It's easy to prove it wasn't an astronaut (or cosmonaut). They're all careful types who follow instruction manuals and would have used a rawlplug when doing DIY.
Russia: The hole in the ISS Soyuz lifeboat – was it the crew wot dunnit?
The whodunnit over the hole in one of the International Space Station's Soyuz lifeboats took a lurch for the surreal this week as reports in Russian media suggested a US astronaut may have deliberately drilled it so the crew could return home. We'll just let that sink in for a moment. The report said that an American …
COMMENTS
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Friday 14th September 2018 14:01 GMT Peter2
On earth, you can use a power drill because your mass is pushed down by a large gravitational field which allows one to maintain their position with minimal effort.
In orbit in microgravity, were you to try and tighten or loosen a bolt with a power drill then the effective mass of the person holding the drill is near zero. What's more likely to rotate when you apply the drill, the bolt or the astronaut?
Some imagination suggests some interesting possibilities. If they do have a tool designed for that sort of purpose then i'd expect that it's going to be designed to be suction clamped to the surface to preclude it rotating the astronaut, but that itself would preclude the damage shown in the previous picture...
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Friday 14th September 2018 14:36 GMT bombastic bob
I still think it was done by a Russian technician
who was trying to plug a leak by drilling down to where the leak was so he could put some kind of leak-stopping material in there. the hole would've been considered 'benign' and apparently it was covered up so it couldn't easily be seen.
Then, the patch that was made on Earth failed, causing the recent leakage. Their fix was kinda like what I propose the original fix was - inject something into the hole to stop the leak, and cover it up.
Occam's razor in this case.
(not nearly as interesting as snarking all over it and pointing fingers and conspiracy theories)
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Sunday 16th September 2018 20:33 GMT cray74
They used to use velcro ... until Apollo 1
They still use Velcro in space. The role of Velcro in ISS sandwich making
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Friday 14th September 2018 15:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Shutterstock!
"It's like The Reg are paying a small fortune for a shutterstock account so they have to make the best use of it, and always come up with these shitty fucking condescending images."
It sure beats images linked to/from Twitter.
Some of us have Twitter and other social media blocked on our devices.
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Sunday 16th September 2018 19:28 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Shutterstock!
"It's like The Reg are paying a small fortune for a shutterstock account so they have to make the best use of it, and always come up with these shitty fucking condescending images."
A while ago, a Reg job advert had selecting and sourcing these images as part of the job description. I'm not sure if that post as been filled yet or not.
Personally I'm of the school of thought that if the picture is not directly related to the article, don't put one there at all.
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Friday 14th September 2018 15:57 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Give Russia's reputation for poor workmanship
What kind of manufacturing process for a spaceship requires holes to be drilled in it with hand tools? Surely everything's pre-drilled these days? I know they're basically hand-built, due to low volumes made. But as the design hasn't changed that much, you'd have thought there'd be tooling for banging out the individual parts.
Or is it like flat-pack furniture from the 80s. Where you got badly drawn instructions tellling you what sizes of drill bits and screwdrivers you needed, and you had to bodge it yourself.
At least Ikea put a stop to that - despite using the cheapest, greyest toilet-roll-iest paper and keeping the drawings impossible to read.
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Saturday 15th September 2018 06:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Give Russia's reputation for poor workmanship
The linked Russian media article says the repair was done with medical gauze & sealant .....
Then again, it also has a classic, paraphrasing : "we've asked the Americans for these records, but they're personal /private medical records, so we probably won't get them, but if we don't get them we'll know the Americans are hiding things from us and then there will be no need for us to ask any more questions (about whether the Americans did this)."
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Saturday 15th September 2018 18:10 GMT lglethal
Re: Give Russia's reputation for poor workmanship
Oh Spartacus... Dont let me tell you some of the stories i know from the aerospace world - you might never fly again! Lets put it this way, mistakes happen. When they happen, the technician writes up a concession, an engineer designs a fix, and the technician applies the fix and everyone moves forward.
If there's an aircraft out there without at least a 1000 concessions on it (for all sorts of things, holes drilled in the wrong spot is just the easiest one), then I'll eat my hat... The Space biz, is no different...
But dont worry, your still safe to fly... probably... ;)
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