Jesus, the story is far more unsettling than the astronaut just saying what's in the headline. Spoiler So I can totally see why padlocks for the hatches were provided to mission commanders after...
Jesus, the story is far more unsettling than the astronaut just saying what's in the headline.
Spoiler
"Hey, if you guys don't give me a chance to repair my instrument, I'm not going back," Wang said.
Exactly what happened after that may never be known. But thanks to new reporting, we may finally have some answers. And though this is an old story, it still reverberates today, four decades on, with lasting consequences into the era of commercial spaceflight as more and more people fly into orbit.
An important clue comes from the oral history of astronaut Henry Hartsfield, who commanded STS-61-A, another Spacelab mission that took flight just six months after Wang's flight in 1985.
"Early on when we were flying payload specialists, we had one payload specialist that became obsessed with the hatch," he said. "'You mean all I got to do is turn that handle and the hatch opens and all the air goes out?' It was kind of scary. Why did he keep asking about that?"
This almost certainly refers to Wang. In the depths of his depression, he told flight controllers he would not come back to Earth if he didn't get a chance to fix his scientific instrument. He was awake for hours, incredibly upset, talking to Overmyer. After this, when Gregory and the Silver team came on their shift, there was duct tape on the Space Shuttle's hatch.
So I can totally see why padlocks for the hatches were provided to mission commanders after that. I wouldn't even be surprised if restraints are also secretly provided now as well, just in case.
"Call of the void" Wikipedia has an article, intrusive thought about it. Call of the void would be a type of intrusive thought but it isn't specifically mentioned in that article.
"Call of the void"
Wikipedia has an article, intrusive thought about it. Call of the void would be a type of intrusive thought but it isn't specifically mentioned in that article.
On a slight aside, for the word collectors in the audience, a similar phrase is "imp of the perverse" which means an urge to do exactly the wrong thing in a given situation. This phrase was coined...
On a slight aside, for the word collectors in the audience, a similar phrase is "imp of the perverse" which means an urge to do exactly the wrong thing in a given situation. This phrase was coined in the title of an Edgar Allan Poe story and the urge is summed up in this quote from the story:
"We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss-we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape… far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought… it is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height."
What if he had just fixed his equipment anyway? If I understand it, their refusal was because basically every second of their days are intricately planned. Letting him work on his experiment would...
What if he had just fixed his equipment anyway? If I understand it, their refusal was because basically every second of their days are intricately planned. Letting him work on his experiment would result in others being neglected.
But what if he just, hadn't listened to them? Would the other astronauts try to physically restrain him, thus consuming their valuable time as well? If he disobeyed orders, fixed his machine, and it ran fine, would they have punished him somehow? Denied him access to the data? Destroyed the data? What would you even do in such a situation?
None of that I would imagine. I'm going to guess it was social pressure and maybe lack off access to tools (through social pressure or not knowing where they were).
Would the other astronauts try to physically restrain him, thus consuming their valuable time as well? If he disobeyed orders, fixed his machine, and it ran fine, would they have punished him somehow? Denied him access to the data? Destroyed the data? What would you even do in such a situation?
None of that I would imagine. I'm going to guess it was social pressure and maybe lack off access to tools (through social pressure or not knowing where they were).
I can't imagine a scenario in which the hatch shouldn't be secured in such a manner outside of Earth's atmosphere. NASA should trust one, maybe two of the trained and vetted mission...
I can't imagine a scenario in which the hatch shouldn't be secured in such a manner outside of Earth's atmosphere. NASA should trust one, maybe two of the trained and vetted mission specialists/NASA astronauts as a redundancy, and simply not worry what payload specialists think regarding crew morale and trust, as long as trust exists between the mission crew astronauts. At a certain point the payload specialists are just very smart passengers with jobs to do, and it's part of the mission crew/NASA astronauts job to keep everyone safe. Stakes are massively high in any aerospace situation, space especially.
Since we're being posed this question by the article; I do not mind somewhat extreme measures for unruly passengers in space. Sedation and restraints should absolutely be utilized to keep crew and passengers safe, especially as space becomes more regularly traveled.
I guess sci-fi has conditioned me to expect too much, but why is there only a basic hatch in the first place, instead of a carefully regulated airlock? Seems like common sense to me, though I get...
I guess sci-fi has conditioned me to expect too much, but why is there only a basic hatch in the first place, instead of a carefully regulated airlock? Seems like common sense to me, though I get that unused space onboard is at a premium.
(Also this story happened 40 years ago, so maybe things have changed since then? I don't know.)
The reason goes back to Apollo missions. For Apollo I, they were fitted in place like a plug to keep it sealed. I think this might actually have been a change over Mercury capsules where Gus...
The reason goes back to Apollo missions. For Apollo I, they were fitted in place like a plug to keep it sealed. I think this might actually have been a change over Mercury capsules where Gus Grissom's capsule sunk in the Pacific after the hatch was gettisoned. For Apollo, once the capsule was pressurized, especially compared with the vacuum of space, the door would be immovable. During a ground test, the Apollo I was pressurized with 100% oxygen when a spark turned the interior into a furnace. Had the crew been able to open the hatch, it is thought they might have survived. So the hatch needs to be able to open quickly when there is urgency.
The second problem is weight and space. I mean where in the vehicle would you create an unusable pocket of air that would be large enough to hold a person, and If there was an air hatch, that's an extra weighted door you need to remove from potential cargo weight, which serves to other purpose than to keep someone away from the other hatch. There was an air hatch on the way from the cabin to the cargo bay as I recall, but that was also how folks would go for walks.
Airlocks generally only make sense if you intend to use them as such, i.e. if you intend to use the hatch with pressure on one side and vacuum on the other. In some cases it's easier to...
Airlocks generally only make sense if you intend to use them as such, i.e. if you intend to use the hatch with pressure on one side and vacuum on the other. In some cases it's easier to depressurize the entire capsule and use a plain hatch. Or to not leave the capsule at all. I'd hazard the guess only bigger vessels have space airlocks - stations, mostly, and craft built for spacewalks. The space shuttle would be one, though I hazard the guess the airlock is used as storage if no spacewalks are planned. Apollo Lunar Modules on the other hand, as far as I can tell, don't have an airlock at all. You just depressurize the entire tin can. Which by the way only weighs 2 tons dry - the ascent stage of it that is.
Incredible read. This may sound strange, but I can't help thinking of Columbine. Sue Klebold has emerged as an activist, author, and public speaker in the years since her son, Dylan, and his...
Incredible read.
This may sound strange, but I can't help thinking of Columbine. Sue Klebold has emerged as an activist, author, and public speaker in the years since her son, Dylan, and his friend committed what is perhaps the most well-known mass shooting in history.
One of her main arguments is that people who commit mass murder are not mainly focused on homicide. She says they are suicidal first and the homicide is a byproduct of that. This article seems to fit nicely with that hypothesis.
I always think of this when a pilot crashes a plane full of people. Of course, we usually find out later they were going through a divorce or were in some other pressure-cooker type of situation.
I know I'm stating the obvious here, but it seems to me that your only choices to reduce these types of risks are to improve mental health in a population and/or limit access to methods of mass murder.
I don't know how much of an issue this will be with space travel. How common will space travel really be? If it does become common, it seems like we would have systems in place like we do on airplanes to mostly prevent this. Perhaps mental health will even be "solved" or greatly improved by then? Then again, as the author points out, it's pretty trivial to kill a lot of people in space. Space wants to kill us anyway. What happens if/when space travel becomes as widespread as airplane travel? What about if it becomes as trivial as automobile travel?
I might be venturing into science fiction territory here but I'm fascinated by this train of thought.
This made me imagine SpaceX and The Boring Company teaming up to build a space-train. And it made me very, very scared. I'm in favor of a space elevator, but I suppose it doesn't solve any of the...
... build a literal train that you could ride to the Moon.
This made me imagine SpaceX and The Boring Company teaming up to build a space-train. And it made me very, very scared.
I'm in favor of a space elevator, but I suppose it doesn't solve any of the issues that airlock defenestration or bad actors present. A space train does sound much more ... majestic.
If you're curious, the idea would be an application of the orbital ring concept, using a series of these to allow a continuous structure to be built all the way to the Moon. Probably not really a...
If you're curious, the idea would be an application of the orbital ring concept, using a series of these to allow a continuous structure to be built all the way to the Moon. Probably not really a practical thing to do, even if we had the tech and industry to do it. But it is fun to see what wild things physics, in principle, allows. Or, if you were really clever, you could make the whole path be a big continuous enclosed space of rotating habitats. Fill it with water and islands. Literally sail your way to the Moon.
If this intrigues you, I hope you have read Larry Niven's Ringworld books. The stories get progressively weirder, but are basically a stalking horse for exploring the idea of a rotating ring of...
If this intrigues you, I hope you have read Larry Niven's Ringworld books. The stories get progressively weirder, but are basically a stalking horse for exploring the idea of a rotating ring of habitat at Earth's orbit around a sun.
That's definitely true in some cases and also something that might be true of people who take hostages. I would think hostage negotiators must get some training to deal with the subset of people...
She says they are suicidal first and the homicide is a byproduct of that.
That's definitely true in some cases and also something that might be true of people who take hostages. I would think hostage negotiators must get some training to deal with the subset of people expecting to die or anticipating being "forced" through their own hostage-taking, to commit suicide. There is a level of mitigation of collateral damage that can be achieved if the hostage-taker's true intentions are understood.
It seems like there are also situations where a person experiences a psychosis (as opposed to a dissociation) that lets them travel down a violent path. And in the process they may also lose any grasp on the concept of consequence (for themselves or others) that might otherwise help to steer them through a situation. Like the Japanese girl who killed her mother last year because she wanted to know if people really die sounds like it might be a situation of psychosis (or perhaps that's just how it was phrased). Either way, it's scary to think that someone might want to test their agency by doing something like opening an airlock.
Flying cars, or generally giving people the privilege of moving in three dimensions at will, are something I'm very much against due to the examples above. A lone bad actor, or group of bad actors, aren't the only risks. Mechanical problems are their own concern. But for me I don't want someone to think "what would it be like..." and intentionally kill bystanders. We already have enough suicides with people driving into on-coming traffic and drunk-driving accidents on top of that. Pilots have a lot of standards to meet, including mental health and being able to communicate effectively (in 2+ languages if it's international), and that helps to insure that the air travel we take for granted is only performed by people who are capable of understanding the responsibility they have.
Maybe it's just me, but a door, that if opened in space would result in the killing of the entire crew should probably be locked as a matter of standard procedure while in space. Lock it up as the...
Maybe it's just me, but a door, that if opened in space would result in the killing of the entire crew should probably be locked as a matter of standard procedure while in space. Lock it up as the first activity by the captain once in space before people start moving around then unlock right before coming back after everyone else is strapped in. During ascent and descent the lock should be on the back of the captains chair so everyone else can see it (assuming the captain is at the front).
That's kind of what I was thinking. If you make it a matter of protocol, it no longer becomes a matter of crew trust or relationships. Really interesting article to read. The part at the end...
That's kind of what I was thinking. If you make it a matter of protocol, it no longer becomes a matter of crew trust or relationships.
Really interesting article to read. The part at the end talking about civilians flying up more frequently on SpaceX makes me think that someday, something really bad is going to happen that will change protocol for good. Like how the cockpit on planes is locked during flight now, post 9-11.
It's interesting the change in power dynamics in space. NASA flight controllers can't force you to do anything in space. They can't send cops to evict you from the station, and there's no space...
It's interesting the change in power dynamics in space.
NASA flight controllers can't force you to do anything in space. They can't send cops to evict you from the station, and there's no space martial. A large amount of implicit trust put on workers who go to space. I have to imagine that any breach of this trust must be career limiting.
Unless your coworkers band together to subdue you, no one can force you to do anything you don't want to do, including leave the station. Which raises questions for what would happen if an entire team were to become disillusioned enough to "go rogue." The workers seem to have complete and total power over what happens during spaceflight.
There may not be a space marshal, but most astronauts are still military personnel, and there is a chain of command aboard the vessels, with a Commander at their head. So I doubt the crew evicting...
There may not be a space marshal, but most astronauts are still military personnel, and there is a chain of command aboard the vessels, with a Commander at their head. So I doubt the crew evicting a problematic crewmember and bringing them back to Earth, even against their will, would be all that difficult for them to do.
If an entire crew went rogue that would definitely be more difficult for anyone on the ground to deal with directly, but since they're not self-sufficient, so can't hide up there in space forever (at least not yet), all that would need to be done is basically starve them out until they fall back in line. And once back on the ground, the military crewmembers would likely face court marshal, so I doubt any of them would be willing to participate in a legitimate mutiny in the first place due to how severe those consequences would be.
Jesus, the story is far more unsettling than the astronaut just saying what's in the headline.
Spoiler
So I can totally see why padlocks for the hatches were provided to mission commanders after that. I wouldn't even be surprised if restraints are also secretly provided now as well, just in case.
"Call of the void"
Wikipedia has an article, intrusive thought about it. Call of the void would be a type of intrusive thought but it isn't specifically mentioned in that article.
Well this is certainly the most literal use of that descriptor I’ve come across.
On a slight aside, for the word collectors in the audience, a similar phrase is "imp of the perverse" which means an urge to do exactly the wrong thing in a given situation. This phrase was coined in the title of an Edgar Allan Poe story and the urge is summed up in this quote from the story:
God, Poe was singular. The man had a handle on the darkness.
What if he had just fixed his equipment anyway? If I understand it, their refusal was because basically every second of their days are intricately planned. Letting him work on his experiment would result in others being neglected.
But what if he just, hadn't listened to them? Would the other astronauts try to physically restrain him, thus consuming their valuable time as well? If he disobeyed orders, fixed his machine, and it ran fine, would they have punished him somehow? Denied him access to the data? Destroyed the data? What would you even do in such a situation?
None of that I would imagine. I'm going to guess it was social pressure and maybe lack off access to tools (through social pressure or not knowing where they were).
I can't imagine a scenario in which the hatch shouldn't be secured in such a manner outside of Earth's atmosphere. NASA should trust one, maybe two of the trained and vetted mission specialists/NASA astronauts as a redundancy, and simply not worry what payload specialists think regarding crew morale and trust, as long as trust exists between the mission crew astronauts. At a certain point the payload specialists are just very smart passengers with jobs to do, and it's part of the mission crew/NASA astronauts job to keep everyone safe. Stakes are massively high in any aerospace situation, space especially.
Since we're being posed this question by the article; I do not mind somewhat extreme measures for unruly passengers in space. Sedation and restraints should absolutely be utilized to keep crew and passengers safe, especially as space becomes more regularly traveled.
I guess sci-fi has conditioned me to expect too much, but why is there only a basic hatch in the first place, instead of a carefully regulated airlock? Seems like common sense to me, though I get that unused space onboard is at a premium.
(Also this story happened 40 years ago, so maybe things have changed since then? I don't know.)
The reason goes back to Apollo missions. For Apollo I, they were fitted in place like a plug to keep it sealed. I think this might actually have been a change over Mercury capsules where Gus Grissom's capsule sunk in the Pacific after the hatch was gettisoned. For Apollo, once the capsule was pressurized, especially compared with the vacuum of space, the door would be immovable. During a ground test, the Apollo I was pressurized with 100% oxygen when a spark turned the interior into a furnace. Had the crew been able to open the hatch, it is thought they might have survived. So the hatch needs to be able to open quickly when there is urgency.
The second problem is weight and space. I mean where in the vehicle would you create an unusable pocket of air that would be large enough to hold a person, and If there was an air hatch, that's an extra weighted door you need to remove from potential cargo weight, which serves to other purpose than to keep someone away from the other hatch. There was an air hatch on the way from the cabin to the cargo bay as I recall, but that was also how folks would go for walks.
Airlocks generally only make sense if you intend to use them as such, i.e. if you intend to use the hatch with pressure on one side and vacuum on the other. In some cases it's easier to depressurize the entire capsule and use a plain hatch. Or to not leave the capsule at all. I'd hazard the guess only bigger vessels have space airlocks - stations, mostly, and craft built for spacewalks. The space shuttle would be one, though I hazard the guess the airlock is used as storage if no spacewalks are planned. Apollo Lunar Modules on the other hand, as far as I can tell, don't have an airlock at all. You just depressurize the entire tin can. Which by the way only weighs 2 tons dry - the ascent stage of it that is.
Incredible read.
This may sound strange, but I can't help thinking of Columbine. Sue Klebold has emerged as an activist, author, and public speaker in the years since her son, Dylan, and his friend committed what is perhaps the most well-known mass shooting in history.
One of her main arguments is that people who commit mass murder are not mainly focused on homicide. She says they are suicidal first and the homicide is a byproduct of that. This article seems to fit nicely with that hypothesis.
I always think of this when a pilot crashes a plane full of people. Of course, we usually find out later they were going through a divorce or were in some other pressure-cooker type of situation.
I know I'm stating the obvious here, but it seems to me that your only choices to reduce these types of risks are to improve mental health in a population and/or limit access to methods of mass murder.
I don't know how much of an issue this will be with space travel. How common will space travel really be? If it does become common, it seems like we would have systems in place like we do on airplanes to mostly prevent this. Perhaps mental health will even be "solved" or greatly improved by then? Then again, as the author points out, it's pretty trivial to kill a lot of people in space. Space wants to kill us anyway. What happens if/when space travel becomes as widespread as airplane travel? What about if it becomes as trivial as automobile travel?
I might be venturing into science fiction territory here but I'm fascinated by this train of thought.
In principle, it is theoretically possible, using known physics and materials, to build a literal train that you could ride to the Moon.
This made me imagine SpaceX and The Boring Company teaming up to build a space-train. And it made me very, very scared.
I'm in favor of a space elevator, but I suppose it doesn't solve any of the issues that airlock defenestration or bad actors present. A space train does sound much more ... majestic.
If you're curious, the idea would be an application of the orbital ring concept, using a series of these to allow a continuous structure to be built all the way to the Moon. Probably not really a practical thing to do, even if we had the tech and industry to do it. But it is fun to see what wild things physics, in principle, allows. Or, if you were really clever, you could make the whole path be a big continuous enclosed space of rotating habitats. Fill it with water and islands. Literally sail your way to the Moon.
If this intrigues you, I hope you have read Larry Niven's Ringworld books. The stories get progressively weirder, but are basically a stalking horse for exploring the idea of a rotating ring of habitat at Earth's orbit around a sun.
That's definitely true in some cases and also something that might be true of people who take hostages. I would think hostage negotiators must get some training to deal with the subset of people expecting to die or anticipating being "forced" through their own hostage-taking, to commit suicide. There is a level of mitigation of collateral damage that can be achieved if the hostage-taker's true intentions are understood.
It seems like there are also situations where a person experiences a psychosis (as opposed to a dissociation) that lets them travel down a violent path. And in the process they may also lose any grasp on the concept of consequence (for themselves or others) that might otherwise help to steer them through a situation. Like the Japanese girl who killed her mother last year because she wanted to know if people really die sounds like it might be a situation of psychosis (or perhaps that's just how it was phrased). Either way, it's scary to think that someone might want to test their agency by doing something like opening an airlock.
Flying cars, or generally giving people the privilege of moving in three dimensions at will, are something I'm very much against due to the examples above. A lone bad actor, or group of bad actors, aren't the only risks. Mechanical problems are their own concern. But for me I don't want someone to think "what would it be like..." and intentionally kill bystanders. We already have enough suicides with people driving into on-coming traffic and drunk-driving accidents on top of that. Pilots have a lot of standards to meet, including mental health and being able to communicate effectively (in 2+ languages if it's international), and that helps to insure that the air travel we take for granted is only performed by people who are capable of understanding the responsibility they have.
Chris Vos who wrote Never Split the Difference was a hostage negotiator
Maybe it's just me, but a door, that if opened in space would result in the killing of the entire crew should probably be locked as a matter of standard procedure while in space. Lock it up as the first activity by the captain once in space before people start moving around then unlock right before coming back after everyone else is strapped in. During ascent and descent the lock should be on the back of the captains chair so everyone else can see it (assuming the captain is at the front).
That's kind of what I was thinking. If you make it a matter of protocol, it no longer becomes a matter of crew trust or relationships.
Really interesting article to read. The part at the end talking about civilians flying up more frequently on SpaceX makes me think that someday, something really bad is going to happen that will change protocol for good. Like how the cockpit on planes is locked during flight now, post 9-11.
It's interesting the change in power dynamics in space.
NASA flight controllers can't force you to do anything in space. They can't send cops to evict you from the station, and there's no space martial. A large amount of implicit trust put on workers who go to space. I have to imagine that any breach of this trust must be career limiting.
Unless your coworkers band together to subdue you, no one can force you to do anything you don't want to do, including leave the station. Which raises questions for what would happen if an entire team were to become disillusioned enough to "go rogue." The workers seem to have complete and total power over what happens during spaceflight.
There may not be a space marshal, but most astronauts are still military personnel, and there is a chain of command aboard the vessels, with a Commander at their head. So I doubt the crew evicting a problematic crewmember and bringing them back to Earth, even against their will, would be all that difficult for them to do.
If an entire crew went rogue that would definitely be more difficult for anyone on the ground to deal with directly, but since they're not self-sufficient, so can't hide up there in space forever (at least not yet), all that would need to be done is basically starve them out until they fall back in line. And once back on the ground, the military crewmembers would likely face court marshal, so I doubt any of them would be willing to participate in a legitimate mutiny in the first place due to how severe those consequences would be.
For some reason I simply forget this fact. Yeah the threat of Court Martial has historically been sufficient for maintaining military discipline.