Astronauts Lost Tools in Space, Forced to Improvise

Ant writes "Neatorama and Popular Science share a CNN story about Russian astronauts repairing the International Space Station (ISS) with improvised tools because they lost the real ones. How? 'It's a lot like your house,' said Paul Boehm, lead spacewalk officer. 'You set your car keys down somewhere and hopefully you find them again later when you try to remember it.' Uh, yeah, but we're idiots -- you're astronauts. Nonetheless, nice to see the Do It Yourself (DIY) spirit at work in space."

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[Konster]

It's an interesting study on things we take for granted when people are deprived of things like the sense of gravity and of place. Couple in the fact that humans are really crappy multi-taskers, and none of this surprises me. An astronaut is deprived of a great many senses, most of which need to be compensated for with conscious effort, which leaves less brain for other stuff.

Simple tasks aren't so simple anymore when your brain is trying to compensate for input that is no longer really there. And then they have to fight off vertigo, which is hard even for people on Earth.

All this I took for granted before a little bit of brain damage, which recoverying from is a trivial little bit of recovery over a long, long time. Sadly, I remember how easy thing were before my neurons got scrambled, everything now takes a lot of conscious effort, mostly due to the fact that I don't perceive my senses as I should, and sometimes I have to really think about things, in single file to make it through the day. Forget about making internet postings and listening to music at the same time. I cannot fathom more than one task at a time, really, when I used to be able to do many. It's constant vertigo, every second of every day, and after some months, it becomes a heavy burden.

The point being is that their brains are more than likely scrambling to make sense out of the senseless, and leaving a screwdriver out in the void is probably pretty small taters, considering everything else.

Re:uh, It's nothing like your house

[iktos]

If you didn't find it in 5 minutes, then your method for looking/putting away is failing. There should be a process, etc. etc.

They had a process on Skylab. In the storage compartment there were 2000 lockers, on the ground there was a team of six working in shifts with a pair of redundant computers keeping track of what was put in which locker.
Didn't work either. And since (almost) everything was supposed to be secured inside something, it couldn't be found just by walking around and looking for it.

Re:Bob Villa?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, sometimes it *is* a bad tool that causes problems. My wife and I were in the middle of redecorating our bathroom. She did the painting, I was in charge of the molding. I bought the molding and proceded to measure and cut. Everything was the right length, but none of the mitered corners met like they should. After careful examination, it turned out that my mitre box had a 42 degree notch instead of a 45 degree notch. Subtle enough that I hadn't noticed it, but wrong enough that $50 of molding was wasted.

I now have a new, better, adjustable mitre box.

Re:space psychology

[Mondoz]

During Bill MacArthur's flight (Increment 12), he lost his PDA for about 4 weeks. He was later doing some maintenance on some of the vents in the airlock, and it came shooting out of an out-flow vent, along with some other missing items. Apparently, it had gotten sucked into a vent somewhere, and had been sitting in a duct.
Things easily get away from you in the station if they're not tethered down or put back exactly where they came from.

They use an Inventory Management System to track inventory, but when you consider that there are over 30,000 individual items and locations onboard, it gets a little hard to manage.
It works well most of the time, but any inventory system is only as good as its data. If they forget to mark down where they put something, it could take ages to find.

When you have everything you could possibly need for living in, working on, experimenting, and maintaining a space station for six months, in an enclosed space the size of a few school buses, things can get kinda cluttered.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/html/iss012e12909.html [nasa.gov]
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/html/iss012e18578.html [nasa.gov]

Whole gallery here:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station /crew-12/ndxpage1.html [nasa.gov]

Re:Uh, what?

[iamlucky13]

You also probably use your keys every day, making habit pretty easy to achieve and giving you a reason to have a place (counter, key rack, whatever) where you normally keep them. Your keys don't get delivered to your house along with a 1000 pounds of other supplies that have to be quickly stowed out of the way where it will fit. It's not like the ISS has a nice pegboards all over the walls like your garage with pretty outlines drawn around the hooks for the hammers and the screwdrivers.

Look at what was lost, too. These were single use items. They don't have any special place to be kept. It was a bag to hold a small sample plate (easily replaced) and a foot restraint for EVA (they had a spare). Two small, probably very mundane looking objects that are no doubt very easy to lose track of when you have two guys unloading a Progress cargo ship full of stuff that might not be used for 3 months by themselves while also continuing their regular duties of monitoring the station and the experiments running onboard.

I suppose it is a little disappointing to lose stuff in a big aluminum tube. You know it's in there, and it's undoubtably safely stowed, you just can't find it. The fact that losing two such simple objects in a structure the size of the average house but much more crowded is even a story sort of shows how well they do of keeping track of things. I seriously doubt anyone here can tell someone exactly where everything in their house is, especially if they just moved into the house 2 months ago and someone else handled most of the moving.

I do have to say, these are rather boring as far as innovative solutions. Not quite like using duct tape and urine bags to adapt the big round C02 srcubbers from the CM to interface with the little square hole on the LEM on Apollo 13 or basically stretching a tarp over Skylab to help reduce solar heating. Also, apparently the Russian cosmonaut (I forget his name), accidentally dropped a tool during the last EVA. It had enough momentum there was nothing he could do but watch it float out past the solar panels.