Low-Orbit Problems

(Photo of a Soyuz from Wikimedia Commons)

If you watch news about space travel, you may have noticed a couple of recent problems in the realm of low Earth orbit.

One is the failure of the UK’s first attempt to launch satellites into orbit. The UK has plenty of practice at building satellites. What we haven’t done yet is launch them ourselves.

This was a type of launch much of the world does not find very familiar. Instead of a rocket taking off from a launch pad on the ground, the British initial attempt was a rocket dropped from an airplane when the airplane is already high. The rocket’s first stage fired and performed well, but something went wrong with the second stage. The rocket and the satellites it was carrying were lost.

No humans were on the rocket, so all we lost was stuff… and pride. It was disappointing. In comments to news reporters after the event, people kept saying “space is hard.” It is. Getting there on the first try would have been amazing, but not getting there on the first try is certainly no cause for shame.

The other piece of news is about the International Space Station. Normally, ISS should have the capability to evacuate its entire crew quickly in an emergency. It has seven astronauts on board right now. It has a Soyuz capsule docked, with a capacity of three, and a SpaceX Crew Dragon with a capacity of four.

That was fine until a micrometeor punched the Soyuz last month. Micrometeors can be a small as a grain of sand, but they are traveling at about 17,000 mph. In school, you may have learned the equation Force = Mass x Acceleration. Even the tiniest fleck of paint with hardly any mass has considerable force when it is going very fast, so it can cause significant damage. The capsule vented coolant into space, forced a spacewalk to be cut short, and left the ISS with a capsule that cannot cool itself properly if an emergency forces evacuation. Re-entry is lethally hot.

Two Russian astronauts and an American were supposed to use the capsule to return to Earth when it is time for their flights to end. If a critical emergency can be avoided, Russia will launch the next Soyuz to the ISS in late February instead of March and it will be empty instead of carrying more crew up to the station. The damaged Soyuz will return with no one in it.

Space exploration can’t get everything right every time any more than any other human endeavor can. We are all only human. We do the best we can. And then when things go wrong, we do the best we can to handle the problems.

It’s much like what happens down here on Earth, but with higher stakes and more demanding solutions… which is why what we learn from coping with trouble in such a challenging environment is so very useful elsewhere too.