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Ah, beat me to it.
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Kevlar and epoxy?
The description of the space tug from William Gibson’s Neuromancer immediately came to mind:
Marcus Garvey had been thrown together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rectangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows overlaying wordy decals in Cyrillic script… The gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy strands of imitation seaweed.
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Fatigue comes from repeated elastic stress cycles - famously in that island-hopping jet back in the last century that blew out a window. Lots of repetitive pressurizing and unpressurizing. ISS probably hasn’t been through that many cycles.
ISS is a pressure vessel though and I’m going to assume they took crack toughness into consideration. At that point I’m going with a previous comment of “white toothpaste” - I mean they’re all kind of tenants and they probably want their deposits back.
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Papasan lives
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Plenty of kapton tape will do the job
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I seem to remember MIR was repaired with some chewing gum at one point.
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Like The Dude… he abides.
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The air pressure inside the ISS is significantly less than sea level, I think it’s 4 psi. So the pressure differential is much less severe than, say, an airplane’s. Also with airplanes you’ve got the repeated inflation/deflation cycle that works to fatigue the metal, which isn’t a factor here.
I’ll be curious to see what the limiting factors are for a space station, but we’re unlikely to find out with astronauts on board, they’ll decomission it long before structural failure becomes likely.
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Headline is misleading: the mysterious hole that was venting atmosphere in 2018 was not in the ISS, it was in the soyuz capsule that was docked with the ISS.
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No actually its 14.7
From my reading its the air seals in spacecraft while limit their working life. All those gaskets are going to start to leak eventually. This was why Mir couldn’t be saved and why the ISS will be abandoned fairly soon.
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Thanks, I was thinking of Apollo.
Gun tape and peanut butter. Fixes everything.
Or my goto: JB Weld.
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Yeah there were a bunch of tradeoffs to be made around air composition and pressure. Apollo was pretty gung-ho with pared down vehicles (the LM ran at 1/5th of an atmosphere to save mass). The CM used 1/4 of an atmosphere, pure oxygen.
But at launch there was 1 atmosphere outside and a pressure vessel which can handle internal pressure easily will collapse with some external pressure. During launch the internal pressure in the CM would have to bleed down and if it started with 75% Nitrogen, 25% oxygen, then it would be left with 1/16th of an atmosphere of oxygen which is unbreathable.
So the CM had 100% oxygen at launch, and any source of ignition would obviously cause a fire. Landing was a different problem because as the CM descended the outside pressure would exceed the internal pressure, so the CM had a pressure relief valve which would let external oxygen/nitrogen into the cabin, with unpredictable outcomes for the crew. At one point an RCS thruster fired then that valve was sucking air and let dangerous gasses into the cabin. In the Stephen Baxter novel Titan an Apollo CM is re-used as a lander and external atmosphere floods the module, killing a crew member.
So the shuttle (and later vehicles) use Earth level atmosphere in the cabin. This simplifies some things but if there is a loss of pressure, the crew will have to deal with the bends while fixing the leak. Also, pressure suits still run on oxygen at low pressure so the crew have to pre-breathe pure oxygen before every EVA, and emergency EVAs are difficult to carry out. And as it turned out, drowning is the biggest hazard faced by crews going EVA at the ISS.
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Of course thermal cycling as it cycles through day and night could have some long term effect too…
That’s the thing, I think that the ISS is the longest lasting pressurized object in space. We may well be discovering new modes of failure.
I think that we can say this was a bit more dramatic than a blown out window
You’re thinking of the early American space programs, Mercury through Apollo.
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I’m abiding Right Now!
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I suppose if it was a significant crack, we’d be hearing a lot more about it. Or nothing at all.
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Ahhhhh, I’ve missed that. Welcome back!
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