Should have turned off the SDS hammer action
...he said, speaking from unfortunate experience.
The boss of Russian space agency Roskosmos has confirmed that last week's air leak aboard the International Space Station (ISS) was the result of engineers getting handy with a drill. Dimitry Rogozin, who famously suggested NASA transport its astronauts to the ISS using a trampoline, said that the hole had been caused by a …
My ex-SO once managed to put the SDS drill into chisel (hammer only) mode when trying to put up curtains, or something. She managed to 'drill' a near 1 cm deep hole into a brick before the drill bent so badly even she finally realised something was wrong! Took half an hour though.
We all know it was really an alien infestation and the trampolining is just a cover story for kinetic impulses needed to stir the critters' internals into dust.
(From vague memories of a mid-20th century SF short story. Any one remember it? Couple of astronauts go up to investigate why satellites are failing, and discover tiny cosmos-drifting creatures that feed on refined metal. They're very delicate and the astronauts end up kicking the satellite to shake them apart. It's a take on an unexpected first contact story.)
Did it occur on the ground or in space?
The picture seems to include some drill marks in the surrounding paint, which implies it happened after assembly of the Soyuz's orbital module.
The whole "drilled and filled with adhesive" sounds a lot like some of the repairs I've specified for bad castings** used in aerospace applications, so I could believe it happened on the ground. Then again, that sort of repair usually happens long before painting. If the repair is decided after painting, we strip the paint, patch the hole (Loctite ea9394 is awesome), sand down to tolerance, and repaint. You wouldn't have those drill skip marks around the hole.
**The stainless steel castings are expected to hold some pressure because the sensors and electronics behind them are air-cooled, but a) there are no lives depending on the pressure seal, and b) the strength margin is ludicrous, so some high strength epoxy in a casting porosity is safe. One of them came back to the factory missing one of its sapphire window panels, paint half blistered off, and packed with mud and fire retardant - it turned out to have been under the wing of a British Harrier that had a bad landing in Afghanistan. We were able to use the casting to train factory operators in window installation because it was still within its dimensional tolerances of +/- tiny.
Back in the 1960s I read a book from the 50s or earlier about the U.S. Navy's submarine program, including a disturbing story from the early days. A naval inspector noticed a small pit on the pressure hull of a sub under construction. As a bureaucrat, he of course had a paperclip handy, and was astonished to find that the "pit" was a hole, all the way through. Rushing to the shipyard management to report it, he was confidently assured that since the hole was "above the waterline" and would be covered by paint, there was no problem.
Pressure differentials work either way, but construction by the lowest (or best connected) bidder is a constant.
A sub with a hole 'above the water line' so it's ok... uh, huh.
well I don't think sub builders [in this case, probably Electric Boat, or perhaps Mare Island] would be so brain-dead stupid as to actually do that. My guess is it's just a funny urban legend... or it may have been a hole that was drilled for some other reason (to attach sonar gear via a cable that penetrates the hull?), and someone was funnin' with the civilian. [yeah maybe the cable stuffing box hadn't been attached yet]
In reality sub hulls are thoroughly x-rayed and re-welded if any flaws are found. I was semi-involved in that process once, a long time ago. Standard practice for Navy ships at any rate.
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In the original source it's mentioned that "there was metal visible" behind the hole, which suggests that albeit this may well have been a pressure-critical wall separating pressure-tight and not pressure-tight parts, the distinction may not have been immediately clear to whoever drilled that hole. I'd even go further and assume that the "outer" part might have been kinda-sorta-nearly-almost pressure tight, considering I find it really hard to imagine a 2mm hole draining even a full ISS worth of volume of air at a rate "barely above normal leakage values" as quoted. None of which justifies the fabrication cock-up of course, if that's what this was, but it might explain why the perpetrator might not have had that "oh crap, I just punctured this spacecraft" moment at the time...
Let's say you do testing, and you discover a leak. you know it's "around here". The drawings say there shouldn't be a leak, but you have one anyway. So, to access the leaky zone, you drill a hole. THEN you inject some sealant goop into the hole, and the leak stops. YAY, you FIXED it! But it doesn't hold, and so now your hole is in a photograph blaming you.
less funny than the other explanations. I'll get my coat anyway for the buzz-kill effect.
What would happen if a similar hole was drilled in the Bigelow module
The Bigelow modules, like Transhab before them, are 50cm of layered ceramic cloth, foam, and fiber-reinforced pressure films. The hole wouldn't grow because of the rip-stop nature of the armor and strength layers.
Repair would be interesting. You'd be filling a 50cm-long bore and trying to get an adhesive to stick to polymers that sometimes don't play well together. However, given the small diameter of the hole and low stress (a few pounds of air pressure at the most), a long plug of epoxy injected in there would probably stick and hold in place.
No-one can hear you scream "NNNNYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEETTTT"...
Apologies to our Russian comrades.
But seriously, how the $Deity did this get through quality control?
I once saw a (allegedly true) story about a drive from an overseas location that mysteriously failed about a year in, when dismantled the cause was so horrible that the *entire* batch was pulled and replaced.
Turns out that hard drives grow bugs, and over that year the bug in question grew to nearly 9mm long and was "quite lively" when removed.
Alas it didn't survive. But imagine the horror of that poor tech when they opened up a drive to find a creepy crawly thing ON THE PLATTER!
Creepypasta material!