Rocket Scientist

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

flitting on fiction

Black Holes and Astrostuff

Quotidian Vissitudes

Glue 4 Families

I Do Things

Librarian Stories

Shakespearemom

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.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS