IT IS supposed to be everything Mir wasn’t: clean, reliable and orderly. But
leaked documents obtained by 91av reveal that life on the International
Space Station station doesn’t always live up to expectations. It’s
unpredictable, often improvised and sometimes aggravating.
The station’s first residents, commander Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri
Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, arrived on 2 November 2000 and stayed on board
until 18 March this year. Much of what is known about their stay comes from the
ship’s daily log. Each day Shepherd wrote one or two pages for NASA to post on
its public website. But around 20 per cent of the material was removed by NASA
censors before publication.
The documents obtained by 91av include much of the censored log
data. They also include transcripts of private debriefing sessions held after
the crew returned. NASA keeps these private to encourage candour from the crews.
But together with the log data, they paint a somewhat different picture of life
on the International Space Station from the one NASA prefers to present. It
seems that NASA’s quite reasonable policy of maintaining privacy for its
astronauts seems to have expanded into a culture of secrecy, designed to protect
the agency from embarrassment.
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The crew was physically comfortable, if over worked. Nothing went
disastrously wrong. But they had to contend with constant niggles; NASA
engineers call them “ankle-biters”. Equipment didn’t work as expected. The crew
couldn’t find anything. It was noisy.
Some of the problems were trivial and amusing. Who’d have thought the crew of
the International Space Station would have to use taco sauce to catch debris
instead of a specially designed gel? But other, more important things went
wrong. The inventory system, for example, was a major failure, and some of the
fixtures and fittings didn’t seem to have been tested properly before lift-off.
The crew members sometimes showed their anger during the debriefing. NASA, it
seems, could have planned things better.
91av asked NASA public-affairs official Rob Navias to comment on
these leaked documents. He declined the offer.
Everyday living
At first, the crew found the basics of space station life pleasant. The air
smelt fresh. Temperatures were comfortable. The food was tasty. Communications
with Earth were good.
But things soon started to grate. The DVD screen they used to watch movies on
was too small and the sound system wasn’t loud enough. “It would have been nice
for the speakers to be a little louder,” Shepherd told the debriefing. “Output
was too low to play it while I was working out.”
Noise in general proved a problem. On 24 November, Shepherd wrote: “Noise is
a distraction, but bearable. We are getting reasonable sleep, all hands wearing
earplugs.” Later, Shepherd called the noise level “unpleasant, but not
limiting”. Krikalev, though, complained vociferously about the carbon dioxide
scrubber in the Russian-built Service Module where the crew lived, which
repeatedly woke them up during the night. The worst thing about it, he said, was
that it was not continuous, but blasted loudly every ten minutes. “In the Mir it
was located in a different module,” Krikalev pointed out. “I always said that
having it in the Service Module was not a good idea.”
All basic amenities were on board, but often the contributions from different
countries were barely compatible. The electrical supply in the Russian modules
was different to that in the American modules. Even mixing water from the two
was not possible since the Russians use silver ions to preserve their water and
the Americans use iodine. Mix them, and you get a precipitate of solid silver
iodide which clogs filters and valves.
Running repairs
As on previous space stations, a large amount of the crew’s time was spent on
maintenance. Their needs far outstripped the equipment they had been provided
with.
On 6 December, Gidzenko and Krikalev attempted to fix a broken
air-circulation fan in the Service Module. “Can’t get at it,” Shepherd reported.
“A fairly large piece of substructure is in the way.” So the crew had to resort
to destructive power tools. “The impact driver comes out, and goes to work on
the framing. Piece is loose and we can get at the fan. It comes out with three
blades gone, and one of the stators bent. This is a pretty good trick, as these
are thick. Replacement fan is not quite the same, although it fits OK.”
Before Christmas, one of the temporary legs on the improvised wardroom table
came loose. The crew had to hold it in place with a set of vice grips—when
they were available. Given the lack of tools, these were in constant use.
“Starting to put notches in the large vice grips,” Shepherd told ground control.
“Used them again today to loosen the vacuum jumper line. Even though the hose
says ‘hand tighten only’, doesn’t mean you won’t need a tool to get it off.”
Improvisation was common. When they couldn’t find a special gel to catch the
debris and shavings from one important repair job, they used taco sauce
instead.
Even when maintenance procedures were in place the crew sometimes found them
impossible to follow. On 5 February they tried to reinstall a detached panel.
“There is a lengthy 3-page procedure which explains how to put the panel back
on,” Shepherd told ground control. “Unfortunately it’s on the back side of the
panel.” In the post-flight debriefing sessions, he complained repeatedly about
similar unworkable procedures and inadequate ground testing. “We should have
found this out pre-flight,” he said about one computing problem. “We wasted a
lot of time on-orbit and made the crew unhappy.” He noted that equipment
developers don’t test the full procedures on the ground. “It basically sucks,”
he said of one procedure to sample fluid from the heating system. His verdict:
“You are wasting the crew’s time.”
The stuff don’t work
Lots of systems on board wouldn’t work properly, often due to inadequate
pre-flight testing. Ironically, one of these was the “crew squawk” software
designed for reporting systems that aren’t working; a squawk is a complaint
about inoperable equipment. This led to a classic catch-22. “We have tried
several times to get the crew squawk tool running,” Shepherd’s entry for 5
January said. “We are able to log in, but the program either locks up or won’t
launch when we try to run it. We would like to start documenting anomalies and
we believe the squawk tool will be a good way to do this if we can ever get it
to behave. We would like to squawk the crew squawk for starters.”
There were plenty of other things they would have squawked if they could. “We
pull out the soldering iron to see how that works,” Shepherd wrote on 16
January. “The first problem is that we can’t plug the iron in. Then the little
soldering tube at the end won’t fit the iron.” The crew also asked for a battery
tester. Ground control told them to use another device already on board, but it
didn’t work. That decision made Shepherd angry. “This is unacceptable and
probably derives from people overstressing safety, and understressing
operability,” he said. “Slam the ‘safety Nazis’ on this one.”
It wasn’t the only directive that wound Shepherd up. At one point he asked
why he was ordered to use US-supplied Kapton tape instead of the easier-to-use
Russian stuff. The ground crew told him it was because the Russian tape left a
residue. “That’s not a big deal as long as it works,” he said. “Grey tape would
have taken five minutes, and using Kapton meant the task took 40 minutes. We
need to get a handle on the anal-retentive engineering approach to
𱹱ٳԲ.”
Grooming
One thing in short supply was shampoo. The crew kept asking for more, and
though supply flight after supply flight showed up, the shampoo never came. It
wasn’t that the crew were washing their hair more than they should, just that
they found it hard to use bar soap in zero gravity. “I wound up using the hair
shampoo and wiping my hands off,” Shepherd explained. But the ground didn’t
believe they were using it as fast as they claimed so didn’t send new
supplies.
Hair products in general were a problem. “I’d like us to look into something
that we could add to the shampoo to cut down dandruff,” Shepherd told his
debriefers. He was asked if there were any items in the personal hygiene kit
that he never used, and he answered “Yeah, the hairbrush.” Removing unwanted
hair was also difficult. “We had problems with having enough razor blades,”
Shepherd said. “We need about two to three blades a week. They get loaded up
with shaving stuff and then they don’t work. We also need a means to cut
.”
The crew didn’t change underwear as often as planned. Shepherd reported he
only used half of the clothes that had been packed for him. “We did that on
purpose,” he explained, “because we weren’t sure how long we were going to be
there.” The original four-month mission was extended by a month while the crew
were in orbit, and before the launch the crew told reporters they were ready to
stay up for six months or more, even if it meant wearing underwear twice as long
as planned.
In the living area, the crew vacuumed and wiped down the surfaces about once
a fortnight. But they also found they had to do extra wiping whenever they spilt
food. “There is a lot of Velcro inside the Russian module,” Shepherd complained.
Apparently, food sticks to the Velcro pads designed to grip pieces of equipment.
“Having this around where you’re eating is not ideal.”
Language problems
Despite extensive language training, Shepherd found that his knowledge of
Russian wasn’t always good enough. For example, since the life-support module
was made in Russia, the medical supplies were labelled exclusively in Russian.
“Barf, diarrhoea, itchy eyeball were terms that were useful,” he said, “but
which weren’t seen much in language training.”
He also described his struggle with the regional accents of the
“Glavnis”—ground controllers at Moscow mission control. “I felt that at
the end of the flight, I could understand half of the Glavnis well, and for the
other half, I only understood 80 per cent of what they were trying to convey,”
he said. “I don’t feel Glavnis were making special efforts to adjust for me.
Some of them needed to slow down if they wanted to be understood.”
Losing it
From the ship’s log of 11 December: “Went through the ship with the vacuum
cleaner—pulled all the debris out of filters and intakes. It is
amazing—if you ever let loose of something, there is an almost 100 per
cent chance it is going to end up in a filter or screen dzɳ.” A few days
later, the log notes: “Shep’s day started badly. Lost favourite mechanical
pencil. Probably pulled out of its belt pouch by Velcro and stuck somewhere.
List of things unaccounted for on board is, however, surprisingly low. Black
Sharpie markers [felt-tip pens] seem to have unique capability to avoid
detection. Most everything else turns up after a while in a filter
dzɳ.”
If only that had been true of items in the station’s main inventory system,
which was designed to keep track of everything automatically. For months it
often didn’t work at all. Day after day, Shepherd chronicled the hours wasted
chasing down lost equipment in lockers or the dozens of bar-coded sacks held in
place by cargo nets.
Here’s a typical log entry, from 2 January. “One of the bags stowed is a
non-standard white bag with a paper tag on it “ECOMM HARDWARE”. No bar code. No
serial number on the bag, but there is a NASA part number. Shep puts new bar
code on. Marks the bag on all sides with this number. Inside the bag [is] a
power cable. Cable has a label, but no bar code. Search for the bag’s part
number in the database—not found. Search for the cable in the database to
find some more clues as to what this bag is. About 6 like cables turn up. Serial
number for this cable says it is located in [gives location]. Definitely not the
same bag Shep is holding. Pull up the history of changes, and it has been moved,
moved again and deleted on the same day, and then duplicated and added back to
the database, all done by the ground, and all, we think, talking about the
“wrong” bag, and generating data that at best, is confusing.”
8 January: “Trying to print out the messages about the Inventory Management
System details. Printer is still acting up and printing half pages. We have been
feeding it strange paper (green), and wonder if that has offended it. We try the
reboot technique sent up from the ground, and that seems to help for a while.
Then the printer goes back to its old ways.”
Slowly they managed to sort things out, and by the end of their stay most
systems were working as well as they should have at the start. That, at least,
was an improvement on Mir: things got better, not worse.