily.
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GRAIL

Coming up is the Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. It will produce the most accurate gravitational map of the Moon to date. Scheduled for launch on 8th September from Cape Canaveral.

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This will be the first time two robotic spacecraft will be placed into the same precise orbit around a planetary body other than Earth so that they can fly in formation. It will also be the first time that there will be cameras (MoonKAM) whose sole aim will be to photograph targets chosen by educational establishments.

Mission overview:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/578754main_grail.pdf

Mission Site:

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/grail/home.cfm
 
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