"John Doe" wrote in message ...
Mike Walsh wrote:
To the Russians credit, they actually have a working system up there and
if their Elektron fails then they might have to burn one of their
oxygen generating "candles" that have worked so well in the
past, at least if they didn't cause a major fire.

They are using O2 from Progress right now, from what I have read. In
terms of
the O2 candle fire, as long as it doesn't occur again over a statistically
significant period of time , one can conclude that the russians have
learned
their lesson and have changed procedures/design to help prevent this from
occuring again.


That does not follow at all. From what I have read, the main procedure
change was
not to use old canisters or canisters that didn't have good tracking data.
This is
not the same as determining the cause of the problem and then fixing it.

The major fire on Mir showed that a malfunctioning capsule can produce a
deadly
stream of flame that will continue unabated until the oxygen supply runs
out. There
is nothing that can be done to stop it once it gets thoroughly started. You
may be
able to damp it and cool it down so that it goes out if there is a minor
fire at startup
but there is no way it can be stopped with the equipment aboard a space
station,
and rather doubtful even with a ground fire fighting system.

What should have been done is that a series of attempts should have been
made
with a set of "doubtful" canisters to see if the problem can be duplicated
and a
cause determined.

If this has not been done then the "candles" are a potential disaster just
waiting for the wrong series of events to happen.

One negative is that I don't believe we even know whether or not
Russia has anyone actually spending the money to have any organization
actively trying to improve Elektron.

Hard to improve something before you know what actually happens to cause
the
problem. And that is exactly what the crews are doing right now. And yes,
judging from comms, they do have engineers in russia providing support.
But
again, until they know what exactly goes wrong in 0g, the ground engineers
can't really fix anything.


It certainly helps to have the 0g data available, but it isn't true that
they
have to know exactly what went wrong before trying to fix it. It is true
that they won't know whether or not the fix works until they actually keep
it running in 0g.


It appears to me that rather than accepting the Russian equipment as
super-qualified because it has been around for a long time that a
combined U.S. Russian program to improve certain specific
capabilities (Elektron, space suits, oxygen generating devices) could
be very productive.

No offense to americans, but they have exactly 0 experience with O2
generators
actually running in 0g, unless you count the handfull of US crewmembers
who
have worked on elektron. So the USA really couldn't contribute much to
fixing
Elektron problems.


Well, someday, somehow U.S. engineers will require similar devices and
observing
and troubleshooting the existing Elektron is a way to do this.

You seem to assume that the USA engineers on the ground couldn't help
fixing Elektron problems because they don't have experience running them.
I believe the Russian engineers have exactly the same amount of "hands on"
0g experience as the US engineers (none) unless they have a former
cosmonaut working the problem.

If the U.S. engineers lack anything it is the design and construction
details
of the Elektron. And very likely the Russians don't send their engineering
reports to NASA.

Mike Walsh




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