Astronauts have a long history of solving problems with equipment and material not designed for the task, but, in space travel, you usually can't get the best tool for a job unless you brought it with you, so improvisation is a necessary part of space exploration. So in today's blog, we will show you, readers, some "Lifehacks" and smart problem-solving skills of the astronauts, which will surely blow your mind... So read it till the end!
1. Astronauts of the first moon mission barely made it back.
Turns out, the Apollo missions are full of critical hacks that save the day, or the mission and sometimes, the crew. Apolo 11 had a moment where the crew discovered a circuit breaker cap on the floor of the lunar module after they did their surface EVA. Buzz Aldrin thinks that he probably hit it with the backpack of his EVA suit and he broke off the circuit breaker, which had been popped out after landing, now, that might not sound bad,i mean there was a lot of circuit breakers but this one, in particular, was very much a circuit they needed to unbreak. This one controlled power to the ascent engine, which was needed for leaving the moon and getting back into orbit. So without being able to close that breaker, they would have had a hard time lighting the engine and returning, and they were pretty much stuck on the moon. But after a bit of thinking buzz aldrin figured out how to close the breaker using a pen, it was a mundane plastic felt pen which saved the day. This pen was on display along with the broken circuit breaker at the museum of flight. |
| The broken circuit breaker controlling the ascent engine |
2. Apollo 13 Adapter hack
On Apollo 13, the astronauts had to figure out how to put a square peg into a round hole when the lunar module carbon dioxide scrubbers needed to be replaced and the square lithium hydroxide canisters from the command module were incompatible (owing them to be the wrong shape) So, in flight, they had to build an adapter using only the stuff that they had on board the spacecraft (which was obviously stripped down for its journey to the moon) they have a plastic bag, a piece of stiff cardboard, a lot of grey tape (which we call duct tape) and a space suit ventilation hose and they built this together , duct taping the square peg to the hose, supporting it with the cardboard to just barely make their way back to earth.
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| (LEFT) Broken Cylindrical scrubber (RIGHT) Cube scrubber |
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| The cube CO2 scrubber "duct-taped" instead of the broken cylindrical one |
3. The Space Station "hole" found using tea leaves
So this one is a lot more recent. After months of searching, the crew on the international space station have finally located an elusive air leak in the Zvezda service module and supposedly the crew used an interesting technique for locating this tiny crack, which involved the innovative use of tea leaves, releasing them into the air, and watching where they eventually collected. They did have things like ultrasonic leak detectors and other high-tech hardware on board but sometimes you just have to hack together towards a solution or as some people say "macgyver the heck out of things" and space flight is full of stories like this. |
| Astronaut using ultrasonic leak detectors |
Conclusion
Without these hacks and the quick thinking of the crew, there could have been many problems, so, what do we learn from this? Well,
That a small tea leave could save a 20 BILLION dollar space station, if only you have the brains for it.
After all, the martian is a great movie and a great book where the entire story is pretty much mark Watney hacking together solutions for problems using the things that aren't well suited to the task and lots of disco music as well but anyway,
Thank you for reading the blog, meet you tomorrow !!!
-By Dhravya Shah And Sushant Pulipati
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