Hallerb wrote:
By the way SMELL is useless in a stinky envirmonment. Eventually you adjust and
cant detect off odors.

No. You get used to odours that are continuous. But if some new odour pops up,
you notice it.

And I am not worried about the survival of the crew. Unlike Columbia, the crew
can always bail and return to earth safely if they feel the stayion has become
unsafe. They can always put on masks, or even EVA suits and move to the area
generating the gas/smell/particles and try to shut off the deffective
component or fix the problem.


And if you have an explosion of ammonia or whatever other toxic gas that
wouldn't give the crew any time to react, then no amount of monitoring
equipment would have saved the day. The monitoring equipment is there to
detect slow events which usually give the crew plenty of time to react.

Also, the station has been broken in already and there is already plenty of
knowledge on how it performs, what commonly breaks, what doesn't. The mistake
in the CO2 filters regenerating unit in Quest probably won't happen again.