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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
By going through a ten-year process that selects for calm people.