Obviously they can't, it looks like an obvious solution they couldn't have missed. But I wonder why it is impossible to do.
Paint obviously is not the right tool for making seals air tight.
If you mean on the inside, it'd be a lot of time and disruption to devote to maintenance on a station that's already having to spend an increasing amount of time on maintenance instead of science.
The modules have a lot of stuff that has been wired between them over the years, all that would need to be sorted out, consequences understood and more before ever starting the work, and by then it'll be time for the ISS to retire anyway.
It might be hard to access the actual pressure hull from the inside (there's probably insulation and padding on top)
If you use paint, you somehow have to get rid of the solvent in it when it dries, which might be a problem when painting a whole module
Naively, I would assume that there are airlocks between the different sections of the ISS. I would also assume that they would close these airlocks while doing the kind of work they are doing to repair the leaks.
So, assuming I'm right (and my assumptions might be wrong,) why do the astronauts need to shelter?
One of the innovations of ISS is larger docking adapter with bulkhead that is removed after docking. Russian section still uses hatches. All of the cables go through the docking adapter or hatch which makes impossible to close door or quickly disconnect.
I.e. leaving the actual ISS structure entirely.
Not exactly something you want to be doing under time pressure.
> Astronauts told to return to International Space Station after sheltering over air leak repairs.
They were also the cause of a fire on Mir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_EO-23
It looks like NASA helped redesign it to be safer, creating the modern Solid Fuel Oxygen Generator (SFOG) system still in use on the ISS as the backup.
https://www.reuters.com/world/nasa-live-international-space-...
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev were using a saw to break into an area where they believed they could access the crack leaking air, the NASA official said.
NASA officials disagreed with this method, the NASA official added, prompting mission control in Houston to order safe-haven procedures."
For example: "The space station is made up of Russian and US segments, and there are modules from the European and Japanese space agencies too." It feels like this sentence is inserting some points, but is lacking in authorial intent. Is the intent to say the station is largely Russian and US, or to say the station has more than two partners? Probably an okay sentence, but still feels like a stone in the shoe.
Rumors are that Elon gets spaceX to buy tesla so tele-operated Optimus robots do the hard space work from now on. Not a bad idea per se but I’m not educated on the topic. Curiosity has me asking if we really want humans to go to mars or in space at all.
I've never shipped anything to real customers in the wild before, so let me tell you how insanely stressed I was to open the firmware and find a 10k lines of C contained entirely within a single switch statement. I think they used some no-code tool to graphically design a state machine then plopped the generated code straight into the device.
I don't think any crewed interplanetary mission is going to last that long for the foreseeable future.
Surely this was considered when building the first modules.
Corrosion is a hard problem in living quarters (ie moisture and salt) in space (sealed with no gravity)
We had two astronauts stranded in space for the better part of a year just last year!
Except you forgot to mention an epic leak in Destiny just three years after it was attached to the ISS: "At its highest rate, the station was leaking about 5 pounds of air per day overboard." [0] Imagine that happening on the 4th year of American Mars mission.
Also, if you on American mission to Mars, it would be reasonable to worry about cooling system dying mid-flight requiring three spacewalks to fix it: "We'd lose cooling capability to half of the electronics on the U.S., European and Japanese part of the space station." [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Orbital_Segment
Several of the US modules were built in Europe by Thales Alenia Space and were transferred to the US in exchange for the US launching the European modules on the Space Shuttle.
I don't think you'll find that type of language in the more traditionally published/edited articles.
(All this was pretty lucid of the US, but obviously the Russians did no such thing on their side. The Japanese even managed to get an ISS resupply mission launched on their own vehicle, which is no small achievement, and the ESA did a bunch of good science. And what would space be without the Canadarm :-)
Several other countries contributed, in an attempt to include other nations, but for all practical purposes it is an American/Soviet(Russian) project from a more civiled age of international competition. I think its appropriate the article remind us of this. A lot of people wasn't born them, and have no idea that once science had less borders.
Generally firmware can't be updated by the end user because there is physically no way to do so without returning the hardware. (Unless an update mechanism is specifically implemented in hardware, obv)
Pucker factor goes way up because if you ship a bug, there's no way back. If you aren't careful, you can break physical devices which can have consequences anywhere from thousands of RMAs to burning down a user's house depending on the hardware and how bad you fucked up.
The deployment process itself is about the same. Tests and more tests, including testing on prototype and/or pre-production units. Hardware testing can get wild depending on application, but I don't think any SWE would find it too surprising. Then you email a binary to your manufacturer and pray
You don't get the AtOx going to mars but you have everything else which will utterly take its toll on a traveling craft.
Anything larger, say a lost screw driver, would punch thru the ISS like it wasn't even there leading to some ugly consequences.
Two astronauts stranded for nine months taking the ISIS supplies intended for others. This is after they safely docked, which was considered risky at the time.
The Soyuz, the MIR, the human space records, the Venera program, closed cycle rockets, all have no equivalent in the West. Even their version of the shuttle was superior (it flew 100% autonomously).
I don't like Musk, but he single handedly saved the Western space programs.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
They've also got some new passenger jets certified and about to enter production (MC-21 and SU-100).