As regular readers have noticed, I haven’t posted in a few days. I was working seventy-hour weeks, and Thursday was my first day off since November 6th. I’m decompressing this weekend, and don’t have a lot to say right now. Things should be calming down for a while–though I’m still working full time for at least another week, it won’t be at burnout pace, and I may have time to start posting again. I will note that I got an email from Jim Oberg about the recent unexplained sound on the ISS, subject: Ignorance is Bliss.
He thinks that NASA is being entirely too nonchalant about this, particularly in light of what happened last February:
Seems like NASA has decided that since they can’t figure out what caused that alarming noise, they are justified in assuming it can’t be dangerous. I’m particularly amused by Foale’s assurances that “It was a sound, but nothing happened after that. I think everything is OK,” which reminds me of his famous quote before arriving at Mir in 1997, “I’m not worried about it — the safety is perfectly assured.”
No news mention of the elevated background noise in the SM — if both crewmen distinctly heard something, it had to have been LOUD. No news mention that major portions of the SM exterior were not observable by the SSRMS cameras (“If the parts we can see have no damage, we can assume the parts we can’t see are the same”). No mention that if the noise WAS a fan internal debris impact, there should be checkable, verifiable consequences (power surge, debris in line, hole in in-going filter, off-balance blade flutter, etc.) that have not apparently been even looked for.
A friend of mine who served on a nuclear submarine tells me that unusual sounds were usually the first clues they ever got — even ahead of instrumentation readings — of mechanical malfunction, and they worked VERY hard to track down their causes — they NEVER just assumed that if they couldn’t figure it out, it was ‘probably harmless’. This may indeed have been harmless, but forgive me for being unimpressed with the apparent nonchalent holiday-relaxed NASA reaction to it, even after they claim to “get it” about ignoring signs that Columbia was in trouble.