Timelapse of ISS/NAUKA incident, ISS doing a FLIP

Anything Rocketry related from NASA, RUSSIAN FEDERAL SPACE AGENCY, Fantasy & Sci Fi
Post Reply
User avatar
Bob Austin
Space Cadet
Space Cadet
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue, 29 Jan 19, 02:46 am

#1 Timelapse of ISS/NAUKA incident, ISS doing a FLIP

Post by Bob Austin »

When the NAUKA fired it's thrusters after docking with the ISS, it was reported that the ISS moved about 45-degrees. Here is a link to a YouTube time lapse video of the ISS live feed. It appears that you can see the glow of the thruster firing and watch the ISS "do a flip" and what appears to be more than 45-degrees. The video is about 30-seconds long.

User avatar
Joe Wooten
Space Lieutenant
Space Lieutenant
Posts: 407
Joined: Wed, 06 Apr 16, 13:26 pm

#3 Re: Timelapse of ISS/NAUKA incident, ISS doing a FLIP

Post by Joe Wooten »

Good old Russian quality control........
User avatar
Bob Austin
Space Cadet
Space Cadet
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue, 29 Jan 19, 02:46 am

#4 Re: Timelapse of ISS/NAUKA incident, ISS doing a FLIP

Post by Bob Austin »

Some additional information on this event.

Space Station Incident Demands Independent Investigation
A space expert warns NASA's safety culture may be eroding again

How close the station had come to disaster is an open question, and the flight director humorously alluded to it in a later tweet that he'd never been so happy as when he saw on external TV cameras that the solar arrays and radiators were still standing straight in place. And any excessive bending stress along docking interfaces between the Russian and American segments would have demanded quick leak checks. But even if the rotation was "simple," the undeniably dramatic event has both short term and long-term significance for the future of the space station. And it has antecedents dating back to the very birth of the ISS in 1997.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/space-station ... estigation
User avatar
bernomatic
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 1169
Joined: Tue, 29 Mar 16, 03:55 am
Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Contact:

#5 Re: Timelapse of ISS/NAUKA incident, ISS doing a FLIP

Post by bernomatic »

Late to the party.

It makes me think that the flexible "docking tunnels" you see in some Sci Fi movies ain't too bad of an idea at all. any abrupt movement made made by a docking/docked craft could automatically trigger a warning and/or release when a certain amount of force is exerted. Not to mention the greater ease of getting docked in the first place.
Chief Cook -n- bottle washer
User avatar
luke strawwalker
Space Admiral
Space Admiral
Posts: 1543
Joined: Thu, 07 Apr 16, 04:45 am

#6 Re: Timelapse of ISS/NAUKA incident, ISS doing a FLIP

Post by luke strawwalker »

Well I read in one of the astronauts books who flew on the Shuttle/Mir program (back when the shuttle was flying up to and docking with MIR pre-ISS and we were paying for our astronauts to live on Mir for months at a time, and we sent up a whole retinue of astronauts in sequence to fly on Mir... It was probably Mike Foale's book or maybe the guy who followed him I can't think of at the moment who went through the Mir fire...) Anyway, in the book they were telling how basically one day they were horsing around and one of the astronauts or cosmonauts said, "hey watch this" and he basically started shaking the module back and forth, and you could look through the tunnel and see the other modules rocking back and forth in unison, like a yardstick grabbed in the middle and whipped up and down to make both ends "flap" back and forth...

The structures can take a surprising amount of force even at the joints where they're locked to the nodes and stuff, Mir even took an impact from a misdirected Progress resupply craft that ended up puncturing one of the modules that had to be hastily sealed off and abandoned in place because all the air leaked into space and it couldn't be repressurized. The bad thing was Mir wasn't designed for easily closing off damaged modules, as they were "hard docked" to the main node and then the hatches were opened, and air circulation hoses, coolant hoses, and wiring cables were run through the open hatch to connect up the modules to the main station's power, cooling fluid, and air recirculation system. Most of the connections were NOT "quick attach" or even easy to get to, as they had to hurriedly cut cables and disconnect hoses to get the hatchways clear to seal off the damaged module before it allowed all the air in the station to vent into space... they lost about half their air IIRC before they got the hatch to the damaged module sealed IIRC. The Mir fire from the "oxygen candle" was also a near-miss, as flames were roaring out the end of the tube nearly 3 feet, coming close to impinging on the thin aluminum skin of the module itself which could have burned a hole straight through it and vented the air into space...

What was funny was the Russians DEMANDED the US astronauts train in their "safety procedures" and follow their guidelines and stuff despite the fact that most of their safety protocols were either decades behind ours or nonsensical and thus in an emergency would be ineffectual or useless. Still, we "went with the program" because we needed to keep the Soviet space program running in the post-Soviet era so the newly independent and chronically unemployed and underfunded Russian scientists wouldn't go build missiles for Iran and North Korea for a fat paycheck... which is why we paid Russia to finish the Mir 2 core module as the service module for ISS (Zarya) and finish another module for the Russian segment (Zvezda) and launch them on Proton rockets... Then we sent 40 something shuttle flights up there sticking parts on like tinker toys over 13 years to build the friggin' thing. Now its an albatross around our neck and we can't get rid of it without losing face; the Russians are tired of it and want to partner up with the Chinese or fly their own station again and ISS is USELESS and UNINHABITABLE WITHOUT the Russian service/power modules which form the core of the ISS... and we don't have ten years and a billion dollars to develop our own power/service module to replace it. ISS is frankly getting long in the tooth and it's not going to survive forever. Mir was literally falling apart by the time it was retired and abandoned, which the Russians didn't want to do but basically we were their main source of funding or at least a necessary source of funding for their space program and NASA and the US gubmint demanded they abandon Mir rather than continue to divert resources to it that could be better spent preparing and operating their part of the commitment to ISS. Remember ISS grew out of the SSF (Space Station Freedom) program instituted by Reagan way back in 1986 in the wake of Challenger to give NASA focus and a purpose... SSF was redesigned numerous times over the intervening years and NO hardware had been constructed or flown, and survived cancellation by a single vote at one point. It took the Soviet collapse in 1990 to really breathe life back into the program once it became apparent that we were going to have to fund not only the dismantlement of the massive Soviet nuclear warhead stockpile but also keep their space program funded to prevent its engineers and scientists from emigrating to find work and a paycheck in Iran, Iraq, or North Korea ("axis of evil") which is exactly what we did, using the "ISS" program as the method and reason to transfer funds to the Russian space program. SSF was morphed into ISS... the US had the basic plans and development work done for their hab and lab modules, but the HARD and EXPENSIVE work remained to be done-- the service module with the power and stability systems for the station, which was going to be a BILLION dollar development project over about five years or more. Plus development of in-space refueling capability which the US did not have. The Soviets had developed not only in-space refueling BUT also automated rendezvous and docking (ARD) technology for their Soyuz spacecraft way back in the late 60's, and perfected it for their "Progress" space tanker/freighter resupply craft (modified unmanned Soyuz) which had been designed to resupply and reboost their Salyut series of space stations in the 1970's and early 80's before Mir was launched and built, and of course Progress and Soyuz continued to serve the same purpose not only with Mir but ISS as well. Progress could reboost Salyuts or Mir with its own propulsion system, plus haul up fuel to transfer through automated connect/disconnects to the Salyut or Mir propulsion system and its engines for station reboost when the Progress wasn't present, plus haul up pressurized supplies in an expendable modified Soyuz orbital module, and act as a "trash dumpster" on the end of the station for waste and spent experiments and materials to be placed in before it separated and deorbited and burned up, eliminating the waste problem on the station and making it long-term habitable (unlike Skylab which used the old S-IVB rocket stage hull's lower oxygen tank as a "septic tank/waste dumpster" into which all the station's waste was discarded via a "waste airlock" in the center bottom floor of the station, separating the pressurized upper hydrogen tank "orbital workshop" from the unpressurized oxygen tank "dumpster" under the common bulkhead separating the two compartments. That is why Skylab was not a "permanent" space station-- when the "dumpster" inevitably filled up the station was no longer habitable, and no serious thought to resupply was really contemplated for Skylab, not until the shuttle era anyway and with shuttle delays Skylab ended up reentering and burning up before shuttles could service and reboost it anyway. In theory shuttles could have resupplied Skylab and hauled back the trash generated by the crews aboard her. All for naught though since it burned up over Australia in '79...

The ugly truth is NASA basically can't afford to do two things at once... they couldn't do shuttle AND Apollo, so they scrapped Apollo lunar missions and greatly truncated the Apollo Applications (down to Skylab at the end) to pay for shuttle. They couldn't afford to really do SSF AND shuttle at the same time either with the funding they had, and Mars missions like Bush 1's "Space Exploration Initiative" program to the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" announced on the steps of the NASM in July of '89 on the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11 (which later grew to monstrous proportions and was laughed out of Congress as "Battlestar Galactica to Mars" and cancelled a couple years later) and of course Bush 2's "Vision for Space Exploration" program for the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" suffered a similar fate under Obama... all we really ended up with was the horrifically expensive and much delayed and already pathetically outdated SLS rocket, made at great expense and effort from the most expensive reusable bits of the shuttle, used in THROWAWAY EXPENDABLE MODE to be burned up or sank in the ocean after each flight... and which survives strictly as the political football that it is, nothing more, nothing less. NASA cannot afford to do Artemis moon missions AND ISS at the same time. It only paid for SLS development AND ISS because the shuttle was cancelled and freed up the money to do so. Artemis missions are NOT going to be cheap; lander and suit hardware doesn't exist, h3ll even the Orion capsule doesn't have a "proper" service module-- just a repurposed ATV European resupply module acting as a service module, and a repurposed Delta IV upper stage acting as an "Interim Propulsion Stage". SLS is going to require all new expendable advanced boosters for the block 2 version and a new ascent propulsion stage to actually insert a real upper stage and spacecraft into orbit capable of propelling itself to the Moon, and SpaceX recently won the contract (which is now tied up being contested by Blue Origin and Dynetics despite their inferior offerings, particularly Blue Origin's pathetic lander design) and will have to build, supply, and launch the lunar lander (Lunar Starship variant) to act as the lander for the overpriced and basically unnecessary Orion capsule once it gets to the Moon in order for the crew to actually land on the Moon. NASA has NO money to develop a lander on their own, as Altair was basically one of the first things cancelled even back in the days when the VSE was still the plan du jour and Ares I and Ares V were being developed along with the Orion MPCV for both space station taxi for crew rotations AND as the deep-space capable lunar mission spacecraft.

IOW, it's all an "ad-hoc" space program, and so long as ISS is eating up $4 billion or whatever it is now of the NASA budget, Orion can't go any farther than "test flights" on SLS block 1 looping around the Moon in highly elliptical "lunar orbits" to "test" the spacecraft for "eventual" Artemis missions to the Moon's surface. IOW, it's all a joke basically.

Later! OL J R :)
My MUNIFICENCE is BOUNDLESS, Mr. Bond...
User avatar
Rocket Babe
Space Babe
Space Babe
Posts: 462
Joined: Wed, 30 Mar 16, 23:34 pm
Location: Alabama
Contact:

#7 Re: Timelapse of ISS/NAUKA incident, ISS doing a FLIP

Post by Rocket Babe »

To me, the NASA I knew, is no more. Mostly U.S. manned space efforts now are no more than a couple of rich HPR guys launching themselves to 60 miles for a few minutes then return. That's a great feat for HRP but it isn't putting men on a moon or another planet. :mm:
User avatar
bernomatic
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 1169
Joined: Tue, 29 Mar 16, 03:55 am
Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Contact:

#8 Re: Timelapse of ISS/NAUKA incident, ISS doing a FLIP

Post by bernomatic »

Rocket Babe wrote: Fri, 17 Sep 21, 13:57 pm To me, the NASA I knew, is no more. Mostly U.S. manned space efforts now are no more than a couple of rich HPR guys launching themselves to 60 miles for a few minutes then return. That's a great feat for HRP but it isn't putting men on a moon or another planet. :mm:
I can agree in certain respects, but not on the overall picture. NASA well become yet another lingering government agency, well past it's prime time. It needs to step aside and quit holding people back (especially with their stringent safety protocols and procedures. America was built by people willing to take a chance. The prairies weren't exactly the most safest places to live).

I tend to look at the close parallel between your "HPR Guys" and the NASA of the early sixties right now. Both were taking small baby steps and doing "tricks" to capture the public's imagination. Behind the scenes, on the other hand, great dreams were being worked on. Musk has "Starship" and Bezos has New Glenn. Give them a decade (well if we were under a president who supported Entrepreneurship more), and we may be surprised.

Even those who aren't poised to go to the moon, (I'm looking at Virgin Galactic) still my play a part. Besides becoming a faster way to travel overseas, Branson's team could be a good way to get passengers into a LEO (low earth orbit) space station. If someone could just assemble a "space hotel" or inn, people would pay a lot of money to just stay there. Eventually, a space elevator or shuttles could transport you to successively higher orbits.

If I were one of the "HPR Guys", that is what I would do, and quit chasing the NASA money as that is limiting, and as Bezos found out, subject to the mercurial habits of bureaucrats and politicians.
Chief Cook -n- bottle washer
User avatar
bernomatic
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 1169
Joined: Tue, 29 Mar 16, 03:55 am
Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Contact:

#9 Re: Timelapse of ISS/NAUKA incident, ISS doing a FLIP

Post by bernomatic »

Of course if you get the space hotel running, don't let he Russians directly try to dock with it. :lol:
Chief Cook -n- bottle washer
User avatar
luke strawwalker
Space Admiral
Space Admiral
Posts: 1543
Joined: Thu, 07 Apr 16, 04:45 am

#10 Re: Timelapse of ISS/NAUKA incident, ISS doing a FLIP

Post by luke strawwalker »

Rocket Babe wrote: Fri, 17 Sep 21, 13:57 pm To me, the NASA I knew, is no more. Mostly U.S. manned space efforts now are no more than a couple of rich HPR guys launching themselves to 60 miles for a few minutes then return. That's a great feat for HRP but it isn't putting men on a moon or another planet. :mm:
Yeah, that's why the "Shatner goes to space" thing was "neat" but that's about it. I liked Bezos when he started out in the space biz... fishing the Apollo 11 F-1's off the ocean floor, having them restored, and displayed at the Kansas Cosmosphere (Where I saw them). But Bezos has become as much of a dick as his little dildo rocket... He put forth the most CRAPTASTIC KLUDGE of a moon lander, then when he DIDN'T WIN, sues to get the whole thing overturned or at least stopped up so SPACEX, who DID win, can't move forward... nor Dynetics with their lander. If Jeff can't win, nobody else can be ALLOWED to either. Oh, he has his fatcat gubmint contract to build the BE-4 methane/LOX engines for Vulcan or whatever, replace the Russian RD-180's we've been relying on for high-thrust hydrocarbon propulsion... but what else has he done?? Oh, we've seen plenty of "pretty rocket porn" powerpoints and graphics of "New Glenn" and all that, BUT *nothing* has actually been built or shown to the public as anything more than vaporware, except his little dildo suborbital rocket... Excuse me for not getting excited about that... SpaceX basically did the same thing with Grasshopper over 10 years ago... they're building the next generation of large fully reusable vehicles RIGHT NOW in South Texas... In the meantime they built all-new engines (true based on NASA "FASTRAC" testbed engine which they bought the original design and test data for, but FASTRAC was a relatively low-thrust, super-cheap EXPENDABLE engine with ablative cooling (meaning the nozzle cooked away in operation) to see "just HOW cheap a kerosene/LOX engine could be built". OF course they reengineered it into the Merlin series of engines, which are basically all-new engines, with regenerative cooling and improved performance, and reusability features built in. IOW a HUGE step forward! Now they've built the RAPTOR engine for Starship as well. PLUS not ONE but TWO orbital launch vehicles (Falcon 1 and Falcon 9), developed an orbital automated cargo capsule capable of both transporting materials TO AND FROM the ISS, and reusable to boot, something NO other cargo vehicle other than shuttle has done (not the Russians, not the Europeans, and not OSC's Cygnus). THEN developing that capsule into a new CREW capsule that has transported crews to ISS and a group of civilians on a four day ORBITAL excursion on the Inspiration 4 flight just recently. Not some 10 minutes of weightless HOP up to 60 miles or so and back like these other rich jokers Branson and Bezos... I don't get too excited about Branson's rocket glider either... which the original version flew to win the X-prize what, about 20 years ago or so now?? And it takes them THIS LONG to clone the thing and upscale it a bit to carry rich people on little hops up to 60 miles and back?? MEH!!!

Suborbital is just tourist stuff... there's nothing really going to come out of that but MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, some "reusable sounding rocket" type stuff, which Blackshire on YORF and I discussed once or twice. He's big into that and being from Alaska where one of the biggest sounding rocket ranges is, he's excited about the possibilities the tiny dildo rocket brings for sounding rocket payloads and reusability. If it happens, that's great. Haven't heard much about it though-- main thing seems to be as a rich person money separator... Suborbital SS2's or "New Shepards" ain't getting you anywhere NEAR an orbital 'space hotel" or anything like that. Whatever happened to the inflatable habs that Bigelow Aerospace was promoting?? They even paid the Russians to launch a couple experimental models into orbit using their SS-18 Satan missiles turned orbital launchers IIRC... They did unmanned tests then-- NOTHING!??! Don't even hear about them anymore. I vaguely remember Bigelow having some problems or getting tired of messing with it and maybe selling off the idea or whatever?? I know he bought the experimental tech from NASA-- they'd been tinkering with it as a cheaper, easier way to build large space modules and even tinkered with adding one onto ISS but like everything else NASA does it all comes to nothing just about the time it's ready to pay off... Anyway, NS and SS2 can fly SUBORBITALLY, which is a h3ll of a LONG way from *ORBITAL* flight... it's about like saying I could take on an F-18 with a powered parachute... TOTALLY different kinds of flying! These suborbital vehicles are the powered parachute, and orbital vehicles are the SR-71's or F-18's... THey don't even compare to each other. SS2 and NS can stagger up to 60 miles altitude or so... but they get there with essentially ZERO velocity (at apogee, like our model rockets) and so they FALL BACK. ORBITAL flight means you have to get up to 100 miles or so with SEVENTEEN THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR velocity, so that you can actually enter orbit. Some little toy rocket or toy tourist glider AIN'T gonna be doing that! Yeah MAYBE some of it *might* lead to some sort of advanced 'point to point' supersonic transportation, trans-atmospheric vehicle for transporting passengers or troops (which SpaceX already got a contract for IIRC?) but even then SpaceX is already light years ahead of them-- If/when Starship is up and running, there's really no reason with a sufficient amount of infrastructure in various places, and the proper permissions and stuff, that you and 50-100 other people couldn't board a starship in the continental USA, lift off, and 30-40 minutes later land on the other side of the world like they plan for the upper stage of Starship to land... The booster would get you going at the right speed and trajectory to stage you off, burn the second stage a bit into a hyperbolic trajectory like an ICBM, and then burn to delecerate enough to "belly flop" back into the atmosphere (after 10-20 minutes of weightlessness and a view of Earth from several hundred miles high in a hyperbolic suborbital trajectory) then land on its tail end like they already demonstrated down in Boca Chica... Don't know what the tickets would cost you, but the military likes the idea... land 50-100 troops anywhere in the world in one, maybe even with some cargo like heavy weapons, transportation, etc, even if the thing was expendable and NOT reused?? They'd buy, which is why they gave him a contract to work on the idea... *IF* you upscaled NS or SS2 by about 10X, *maybe* you could get it to do something similar?? Probably... but that's a HUGE step beyond what they're doing right now...

SpaceX is flying not only into orbital space, with people and cargo, RIGHT NOW, they're ALSO flying CIVILIANS *AND* flying them higher than anybody has been since Apollo ended moon flights in the early 70's... THAT IS HUGE. They're working on the next steps, a large FULLY reusable crew/cargo vehicle which is a heavy lift vehicle, which will TOTALLY change the game if they can make it work... and they've been making it work, they're well on their way with successes and YES the inevitable failures as well. We've seen NOTHING but powerpoints about "New Glenn" and a lot of hot air and empty promises... "Oh, that's just how Bezos does things-- everything is top secret til he perfects it and then trots it out in a big reveal that performs great first time at bat". Maybe, maybe not, been a LOT of grandiose plans made over the decades, by both national space agencies and contractors and individuals and startups and entrepreneurs alike... but I've learned "I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT!" ... til then it's all just "hopes and dreams" NOT REALITY! Til I see some hardware and see some test flights or success or even failures showing they're trying new things, they're learning as they go, whatever, it's all just TALK...

Later! OL J R :)
My MUNIFICENCE is BOUNDLESS, Mr. Bond...
Post Reply