soyuz cost per kilogram is $5357, so if you include the other materials used to make it EVA version toothbrush the cost to get it to the station would be about $446-$669
Once I heard a story about random toothpaste boxes being empty and how the company fixed it (these stories change so much that I wonder if it's actually true, but...): It seems some random toothpaste box ended up empty at the consumer, no tube inside. So the company hired a 3rd party to fix the manufacturing problem. They couldn't figure out why, so they developed a very expensive system that would weigh each box and, if it was deemed empty, it would push it out of the belt. Truckload of money, but problem was fixed. One day, the supervisor was walking around the plant and noticed the device was plugged off. When asking the sector employees they said it was slowing down the line with the weighing process, so they just bought a cheap fan and kept it pointed at the belt, if a box was empty it was just blown off of it.
@@a..d5518 As someone who has studied TPM and 5S and everything gonna be honest you _always_ go to the line workers first - they're the ones that know their machinery. If something's gonna get fixed ask the folks who work on it every day haha
This is just one of many reasons why we need human spaceflight. It's the ingenuity & "out of the box" thinking of human brains attached to human hands out there on the spot that can save the mission.
"So I've been in space, on the end of an arm attached to a Space Shuttle. While I held on to a sattelite." Just imagine the stories he's got during BBQ's
For those of you wondering how dropping a hammer to a hip-height fender in 1/12th a G could somehow manage to damage it (obviously impossible), the answer is that that's not what happened. He had the hammer in a pocket and it caught the edge of the fender and popped it off.
@@Kineth1 Not required. Too many useless temporary fixes have become permanent with every cleanup attempt stopped by the memory of the original problem or assumption that it's there "for. a reason"
The word 'hack' and its various misuses really irritates me. But after thinking about it for a second, I realized why it is an indelible part of the modern lexicon: because the word im-pro-vis-at-ion is such a mouthful...
Well life hacks which are dumb are published by libtards or Russians and we know those dont get banned like the rest of us = that is why youtube is full of them ^^
Have you seen the actual source code for the Lunar lander? There are literally lines of code commented as "# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE". Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix.
I've definitely written some code like that, where I finally found something that works and I'm not entirely sure why. The thing to do is carefully add //HERE BE DRAGONS, DO NOT CHANGE and then move on.
I love early nasa because it’s pretty much the smartest people in the USA with the best technology doing shit that shouldn’t be possible for another 40 years. Plus half the shit they did was just fucking nuts, I mean seriously the fucking moon, there’s a reason we didn’t go back and it’s not some crazy conspiracy or anything. It’s because it is stupidly dangerous and we got stupidly lucky, seriously half of it is just sticking a guy in a can for a few days and then playing it by ear. Actually better analogy early nasa is kerbal space program but the player actually cared about the Astronauts they had.
My favorite (from the movie "The Right Stuff") is when Chuck Yeager fell off his horse,and broke his ribs the evening prior to the first Mach 1 flight. He was unable to reach across and close the access hatch with his injuries and unwilling to admit the injuries to the higher ups and lose the flight to some other pilot. So, he smuggled a length of broom stick aboard. Wedged into the hatch frame, it gave him the grip/leverage needed to close the hatch. The only this that rings untrue in this story was that, while riding his horse hell-for-leather in pitch darkness into a closed fence, he was stone cold sober (not likely).
Rocket engineers: "We calculate that we need to lose some mass to make this mission successful. What can we get rid of? How about these rolls of duct tape." Astronauts bunching fists... Rocket engineers: "OK, OK. How about the desserts out of the ration packs?" Astronauts: "Fine. Whatever."
Yeah, good choice, they *need* that tape... though it would take some heavy desserts, or a lot of lighter ones, to equal the mass of a few rolls of duct tape.
This is why you should always make sure to bring your mass effect field toothbrush with you!.. btw: You don't need to leave the Earth to fave the need of crazy macgyvering. We constantly did the same in the middle of Siberian winter expeditions while building a neutrino telescope. No tool or resource went untouched.
Neutrino telescope????????? Thats normally a HUGE water tank with billions of gallons(or liters) deep in an old mine with no light and lots of detectors to recognize the 2-3 reactions per day-week depending on size and mass above you!!?
@@torstenmautz195 Yep. That's it. Lake Baikal = huge water tank. At ~1300m it's also dark. Practical benefit: During the winter when the ice is thick, you can build an ice camp and winch it up near the surface for repairs/upgrades/etc. (Unlike the South Pole one that's 2000m deep in ice. Once it goes down, it stays there.)
@@TheZoltan-42 wow that's a cool thing. But I think Iwouldn't like to stay in a cold environment like Siberia in the winter.... how cold was it there -50°C(223K)?
@@torstenmautz195 I worked in -45C, and on one occasion I missed some -50C by a few days, as I was told. (In a section of Irkutsk, central heating went down and people died.) It's quite interesting. Your tears can freeze, sealing your eyes when you blink. Need to mind how you breathe. Loads of things that you may read about, but being there, living in it, experiencing it (and not being able to just quit when you like), is something you will remember for life. Working on bleeding edge science, do small excursions, survive animal attacks, experience storms, see the beauty of the environment, meet locals etc. All worth loads of stories.
@@TheZoltan-42 When was that? I live there and I've never heard of that. I'm guessing like a decade ago? Never heard of temperatures like that there either, but I know it used to be colder years ago.
wow! I didn't realize the ISS solar panels are just film with the photovoltaics on there! That shot of the one array moving as it was being worked on was fantastic! Is that Kapton? Always wondered why they are orange.... Edit: I did some research and the solar arrays are in fact cells bonded to a Kapton/fiberglass blanket. The more you know!
STS-51-D is memorable for me because I still have the “Toys In Space” vhs tape I bought at KSC in 1994 shows it. I still have the tape. I should get that from my moms house and digitize it.
It always amused me that they never thought about making the air scrubbers compatible between service and lunar modules to begin with. In this case, the redundancy of having two separate systems was a bit too redundant.
A redundancy has to be compatible... that problem was just due to 2 different teams at 2 different companys developing things really fast and not coordinate with each other that had very specific use cases.
@@torstenmautz195 You also have to remember that the round cartridges used in the lunar module's life support system were the same type that fit into the PLSS backpacks. There may have been some technical reason why the backpacks needed to use the round cartridges and so to make things easier they used the same round cartridges in the LM's life support system.
Worrying about things like making the scrubbers being designed by two independent teams inter-compatible makes the design process takes longer and raises prices.
The "hack" in a way, was the redundancy. The plan to "put a square peg, in a round hole" was planned out in advance, unlike how the movie shows it as a last minute fix.
@@jerrymiller276 Yes, but if the components you have at your disposal to craft such tools are more likely to work together, the non-standard solutions are more achievable. If everything is a hex socket with the same bore, there is less work to solve the square peg in the triangle hole problem.
@@PatrickKQ4HBD I was about to say how he had probably the most expensive car ever made but then thought about all the shit he did to it by the end of the book.
@@sentientmop317 haha, yeah. I was actually referring to the epilogue (prologue?) in the book. Foreshadowing. Before they went to Mars, Mark took a road trip in his crappy car, which broke down on him in the middle of nowhere. His cellphone was also dead and he'd forgotten his charger, so of course he tore apart his stereo to make one and call a tow truck.
STS-49, Endeavour's maiden flight. When the original plan to capture the wayward Intelsat VI satellite failed, the crew and ground support worked out a plan using three astronauts in the only EVA in spaceflight history to date to do so to grab and then hold the satellite by hand so that the capture bar that had failed on previous EVAs due to a lack of sufficient resistance to trigger it off and clamp onto Intelsat IV. The working out of radio, airlock procedures, use of the ASEM struts and equipment for another unrelated EVA test to create positions for two of the three astronauts to position themselves in the payload bay on definitely qualifies as one of the greatest improvised rescues in spaceflight history.
The McGuyver mode is one of the modes of operation that make humans great. There is the loving mode, the artistic mode, and all sorts of other skills and qualities and capabilities we should be proud of and for which we owe our existence. But among these must always be valued, the McGuyver mode. :)
Ginger is used to plug leaks in automotive cooling systems, perhaps tea would do the same? ( Until the leaf moves and the leak starts up for the next crew. )
@@bobroberts2371 they just needed something that wouldn't damage any astronaut or system onbord but is sticky and light enough. So tea leaves, maybe with a drop of water, was a good solution.
@@torstenmautz195 I would guess the tea leaves were used to find the leak, dry and floating in the cabin being drawn toward the hole by the escaping air. Then they used something more glue-y to seal it.
Remember how an early Soyuz-Salyut docking got stuck halfway through the mechanical engagement, with no ability to continue and no provisions to back out of the procedure? They were looking at saving the crew at the price of losing the brand-new space station. Then hacking intensified and things worked out in the end.
This reminds me that once away from home my bike chain broke, a link was broken and with two stones and broken pieces of the chain I managed to join it again.
The timing of the "toothbrush that saved the ISS" story is interesting, because that was ~six months before Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC dropped, which also features a toothbrush saving a spacecraft.
Dear Scott: the following is a list of other important hacks in space: 1- Using slings to close the doors of the Hubble Space Telescope after repairs. 2- Neil Armstrong thetered the Agena module to his Gemini space ship after having trouble with the docking maneuver. 3- Leting Sheppard "go" in his spacesuit🤣🤣🤣🤣. 4- Neil Armtrong using his slide rule to calculate the LM position after he noticed they were off the expected landing zone 5- The 1202 and 1201 alarm "Service call" in the Apollo 11 landing on the moon😅😅😅 6 - Mark Watney's Iron man maneuver🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. 7 - Alexey Leonov deflating his spacesuit after the first ever EVA to fit through the hatch of hi's Voskod space ship. And finnaly.... 8 - Leaving the retro rocket pack attached to John Glenn's Friendship 7 Space ship to ensure its heat shield did not saparated from the spaceship while returning to Earth, avoiding "Plasma Baking" John Glenn.👍 There are some other "space hacks" but I don't remember them all. Have a pleasant evening.
Fantastic! I knew the more famous ones but this collection of hacks is incredible. Suggestion: you could talk about that time the Canadian robotic arm failed and astronauts had to do an EVA to take a satellite they were fetching back BY HAND. A good time to understand the difference between weight (force) and mass (inertial mass) as the satellite had several tons.
I like to snowmobile, and one of the interesting things about the pastime is you often end up out in the middle of the woods somewhere with an unexpected problem with one or more of the vehicles that got you there (and are your ride home). You learn to come prepared. It's actually part of the excitement for me to be challenged by and overcome these problems. This video reminds me of snowmobiling in that way and I feel like space travel is the ultimate version of my own adventures.
This is why I love space exploration, ingenuity of humankind at its peak. Thank you Scott for bringing us all these stories and videos to us mere mortals.
This is the great reason for having 3D printer on ISS. Is absolute tool for hacks/magavering things. Especially when specialist on earth can design part and transmit file to ISS.
And then there's the other end of the hacker spectrum where if there isn't a X for exactly their situation, then there is just absolutely no way that the task can be accomplished. One of my favorite hacked together tools is when a man made a megaphone out of nothing but some string, a squirrel and a megaphone. Crazy.
Love it! most of my life seems to be doing this..mending repairing stuff with whats on hand..I call it the 'Desert Island thinking' ..you can only fix it with what is around you and your life depends on it..its amazing what you can achieve with seemingly useless objects and stuff.
During (if I remeber well) the Aragatz mission on MIR with the french cosmonaut Jean-Loup Chrétien, a 3m deployable mesh antenna made by Aerospatiale was to be tested in deployment in zero G. The antenna had been stowed earlier in the station for a long time, and when they put it out for the deployment test, it failed to deploy. Most probably, moisture from the interior of MIR had frozen when it was exposed to the cold of space. Alexander Volkov was in charge of activating the deployment outside and in communication with the ground in Russia. He was ordered to wait for analysis, but he pretended a bad radio link as they were going out of coverage and literaly and strongly kicked the antenna which then urfulled perfectly. A sort of kickass hack !
Knowing the history and the 18-20 minute comms delay, these are the things I am constantly thinking about in regard to putting people on Mars. They'd better be some damn good problem solvers and we might want to back them up with some good AI that can help them solve weird problems with the tools on hand.
STS-125 was the final Shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. When they had problems getting a bolt to loosen, they had to make a breaker bar to get it loose. They also had to physically rip off a metal handle in order to get at a circuit card that needed to be replaced.
Getting to space is hard. Making stuff in space is hard. Fixing stuff in space is also hard but only because you have to learn to act for a Macgyver episode
Don’t be afraid of telling us about these little details, I hadn’t heard of many of the situations and the ones I HAD heard of didn’t cover all the stuff you have known for years and years. Very informative and interesting 🤔!
I remember being told of an engineer's joke about duct tape, that it was one of the two most crucial tools in your bag - the other one being WD40. If it was supposed to move but didn't, get out the WD.... if if moved but wasn't supposed to, reach for the duct tape.
This is perhaps what makes scifi stuff with very small crews so remarkable, The fact they can function without that mission control and no matter what breaks their engineer/mechanic always knows the answer.
This is NASA at its best. Being in a situation that seems near hopless, where any sane person whould have given up, and assembling teams of engineers and scientists to work on the problem, take inventory, study the situation, come up with possible solutions, then simulating and simulating until they have perfected an answer. It's the thing that turns space from a scary, lonley and hostile abyss into a problem to be solved.
Very interested to hear what you mean by "improvise a spacewalk". I would assume that (over simplifying of course) they would just suit up, get in the airlock and tether up then hop out. I feel like I'm missing something.
I believe they usually plan these things weeks in advance to ridiculous detail on the order of "how many turns does it take to remove bolt X" "how many steps is it to get from point A to B". In the case of shuttle missions, i think they also did a lot of mission rehearsals on dummy hardware in their "0g environment" pool. Just saying "suit up, go out there, and wave the flyswatter at the satellite" is a lot more seat-of-the-pants than a meticulously studied and planned EVA.
I can relate to a small extent. It may not be as epic as space, but in the work-class ROV business, there have been many instances where there're been problem solving with everyday items and things not intended to operate at a mile deep or more.
4:14 My favorite exchange from the Apollo 17 radio logs: Cernan: "Remind me to dust my camera too, will ya?" Schmitt: "Don't forget to dust your camera."
I'd like to know what bits of kit are carried on each mission designed to be improvised and bodged, or if its always just repurposing items with other functions
This is exactly why there will always need to be crewed missions. Even if they're in the habitat on mars driving a rover remotely, they can still go fix things in a pinch.
Hey Scott, love your videos! Odd question but do you remember where you got that gantry for the Saturn V? I’ll be getting the lego set for xmas and was really hoping to find a nice model launch tower. Keep up the great work and thanks for all the educational videos!!
These stories resignate with my experience working in the middle of nowhere on a remote Sight in Zimbabwe:) You should see some of the genius hack that I have come across and seen here. Quick question, there was a story about Harare International airports Main runway being a shuttle emergency runway. Where were the rest of these and in what circumstances would they need to use them?
To be fair, that toothbrush cost more than $2 due to the shipping costs.
😂
soyuz cost per kilogram is $5357, so if you include the other materials used to make it EVA version toothbrush the cost to get it to the station would be about $446-$669
20,000$ to be exact in U.S terms. Because why would they be cheap? It’s unnecessary.
There are the humorous people, and then there are the people who insult you over a joke.
Not if you buy it with cash oin the local market
Moral: Never run out of duct tape.
Moral, not morale.
@@12201185234 Thanks. Corrected.
Never run out of: duct tape, plastic sheeting and a shovel...
"Duct tape, Well, it’s like the Force. It’s got a light side and a dark side and it binds the whole universe together." ~ Adam Savage
the first aid kit in my car is duct tape and a towel
Once I heard a story about random toothpaste boxes being empty and how the company fixed it (these stories change so much that I wonder if it's actually true, but...):
It seems some random toothpaste box ended up empty at the consumer, no tube inside. So the company hired a 3rd party to fix the manufacturing problem. They couldn't figure out why, so they developed a very expensive system that would weigh each box and, if it was deemed empty, it would push it out of the belt. Truckload of money, but problem was fixed.
One day, the supervisor was walking around the plant and noticed the device was plugged off. When asking the sector employees they said it was slowing down the line with the weighing process, so they just bought a cheap fan and kept it pointed at the belt, if a box was empty it was just blown off of it.
F=ma FTW! :)
thats awesome, such a simple and elegant solution.
Holy shit, I used to work at a production facility with this exact problem. Might go back and get a raise now.
Had they consulted the line workers first they could have saved a lot time and money!
@@a..d5518 As someone who has studied TPM and 5S and everything gonna be honest you _always_ go to the line workers first - they're the ones that know their machinery. If something's gonna get fixed ask the folks who work on it every day haha
"Either damaging the panels or the astronaut would be a very bad outcome."
Another of Scott Manely's famous understatements.
sub optimal outcome :)
Gotta love his low-key cynicism.
This is just one of many reasons why we need human spaceflight. It's the ingenuity & "out of the box" thinking of human brains attached to human hands out there on the spot that can save the mission.
I'll have to remember these next time I'm on the ISS
Sir i must comment on how good that pfp matches RUclips dark mode
I didn't remember and I died on the ISS a few months ago.
Oh that matches YT dark mode for sure
Well its still more usefull then those weird coca cola life hacks
Yes, these space hackers are really helpful to this secret Chinese spy space station now
"So I've been in space, on the end of an arm attached to a Space Shuttle. While I held on to a sattelite."
Just imagine the stories he's got during BBQ's
Gathered around the Poodle on low throttle
@@AgentTasmania Nice
@@AgentTasmania I get that reference XD
That one!
@@AgentTasmania haha, good job
For those of you wondering how dropping a hammer to a hip-height fender in 1/12th a G could somehow manage to damage it (obviously impossible), the answer is that that's not what happened. He had the hammer in a pocket and it caught the edge of the fender and popped it off.
Small correction: 1/6th of a G, or 16.6%.
That sounds a lot more plausible.
What was that saying? "There is no more permanent fix, than a temporary one"
I think you're missing two key words at the end: "that works."
The most permanent solution to a problem is a temporary one that works.
Ohh yes the "pemenent temporary fix "
@@Kineth1 Not required. Too many useless temporary fixes have become permanent with every cleanup attempt stopped by the memory of the original problem or assumption that it's there "for. a reason"
There's always time to do it right the second time
“RUclips is full of dumb life hacks.”
-Scott Manley for the 2020 Quote of the Year.
Nah, too many bad quotes already accumulated. It's 2020 after all, and our vision isn't.
Generally speaking if I see "hack", "life", "amazing", or "mind-boggling"; I click "Not Interested", or "Don't recommend this channel".
The word 'hack' and its various misuses really irritates me. But after thinking about it for a second, I realized why it is an indelible part of the modern lexicon: because the word im-pro-vis-at-ion is such a mouthful...
@@thePronto This use of the word hack is much closer to the original meaning than the use for criminal activities.
Well life hacks which are dumb are published by libtards or Russians and we know those dont get banned like the rest of us = that is why youtube is full of them ^^
"And they still operate today with the emergency fix still in place"
I, a software dev, shudders at that sentence.
Have you seen the actual source code for the Lunar lander? There are literally lines of code commented as "# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE". Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix.
"If it compiles it's good, if it boots up it's perfect " Linus Torvalds
I've definitely written some code like that, where I finally found something that works and I'm not entirely sure why. The thing to do is carefully add //HERE BE DRAGONS, DO NOT CHANGE and then move on.
@@lofowens Like Mario Galaxy, where if you delete or replace a single unused Mushroom moddel, the whole game doesn't bootup
To be fair, the fix wasn't to the electrical aspect of the panels.
"Greatest Tech Support call" - nah, that's devops jerry-rigging in production. Straight up heroic.
That scene in From the Earth to the Moon was awesome. They woke the guy up in the middle of the night and fed him coffee until he came up with a fix.
@@RCAvhstape poor dude.
I can hear him "try this. now will you leave me alone?"
I love early nasa because it’s pretty much the smartest people in the USA with the best technology doing shit that shouldn’t be possible for another 40 years. Plus half the shit they did was just fucking nuts, I mean seriously the fucking moon, there’s a reason we didn’t go back and it’s not some crazy conspiracy or anything. It’s because it is stupidly dangerous and we got stupidly lucky, seriously half of it is just sticking a guy in a can for a few days and then playing it by ear.
Actually better analogy early nasa is kerbal space program but the player actually cared about the Astronauts they had.
Scott: Jabbing metal objects into electrical panels isn't good.
Me, an electrician: Ummmm, that's pretty much my job description?
thats why we call a professional. ;)
They're astronauts, not electricians.
@@beanslinger4616 They're astronauts _and_ electricians.
Bad job
Elechikens**
I was just thinking: wouldn't it be amazing if Scott did a video about space emergencies? And then this drop and i was like: yeah that will do.
I thought he did one years ago... or did he?
@@CapaNoisyCapa if yes, why not do another one.
@@MrHichammohsen1 I'd listen to Scott read out the weather report if it meant more content from him
My favorite (from the movie "The Right Stuff") is when Chuck Yeager fell off his horse,and broke his ribs the evening prior to the first Mach 1 flight. He was unable to reach across and close the access hatch with his injuries and unwilling to admit the injuries to the higher ups and lose the flight to some other pilot. So, he smuggled a length of broom stick aboard. Wedged into the hatch frame, it gave him the grip/leverage needed to close the hatch.
The only this that rings untrue in this story was that, while riding his horse hell-for-leather in pitch darkness into a closed fence, he was stone cold sober (not likely).
Rocket engineers: "We calculate that we need to lose some mass to make this mission successful. What can we get rid of? How about these rolls of duct tape."
Astronauts bunching fists...
Rocket engineers: "OK, OK. How about the desserts out of the ration packs?"
Astronauts: "Fine. Whatever."
Yeah, good choice, they *need* that tape... though it would take some heavy desserts, or a lot of lighter ones, to equal the mass of a few rolls of duct tape.
Engineers would never think of getting rid of duct tape.
I was originally going to say that they should eat the dessert, but that's not how conservation of mass works
This is why you should always make sure to bring your mass effect field toothbrush with you!..
btw: You don't need to leave the Earth to fave the need of crazy macgyvering. We constantly did the same in the middle of Siberian winter expeditions while building a neutrino telescope. No tool or resource went untouched.
Neutrino telescope?????????
Thats normally a HUGE water tank with billions of gallons(or liters) deep in an old mine with no light and lots of detectors to recognize the 2-3 reactions per day-week depending on size and mass above you!!?
@@torstenmautz195 Yep. That's it. Lake Baikal = huge water tank. At ~1300m it's also dark. Practical benefit: During the winter when the ice is thick, you can build an ice camp and winch it up near the surface for repairs/upgrades/etc. (Unlike the South Pole one that's 2000m deep in ice. Once it goes down, it stays there.)
@@TheZoltan-42 wow that's a cool thing. But I think Iwouldn't like to stay in a cold environment like Siberia in the winter.... how cold was it there -50°C(223K)?
@@torstenmautz195 I worked in -45C, and on one occasion I missed some -50C by a few days, as I was told. (In a section of Irkutsk, central heating went down and people died.)
It's quite interesting. Your tears can freeze, sealing your eyes when you blink. Need to mind how you breathe. Loads of things that you may read about, but being there, living in it, experiencing it (and not being able to just quit when you like), is something you will remember for life.
Working on bleeding edge science, do small excursions, survive animal attacks, experience storms, see the beauty of the environment, meet locals etc. All worth loads of stories.
@@TheZoltan-42 When was that? I live there and I've never heard of that. I'm guessing like a decade ago? Never heard of temperatures like that there either, but I know it used to be colder years ago.
wow! I didn't realize the ISS solar panels are just film with the photovoltaics on there! That shot of the one array moving as it was being worked on was fantastic! Is that Kapton? Always wondered why they are orange....
Edit: I did some research and the solar arrays are in fact cells bonded to a Kapton/fiberglass blanket. The more you know!
The handyman's secret weapon - duct tape.
-Red Green
And cable ties...
Not secret. Why do you think hardware stores ALL sell it?
Keep rolling. We're all in this together.
STS-51-D is memorable for me because I still have the “Toys In Space” vhs tape I bought at KSC in 1994 shows it.
I still have the tape. I should get that from my moms house and digitize it.
You should
You definitely should. Most VHS tapes are nearing the end of their life. It would be a shame to lose a piece of history like that.
Bodging has a long and hilarious history.
Yes
Ever seen tom scotts video on the emoji keyboard? It’s a good video on the art of the bodge
Yes it's a good one.
A bodge???
A bodge???
A bespoke optimised custom engineered solution was delivered!
@@VroomTheSpaceApe You have truly grasped the concept of the bodge. Now go and practice what you have learned.
It always amused me that they never thought about making the air scrubbers compatible between service and lunar modules to begin with. In this case, the redundancy of having two separate systems was a bit too redundant.
A redundancy has to be compatible... that problem was just due to 2 different teams at 2 different companys developing things really fast and not coordinate with each other that had very specific use cases.
@@torstenmautz195 You also have to remember that the round cartridges used in the lunar module's life support system were the same type that fit into the PLSS backpacks. There may have been some technical reason why the backpacks needed to use the round cartridges and so to make things easier they used the same round cartridges in the LM's life support system.
Worrying about things like making the scrubbers being designed by two independent teams inter-compatible makes the design process takes longer and raises prices.
Fred Derf and reduces the risk of putting your astronauts into a life threatening emergency situation.
The "hack" in a way, was the redundancy. The plan to "put a square peg, in a round hole" was planned out in advance, unlike how the movie shows it as a last minute fix.
That is an ode to standardization and reusing if there is any...
Also, having a standard toolbox in any space situation.
Non-standard problem sometimes require non-standard tools.
@@jerrymiller276 Yes, but if the components you have at your disposal to craft such tools are more likely to work together, the non-standard solutions are more achievable.
If everything is a hex socket with the same bore, there is less work to solve the square peg in the triangle hole problem.
But the sockets have to be SAE.
@@PatrickKQ4HBD That's how you lose an orbiter.
"Houston... We have a problem...."
"One minute ISS... We'll call our brazilian expert on gambiarras..."
Por isso q temos q colocar brasileiros na ISS!
you say that like they don't have one.
Campeão do mundo
i feel like a requirement for astronauts should be to go drive a crappy car on a road trip with no phone
Mark Watney did exactly that.
@@PatrickKQ4HBD I was about to say how he had probably the most expensive car ever made but then thought about all the shit he did to it by the end of the book.
@@sentientmop317 haha, yeah. I was actually referring to the epilogue (prologue?) in the book. Foreshadowing.
Before they went to Mars, Mark took a road trip in his crappy car, which broke down on him in the middle of nowhere. His cellphone was also dead and he'd forgotten his charger, so of course he tore apart his stereo to make one and call a tow truck.
With all the problem solving going on in this video, I was expecting for it to be sponsored by brilliant
Especially when Scott got the conclusion near the end, I started bracing for a segue!
And this could be counted as one of the reasons why we need manned spaceflight.
Improvisement is an ability I guess no machine will ever replicate.
OMG. Fantastic stories....many of which I had never heard before!! Great video!!!
STS-49, Endeavour's maiden flight. When the original plan to capture the wayward Intelsat VI satellite failed, the crew and ground support worked out a plan using three astronauts in the only EVA in spaceflight history to date to do so to grab and then hold the satellite by hand so that the capture bar that had failed on previous EVAs due to a lack of sufficient resistance to trigger it off and clamp onto Intelsat IV. The working out of radio, airlock procedures, use of the ASEM struts and equipment for another unrelated EVA test to create positions for two of the three astronauts to position themselves in the payload bay on definitely qualifies as one of the greatest improvised rescues in spaceflight history.
The McGuyver mode is one of the modes of operation that make humans great. There is the loving mode, the artistic mode, and all sorts of other skills and qualities and capabilities we should be proud of and for which we owe our existence. But among these must always be valued, the McGuyver mode. :)
So they were reading tea leaves to scry the location of the leak?
Make sure you pay attention in divination class!
Ginger is used to plug leaks in automotive cooling systems, perhaps tea would do the same? ( Until the leaf moves and the leak starts up for the next crew. )
@@bobroberts2371 they just needed something that wouldn't damage any astronaut or system onbord but is sticky and light enough. So tea leaves, maybe with a drop of water, was a good solution.
@@torstenmautz195 I would guess the tea leaves were used to find the leak, dry and floating in the cabin being drawn toward the hole by the escaping air. Then they used something more glue-y to seal it.
@@-mike-8134 yea, they used the tea leaves being sucked towards the hole to find it, and then temporarily stuck some duct tape on it right?
Remember how an early Soyuz-Salyut docking got stuck halfway through the mechanical engagement, with no ability to continue and no provisions to back out of the procedure? They were looking at saving the crew at the price of losing the brand-new space station. Then hacking intensified and things worked out in the end.
This reminds me that once away from home my bike chain broke, a link was broken and with two stones and broken pieces of the chain I managed to join it again.
The timing of the "toothbrush that saved the ISS" story is interesting, because that was ~six months before Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC dropped, which also features a toothbrush saving a spacecraft.
Dear Scott: the following is a list of other important hacks in space:
1- Using slings to close the doors of the Hubble Space Telescope after repairs.
2- Neil Armstrong thetered the Agena module to his Gemini space ship after having trouble with the docking maneuver.
3- Leting Sheppard "go" in his spacesuit🤣🤣🤣🤣.
4- Neil Armtrong using his slide rule to calculate the LM position after he noticed they were off the expected landing zone
5- The 1202 and 1201 alarm "Service call" in the Apollo 11 landing on the moon😅😅😅
6 - Mark Watney's Iron man maneuver🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣.
7 - Alexey Leonov deflating his spacesuit after the first ever EVA to fit through the hatch of hi's Voskod space ship.
And finnaly....
8 - Leaving the retro rocket pack attached to John Glenn's Friendship 7 Space ship to ensure its heat shield did not saparated from the spaceship while returning to Earth, avoiding "Plasma Baking" John Glenn.👍
There are some other "space hacks" but I don't remember them all.
Have a pleasant evening.
this video felt like it was 30 seconds long. I NEED MORE
Fantastic! I knew the more famous ones but this collection of hacks is incredible. Suggestion: you could talk about that time the Canadian robotic arm failed and astronauts had to do an EVA to take a satellite they were fetching back BY HAND. A good time to understand the difference between weight (force) and mass (inertial mass) as the satellite had several tons.
I like to snowmobile, and one of the interesting things about the pastime is you often end up out in the middle of the woods somewhere with an unexpected problem with one or more of the vehicles that got you there (and are your ride home). You learn to come prepared. It's actually part of the excitement for me to be challenged by and overcome these problems. This video reminds me of snowmobiling in that way and I feel like space travel is the ultimate version of my own adventures.
Right! you’re in charge of packing the space shuttle next time.
IMHO the greatest tech service call is "S.C.E. to AUX" John Aaron is a god.
"Steely-eyed missile man"
What the hell is that?
"Grey Tape" comes to the rescue so many times. Whoever first thought that it would be a good idea to put it onboard should get a reward.
The janitor put a box of the stuff onboard without anyone noticing.
I have been going about problems all wrong for too many years. Simply Bury the Red Tape in an ample amount of Grey Tape! 😜
This is why I love space exploration, ingenuity of humankind at its peak. Thank you Scott for bringing us all these stories and videos to us mere mortals.
"If you'd told me this morning that a toothbrush was going to save the Normandy, I'd have been very skeptical."
Right, Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC.
This is the great reason for having 3D printer on ISS. Is absolute tool for hacks/magavering things. Especially when specialist on earth can design part and transmit file to ISS.
And then there's the other end of the hacker spectrum where if there isn't a X for exactly their situation, then there is just absolutely no way that the task can be accomplished.
One of my favorite hacked together tools is when a man made a megaphone out of nothing but some string, a squirrel and a megaphone. Crazy.
Love it! most of my life seems to be doing this..mending repairing stuff with whats on hand..I call it the 'Desert Island thinking' ..you can only fix it with what is around you and your life depends on it..its amazing what you can achieve with seemingly useless objects and stuff.
the 'analogue' space days, is the feeling that the early Alien films represent really well
Only Alien, not Aliens.
@@RKroese Especially the improvised Alien proximity detector.
If you had told me before that a toothbrush would save the -Normandy- ISS I would have been very skeptical.
I have been waiting for you to make a video about it. I think the way the leak could be found is ingenious. Thanks for your thoughts and the video!
During (if I remeber well) the Aragatz mission on MIR with the french cosmonaut Jean-Loup Chrétien, a 3m deployable mesh antenna made by Aerospatiale was to be tested in deployment in zero G. The antenna had been stowed earlier in the station for a long time, and when they put it out for the deployment test, it failed to deploy. Most probably, moisture from the interior of MIR had frozen when it was exposed to the cold of space. Alexander Volkov was in charge of activating the deployment outside and in communication with the ground in Russia. He was ordered to wait for analysis, but he pretended a bad radio link as they were going out of coverage and literaly and strongly kicked the antenna which then urfulled perfectly. A sort of kickass hack !
Knowing the history and the 18-20 minute comms delay, these are the things I am constantly thinking about in regard to putting people on Mars. They'd better be some damn good problem solvers and we might want to back them up with some good AI that can help them solve weird problems with the tools on hand.
This was an awesome video! Thanks for these informative videos.
I hope they have a tube of Shoe Goo on board. That stuff is awesome.
Permatex right stuff. You can glue the world together with that stuff.
That's why STEM education, coupled with practical hands on experience is so valuable.
I grew up on a farm and we seldom had what we needed, but I learned to misuse tools and other stuff to get by.
Misuse? If it works that's what you call creativity
Every tool is a hammer
@@sandybarnes887 some hammers are just single use.
@@garret1930 😆 true
STS-125 was the final Shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. When they had problems getting a bolt to loosen, they had to make a breaker bar to get it loose. They also had to physically rip off a metal handle in order to get at a circuit card that needed to be replaced.
Space is hard, until $2 toothbrushes are saving the ISS.
That 2$ toothbrush costs 1-2000$ to be sent... ;-)
then its harder
Getting to space is hard.
Making stuff in space is hard.
Fixing stuff in space is also hard but only because you have to learn to act for a Macgyver episode
@@torstenmautz195 It'd be more like 50-100$ with launch prices now which isn't terrible.
@@7e21 F9 still costs 50.000.000 for 18t (max) to 200km orbit. That's 2.777,77$/kg. No dragon. No iss. No 400km orbit. No procedures for docking etc.
Laser line generator and an ultrasonic mister are my favorite airflow vis tools.
I can imagine Dave from the EEVBLOG visiting the IIS and him going: "Oh ! We've got bodge !!" 😂
Don’t be afraid of telling us about these little details, I hadn’t heard of many of the situations and the ones I HAD heard of didn’t cover all the stuff you have known for years and years. Very informative and interesting 🤔!
That $2 Toothbrush must have been before shipping charges.
Space, one of the many ways we know the earth is not flat. Great video.
toothbrush: damn
Scott, I have to say as a Dutch citizen. You are one of the greatest speakers on RUclips, vocabulary Titan!🙏
Ah yes, duck tape the tool to rule them all!
Duct... Or how about ducked tape? A totally new variation
@@benterrell9139 duck tape is ok to use too, its literally the original name used during Ww2
I remember being told of an engineer's joke about duct tape, that it was one of the two most crucial tools in your bag - the other one being WD40.
If it was supposed to move but didn't, get out the WD....
if if moved but wasn't supposed to, reach for the duct tape.
And it comes in the form of a ring!
@@donjones4719 Disappointingly, burns in any old fire 😕
Hello Mr. Manley,
Thank you for telling all these peculiar stories in one video!
Greatly appreciated.
This is perhaps what makes scifi stuff with very small crews so remarkable, The fact they can function without that mission control and no matter what breaks their engineer/mechanic always knows the answer.
12:19 gotta love the ACME Bolt. There is nothing more reliant than an ACME tool
It's a shame there was no mention of the Inanimate Carbon Rod
.
So cmon tell the story 🙄
@@MlTGLIED It's from a Simpsons episode. Homer goes to space and has to use the rod to hold the door shut.
@@DecidedlyNinja I am a fool. Of course I saw that episode with Homer in space. Thx mate 😆
My favorite is when Story Musgrave used packing straps to close the Hubble doors.
Sounds like the history of space flight is the history of bodging together solutions to unexpected problems.
This is NASA at its best. Being in a situation that seems near hopless, where any sane person whould have given up, and assembling teams of engineers and scientists to work on the problem, take inventory, study the situation, come up with possible solutions, then simulating and simulating until they have perfected an answer. It's the thing that turns space from a scary, lonley and hostile abyss into a problem to be solved.
Very interested to hear what you mean by "improvise a spacewalk". I would assume that (over simplifying of course) they would just suit up, get in the airlock and tether up then hop out. I feel like I'm missing something.
I believe they usually plan these things weeks in advance to ridiculous detail on the order of "how many turns does it take to remove bolt X" "how many steps is it to get from point A to B". In the case of shuttle missions, i think they also did a lot of mission rehearsals on dummy hardware in their "0g environment" pool. Just saying "suit up, go out there, and wave the flyswatter at the satellite" is a lot more seat-of-the-pants than a meticulously studied and planned EVA.
@@Kineth1 I think you're right maybe just the thrill of the unplanned journey. Cheers mate
Interesting to hear some stories like this, thanks!
Or as Tom Scott would say, they bodged together a solution
The word "bodge" is about 400 years older than Tom Scott...
Hey, I do this for a living... but when they do it, it's pretty inspiring I've gotta say
The Spanish for duct tape is “cinta americana”. Understandable why.
I can relate to a small extent. It may not be as epic as space, but in the work-class ROV business, there have been many instances where there're been problem solving with everyday items and things not intended to operate at a mile deep or more.
Living on Mars will be MacGyvering x100 ...
4:14 My favorite exchange from the Apollo 17 radio logs:
Cernan: "Remind me to dust my camera too, will ya?"
Schmitt: "Don't forget to dust your camera."
I'd like to know what bits of kit are carried on each mission designed to be improvised and bodged, or if its always just repurposing items with other functions
Grey tape is one.
This is exactly why there will always need to be crewed missions. Even if they're in the habitat on mars driving a rover remotely, they can still go fix things in a pinch.
NASA: duct tape, pen caps, maps, etc.
Homer Simpson: inanimate carbon rod.
I've never heard most of these, amazing video Scott
I'm pretty sure NASA toothbrushes cost more than 2 bucks but the delivery cost is the real killer :)
This is already one of my favorite of your videos to date. Thank you for being a great person.
I clicked on the video without even reading the title. I wasnt deceived
Loved this. Thanks for sharing!
Pete Conrad was the freaking man
Scott please do a video on pressure vessels, how they're made, how strong they have to be to withstand vacuum and their history
I highly recommend the video on making the Apollo 13 filter, Scott I love you, but your wife saved your bottom in the "crafts" department!
The only life hack video worth watching.
Hey Scott, love your videos! Odd question but do you remember where you got that gantry for the Saturn V? I’ll be getting the lego set for xmas and was really hoping to find a nice model launch tower. Keep up the great work and thanks for all the educational videos!!
Not the Scott you wanted but Google Lego Saturn V LUT.
You buy the parts from other Lego parts sellers.
@@scottb721 Thanks man I'll definitely try that out.
"If you would have told me this morning the the Normandy would be saved by a toothbrush, I would have been skeptical..."
109 likes and 0 dislike, keep it that way
These stories resignate with my experience working in the middle of nowhere on a remote Sight in Zimbabwe:)
You should see some of the genius hack that I have come across and seen here.
Quick question, there was a story about Harare International airports Main runway being a shuttle emergency runway.
Where were the rest of these and in what circumstances would they need to use them?
Longer videos man! I miss the vids when youd get nerdy for 20 30 mins then grab a beer and stream kerbal!
13:12 is such a nice number tho
@@schwiftyasfuck8575 it really is!
Oh man! You mentioned my favorite actor Mark Watney! I loved him in Tod and Booger Nights!
Welcome to rural Alaska, minus the experts on the ground.
👍
"If you told me this morning a toothbrush was going to save the ISS, I would have been very skeptical."
- Commander Shepard...probably