Jeff Findley wrote:
There is plenty of blame to go around. However, it's not like NASA was
blindsided by the Elektron problems. They knew what they were getting into
based on their experience with Shuttle-Mir. The hardware failures are
clearly the fault of Russia, but the fact that NASA has failed to adequately
plan for these problems is NASA's failure.


In what way did NASA fail to adequatly plan for this ?

The provision of oxygen is in absolutely no danger. When you consider the very
limited upmass available on progress, and when you consider that the USA's
supply of O2 in Quest was not used once, it seems to me that the russians have
a pretty reliable supply of O2 available, despite Elektron's hiccups.

And when you consider that with the limited upmass, the russians have been
able to conduct EVAs which drew upon russian O2 supplies, it seems to me that
O2 isn't really a problem.

NASA may have been unrealistic in its assembly schedules, it may have been
unrealistic in its budgeting issues. But in the end, the russians did deliver
the basis life support, and despite all the problems we hear about Elektrton,
the crews are alive and havn't been told to breathe slowly to conserve O2.

I have no idea wherther Elektron's problems are due to politics, incompetence
of simply because it is a problem that just hasn't been isolated and resolved
yet. Do you call scientists incompetant because they haven't yet succeeded in
making a fusion reactor work ?

The way you talk about Elektron, you make it sound like all the problems
with ISS are the fault of Russia.

Fault ? perhaps not. Responsibility, yes. The stace station is there to learn
about living and working in 0g. And Elektron is a perfect example of why we're
not ready to go to mars yet and need to work out the kinks in the station
before we can reliably send people on long missions.

The USA has some reliable ECLSS systems on the station, notably ventilation
and some air contaminant cleaners. But its CO2 scrubber doesn't seem to be
reliable since they only turn it on when they are forced to shut off the
russian one.

Since Vozdhuk seems to be fairly reliable, we don't hear much about CDRA
because it isn't used much. If the USA had a reliable O2 generator, you
woudln't hear about Elektron's problems because it woudln't be used much.

systems which are proving to be far more failure prone than NASA would like.
The CMG's and the US laptop computers both spring to mind.

The CMG issue can't be judged until they bring a failed unit back for autopsy.
Unlike Elektron which is indoors, the CMGs aren't exactly field serviceable.
But they were designed with plenty of redundancy and have continued to provide
pretty good service to the station despite their failures so far. And had the
shuttle not been grounded for so long, the first failed unit would have been
examined and perhaps a permanent fix found and plants to retrofit the other
units put in place.

Since the Russians don't have a CMG equivalent, you can't compare whether the
USA model is more reliable than a russian one. Unlike Elektron, CMGs aren't
field serviceable.

In terms of the laptops, their failures are probably not higher than
expected/predicted. The ones runnng microsoft are expected to fail regularly.
Chgoosing Microsoft to run the non critical laptops was a mistake. It has
taken up much valuable crew time, more so than the same microsoft software
reduces employee productivity die to bugs, crashes etc. At least they don't
have viri on the station.

The hardware failures of the laptops are probably not anyone's faults. Space
environment isn't kind to electronics. And keeping laptops turned on for years
at a time does have some issues, especially in 0g envuironments where cooling
of the laptops may not work as well. Batteries also tend to fail with time,
both on earth and in space.

On earth, you don't hear it as much because people tend to replace laptops
with newer models faster than in space.