Jan 05 2009
Six Random Things - with a Twist
Newton’s Ocean tagged myself and a few other excellent blogs with the famous: six random things about yourself. Well, I did seven things about myself at one point and, frankly, I’m too dull to have anything interesting to say about myself. I’m so boring, it’s frightening.
So, I’m gonna do it differently and I’m going to encourage people I know who are up to their eyeballs in useful knowledge to pass some of it along. I like people and I like to know more, but I always love to learn. Here are the original rules…
Tag Rules:
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they were tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.
Here’s what I’m going to change them to:
1. Write six things most people don’t know about one of your specialties. This could be hobbies or professions or whatever. For example, I will be writing six things you probably didn’t know about EVA.
That’s it. I will include a list of people I’d love to learn more from but there is no obligation, on their part, to follow suit or to pass it along. Nor do I consider this limited to the people I thought of. If you would like to try this, coolness! Don’t let the fact I didn’t list your blog stop you and please do let me know with a comment so I can learn something new!
So, six things you probably never knew about EVA:
(1) Blowing one’s nose while in a suit that allows no access to one’s face is challenging. This may seem like a minor thing, but think back to whenever you’ve had an itch on your nose you just couldn’t scratch. Compound that with the fact you are in this suit, doing physically and mentally exhaustive work, for more than eight hours (including prebreathe), that there is a deliberate breeze on your face, that there is a significant pressure drop to deal with, and that the air inside the suit is very dry. So, there is a little block, called a Valsalva device, put inside the helmet that the crewmember can just reach with his face, with which he can clear his nose. Now you know.
(2) One of the very worst scourges for our Apollo moonwalkers was, seriously, dust. The dust captured in their cloth outer surface could not be readily removed before entering their tiny enclosed living quarters. Aside from the problems with aspirating fine dust, the dust got into the suits seals, making a airtight seal for future EVAs challenging and, in many ways worse, coating the inner surfaces when the suit was doffed so that, in addition to fighting the inherent stiffness of the suits themselves, the crewmembers were often rubbed raw from abrasive lunar dust.
(3) Cooling in EVA suits has been a hassle from the very beginning. It is easy to forget, especially watching spacewalkers floating freely about in zero gravity, how much work it really is. One is forced to use muscles that rarely are needed in one g to slew oneself and 200 pounds (and more with tools and SAFER and …) using just one’s hands and arms, and, to a lesser extent, one’s legs. And one is constantly working against the pressure necessary for the suit. And the direct sunlight can heat things up quickly. The suits use a liquid cooling garment that not only runs water through a long underwear type garment filled with tiny tubes, it also runs it out to a sublimator that evaporates the water directly to provide cooling for the systems of the suit. Inside a pressurized environment, one can’t use the suit’s cooling system but must use an umbilical because running the sublimator would just cause an ugly leak. You need vacuum to make it evaporate.
(4) Apollo suits, and in fact, all the US suits are limited in mobility. Falling down on the lunar surface, which happened at least once, was a non-trivial situation since the limited ability to bend arms and legs and waist serious hampered nominal methods to get back up. Don’t pooh-pooh this. Consider how hard it would be to get up, if you couldn’t bend at the waist. I’ll wait. Believe me, those Apollo astronauts earned their approbation and hazard pay.
(5) Russian space suits are “all one piece” (except the helmet and the gloves) that are entered through a panel in the back. The US suits are top and bottom attached at a waist bearing but with the Orlan, a crewmember must crawl in and make himself comfortable.
(6) The volume where two crewmembers (and a helper) doff and don the suits is very very small, (internal airlock dimensions have a diameter of 63 inches, a length of 83 inches - about 150 cubic feet. Imagine two people in bulky suits with a third person in a 5×5 room - getting dressed). Also, all the controls are “upside down,”because, originally, the airlock was going to be in the payload bay. When they decided to make it internal (as it was in the original Orbiters), they just flipped it over, controls and all, thinking (correctly) that up and down don’t matter much in zero g. Ironically, when they made the external airlock for Mir and ISS missions, they left the controls upside down to be compatible with the internal airlock on Columbia. Other Orbiters were retrofitted.
Well, hopefully you learned something new.
Now, people I’d love to learn stuff from others including the owners of
and, yes, Newton’s Ocean .
Update: Remember folks, the 6 things about one subject’s not intended to limit you. Don’t like your job but you’re an expert on blues music? Go with that. Maybe you’re not an expert in any one thing, but you are a gatherer of odd bits of data. It’s cool, I’m down with that. Can’t think of 6? Five’s fine. Got more than six? Bring it on. I love it.
Good stuff, and a nice twist on the meme.
I had thought about a fully-suited astronaut falling down before, but I didn’t know that it actually happened.
Check this out, Gumby:
http://www.workingonthemoon.com/WOTM-GrabKneelFallRise.html
Okay, what are the chances? I came to your site to get your URL so I could link to you in my newest post (go check it out!) and noticed that you had put up a post. I stopped to read it, and here I am in your post! LOL! Very cool.
Now I shall have to think of six things I haven’t mentioned yet on my site about being a librarian, and that the general public probably doesn’t know. Hmmm…
Hava
Who knows she won’t come up with anything nearly as cool as information about space suits, but shall give it her best shot anyway…
Hey, people can often be surprised how cool the stuff they know really is. I love to learn all kinds of things.
And it doesn’t *have* to be library related. You love nonfiction - pick another subject…
I read that link… I had never seen this info before. They really has a record of every second spent on the moon huh? Cool stuff.
Awesome! I love what you did with the meme AND with your tagging. In this sometimes self-obsessed world of blogging, it’s nice to know there are people out there who are genuinely interested in what other people do and know.
Fascinating article. I definitely learned a few things here. I’ll do my best to come up with something good.
Gumby, I had the opportunity to hear a talk by a group that had, last decade taken the opportunity to talk to all the Apollo astronauts (still living) that they could to ask them what they learned about EVA on another planetary body. Things that could be done better or smarter, options they wished they’d had, mistakes that were made and where we did good. I thought it invaluable (though a lesson to me that even people who should know better, like pilots, still can get concepts confused. They didn’t think the mass they had to carry around with their suits was a problem, but did have a problem with the inertia, for example. Uh, OK. Good luck separating that.) if only because there was so much priceless experience that we can’t replace, at least not for some time. I really respected that someone had had the foresight to pursue this - then to turn around and pass the data along. I would have loved to use the data I got here in my paper for the IAASS that year on designing EVA for other planetary surfaces.
In addition to the memories and judgement of the men that were there, the presentation referred to this site and I was stunned and thrilled to see the wealth of data publicly available. I bring it up often because it is our space legacy and I think we all have something to learn from it. After all, we paid for it.
JD, I learned a long time ago that, to compare intelligence among people who are capable of thinking for themselves is almost a waste of time. People who are geniuses with nuclear energy can be incapable of balancing a checkbook or matching their socks. A financial whiz might not be able to spell worth a damn. I’ve never met another intelligent person (i.e. capable of thinking for themselves) who wasn’t interested in learning. I know I am.
And that means I’ve never met an intelligent person who didn’t know stuff I didn’t know - and, chances are - would like to. People can be excited by one profession or another: rock star, aerospace engineer, Pulitzer prize winning author. But “regular” people are just as vital to the rest of us, without the hoopla or the adulation. Perhaps more so because they do it because they’re good at it, because they love it. Or they do it for the rest of us.
I’d be a pretty stupid rocket scientist if I thought I had nothing else to learn.
It occurs to me I can’t recall an aerospace engineer who got lots of hoopla, with the possible exception of Von Braun, who was kind of the Baryschnikov of rocketry.
Great post! I was at NASA in Florida recently (for the 3rd time!) I was like an excited kid looking at all the rockets and equipment. I was probably a total embarrassement to my friends…
I hope you didn’t buy any of those fetching gloves you had on your own blog (Psst, they’re not real!)
Any time you want to pelt me with questions, feel free. Glad you stopped by, Tiggy.
Stephanie, this is GREAT information you’ve shared with us. I accept the challenge! I’ll try to post it later this evening. Thanks!
Davida
I look forward to it, Davida, and thanks!
Very cool stuff, you are so very interesting. I always like to learn even though my brain is about as full up as it can get,lol. I don’t usually do memes, but this one is different, I too am very dull, the way you changed the rules made it more about what I like then how I’m like, which I like,lol.
Bob, I know exactly how you feel. I not only get to share stuff I think is cool, I get to learn stuff I didn’t know before.
I’m kinda tickled with myself.
After reading your very interesting post,I am now completely sure that I never want to put one of those suits on. I am sure NASA will be disappointed, but you will just have to get by without me on all future EVA missions.
You didn’t cover washroom type issues. I imagine all moonwalkers and such were trained in the ‘pelvic clenching’ technique to control bladder pain. A big cup of coffee before an 8 hour stint would be a no-no?
Tim, we’ll miss you, but, somehow we’ll manage. Actually, I wouldn’t to wear it either. I actually slipped into the HUD (hard upper torso), a large and this one at least was not made for a big chested woman. One of my non-astronaut coworkers couldn’t slip in either because she got claustrophobic. It’s not an easy task.
I got asked that offline, I guess thinking about the movie The Right Stuff. Actually, loading up on fluids is a good thing (and they also have a fairly large drink bag in the suit as well) because EVA is hard work and the canned air is very very dry. That kind of combination would be devastating if they didn’t stay hydrated.
What do they do? They use, yes, a fancy name for an adult diaper, the UID, which stands for something (but I don’t remember what - I reached acronym saturation several years back). The male EV crewmembers used to have the option of a plastic device to catch urine, but I think the consensus is that it was easier to use the UID so I’m not sure the other is even offered any more.
Well, I guess I should have known that. Now I can recall a female astronaut type person going on a ‘personal mission’ (on Earth) and wearing one of those so she didn’t have to stop the car for pee breaks.
It’s why I didn’t mention it. After the Lisa Nowak brouhaha, it didn’t seem to me like this was news