
How NASA Kept the ISS Flying While Harvey Hit Mission Control - Tomte
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/31/16228906/nasa-mission-control-center-tropical-storm-harvey-international-space-station
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fridek
In case anyone wonders how long ISS could survive completely unattended - it
averaged 1 debris avoidance manouver per year before 2011 and 4 in 2012. Its
orbit is around 400km which is low enough do decay slowly, but boost burns
happen only every few years. Both of those events are planned months or years
ahead.

NASA must have decided there was no real danger to the operators apart from
some longer shifts and sleeping in the office. Otherwise, even without the
backup ground control, ISS wouldn't be in any significant danger if
disconnected for a few days.

~~~
mirashii
Boost burns happen significantly more frequently than every few years. At
400km and a drag profile as large as the ISS, decay would take around a year
or less, depending on attitude. A little bit more reading:

[https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9087/how-often-
doe...](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9087/how-often-does-iss-
require-re-boosting-to-higher-orbit)

~~~
fridek
Wow, the height chart there is excellent. I was looking at a 2013 post where
someone mentioned the next burn is scheduled for 2015. Clearly it was
inaccurate.

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ngoldbaum
My favorite part of this is the mission patch they came up with for the team
that had to stay at JSC: [http://imgur.com/a/9YiQZ](http://imgur.com/a/9YiQZ)

~~~
bdamm
A pun in Latin! Thanks for the smile

~~~
foobarian
For the more thick of us, what makes that a pun? Looks like they just modified
the aphorism.

~~~
dogma1138
To the stars through/from water, it's a play on the phrase ad astra per aspera
which means to the stars through (or in the context despite) hardship. The
original phrase also is fitting but since the water in this case is their
hardship I think is what makes it a pun.

~~~
fish_fan
I'd call it a play on words, but it's not a pun—only a single meaning is
possible here.

~~~
labster
I've talked myself into thinking it's actually a pun. _Ad astra per aspera_ is
a set phrase in English, so any modification to it is punning the phrase. In
this formulation, _aquam_ still carries the original meaning of _ardua_ ,
hardship. While this wouldn't be a pun to a native Latin speaker, I haven't
met too many of them.

I kind of wish my work had mission patches like this, though "Deployed Client
X" doesn't sound so dramatic.

~~~
whatusername
Have you looked at this? [https://openbadges.org/](https://openbadges.org/)

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gist
Noting that the plans they made were all as a result of having enough advanced
warning of the storm to 'bring in big camping backups and setup cots (assume
those were there already?'. I would think that the planning should or would
include a case where there is no warning at all. In other words personnel
would be required to keep items onsite like hospitals do with crash carts for
emergencies maybe storage places or bomb shelter esq. After all if one thing
this storm taught (the chemical plant with the generators on the ground) is
that you can't really predict the unknown unknowns. It doesn't seem, relative
to the cost of space missions, a big deal for each employee to keep onsite (at
JSC cost) items that would be needed (including medicine; refreshed as needed)
in the event of no ability to plan ahead.

My wife works as a doctor at a hospital. I am always amazed at how they make
no plans at all in bad weather to have a system in place to make sure she gets
to work. It was actually my idea to tell her to buy an SUV so she wouldn't
have problems when it snowed. It's literally left to all employees. They don't
even have a way to reach her in the case of a mass county wide emergency. For
example we don't have a landline and they don't have my cell phone and so on.
It's all very ad hoc.

~~~
toomanybeersies
It seems, from reading about the recent attacks in London and Manchester, that
it's assumed for a major situation, that most of the staff will hear about the
situation through other channels, and make their way to the hospital on their
own accord.

There's also a very interesting article from Stanford about how they handled
their response to the Asiana Airlines crash a few years ago:
[http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/07/this-is-
not-a-...](http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/07/this-is-not-a-test-
in-caring-for-airplane-crash-victims-training-and-teamwork-prevailed.html)

Basically, they paged everyone to come in, and roped in everyone who was in
the hospital to help out.

~~~
gist
"Pagers" (if you mean that literally) aren't used anymore. The difference
between pagers and cell phones is that pagers work practically everywhere and
cell phones as you know are spotty.

That said I think it depends on the crisis and the community size. Not
everyone is even watching the news during the day I remember I heard about 911
as a result of someone making a comment on a group that I followed that was
almost quite accidental.

Part of the problem with any of this is that disasters aren't that frequent so
not much thought is given to a host of 'what if's'.

~~~
krallja
No, pagers are very much still used by doctors. My wife is a doctor. In both
hospital systems she's worked, she has carried an actual physical pager.
Sometimes more than one!

~~~
gist
Same here but my wife doesn't have one where she works.

------
gregmac
> But when it comes to sending commands to the orbiting lab, that has to be
> done on site at JSC.

> There’s the option of moving Mission Control temporarily to a hotel in Round
> Rock, Texas, before transitioning control more permanently to NASA’s
> Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. This facility has a lot
> of spaceflight infrastructure and could potentially support operations for
> weeks.

This seems very surprising, as it sounds like there's not really a plan if
something disastrous were to happen to JSC. I don't mean to say they couldn't
figure it out -- I have no doubt of that -- I am just surprised that the best
plan backup plan is migrating to another facility "for weeks" after a short
transition in a hotel (is this a literal hotel, or something more akin to a
'carrier hotel'?).

~~~
rtkwe
There are also Russian and ESA mission controls. Normally it seems they do
more science support missions than supporting the facility itself, though
Russia of course runs support for Soyuz and Progress docking, but if something
truly disastrous were to happen to JSC those mission supports could be
transferred to another location. That comment is more 'this is how we have the
security setup and for a temporary situation like Harvey it's not worth
changing everything when we have an alternative plan' than 'there is
absolutely no other way to control the station than physically logging in from
JSC.' That's pretty clear given that their primary backup site is just a
hotel.

------
dsfyu404ed
tl;dr They were prepared to and did modify their operations as necessary to
meet their SLA. They did their jobs.

Emergency preparedness isn't rocket science even if your organization's
mission happens to be rocket science.

~~~
amrrs
In fact most of the corporates have this part of their internal audit called
BCP Business continuity Process, asking team members not to come to office but
continue working.

What's inescapable I think is things like Malware attack and not these things

~~~
jfoutz
I worked at a small business that made working from home mandatory one day a
month for all employees (whatever day was convenient for each employee, not
all at the same time). On multiple occasions they'd tell people to just stay
home. Bad snowstorms and power outages, mostly. It worked really well, because
everyone know how to get stuff done when remote.

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rebootthesystem
Headline seems click-bait-y, doesn't it? "Kept the ISS Flying"? Last I checked
the ISS doesn't fly. Even if we concede that as a term of trade, it isn't
going to fall out of orbit because it gets no love from earth for a few days.

------
jeffdavis
"ISS, we have a problem."

~~~
marksomnian
"This is Houston, we have a problem"

------
rbanffy
Inertia?

~~~
thehardsphere
Stable orbit above the troposphere?

~~~
rbanffy
It's not really that stable, but it can hold for a while.

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turk183
Space is so disappointing because everything humans do there is super
complicated and fragile.

~~~
goda90
It's due to a lack of cheap, readily available energy. We have to constantly
worry about fuel and debris because maneuvering isn't cheap, and any form of
electromagnetic shielding that's could even theoretically be useful would have
incredible energy usage.

~~~
Robotbeat
?? No. It's due to lack of mass (for shielding and fuel). We produce lots of
energy in orbit.

~~~
goda90
Getting mass into orbit is also difficult due to a lack of cheap, readily
available energy.

~~~
mikeash
Energy costs are a tiny fraction of launch costs. If rocket fuel could be had
for free, it wouldn't noticeably change overall costs.

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2017Dude
NASA? It's maintained by Russia.

~~~
Robotbeat
No. The vast majority of Station is the USOS, the US side. Station overall
control is handled by NASA.

~~~
0xbear
Control in what sense? Paperwork? Only the Russian segment has any engines
that could change ISS's orbital position.

~~~
Robotbeat
Control as in day to day operations. Who organizes visiting vehicle ops,
consumables, etc.

Those Russian engines are only used occasionally. Mostly, Station relies on
US-side control moment gyros for attitude control. Also, the huge solar arrays
(USOS, again) act as controllable aerosurfaces. In a pinch, you could actually
use the solar arrays alone for desaturating the gyros. Until Shuttle
retirement in 2012, Shuttle was also used for reboosting Station. It's
possible for other visiting vehicles (ATV, HTV, Cygnus, Dragon, Proton, Soyuz,
Starliner, Dream Chaser) to reboost as well. Mostly Proton does the
reboosting, but that's just an operational decision.

Something like 75-80% of the mass of Station is USOS. Something like 80-90% of
the power as well. Zarya, a Russian-built module that was the first part of
ISS and which contains propulsion systems (Ukrainian-developed control
systems), was actually bought and is owned by the US.

