Veteran spacewalker and Endeavor astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper lost her grip on the backpack-sized bag on Nov. 18 while cleaning up a mess from a leaking grease gun…
Once the tool bag floated away, some thought they’d seen the end of it. Not quite. A satellite tracker at Spaceweather.com now is monitoring both the space station and the tool bag.
After sunset on Nov. 22, Edward Light, using 10 x 50 binoculars, spotted the bag in space while he scanned the sky from his backyard in Lakewood, N.J., Spaceweather.com reported. On the same night, Keven Fetter of Brockville, Ontario, video-recorded the bag as it passed by the star Eta Pisces in the constellation Pisces.
More bag-viewing opportunities are expected.
The satellite tracker predicts the tool bag will make a series of passes over Europe this week. Then, late next week, the tool bag is expected to reappear in the evening skies of North America, and should be visible through binoculars a few minutes ahead of the ISS.
Now, that’s cool. Of course, Mr. Light didn’t just happen to spot the bag while birdwatching.
Seems to me the best of the brightest at NASA could come up with a field expedient to recapture the toolbag?
I am shocked that standard protocol would not call for each and every “loose” item not be tethered by a nylon string. Its not cost or safety but rather making sure the tools/items are available for the rest of the mission.
I have to wonder how bone deep stupid NASA, our entire government, really is.
If anyone finds this in their back yard. Heide borrowed a pair of Craftsman pliers from me before she left. If you find them in the bag, even if they are damaged, I would like to get them back.
Thanks!
P.S. Heide, This is the last time I’ll lend you any of my tools.
If I find it, EBAY here I come!!
Let the Fed buy NASA a new bag. I bought my wife one when she lost her’s. Whatdoyouthink, 3 billion be enough? It’s only paper.
First of all, Heide Piper is extremely competent and careful in her work – just note how she performed in previous shuttle missions – and was deeply upset for losing these tools. It could happen to anyone – even in their underwater training, something like this would be missed, as things won’t just float away in water as they do in space. She even thought about trying to jump and grab it, but didn’t out of concern of causing even more damage.
Second, I read recently something to the effect that people in the US only noticing NASA once something goofy happens. You guys seem to miss the sheer grandiosity of what you’re doing in space! Heck, you’re learning, giving the first steps, to work and live in space. That’s not small potatoes and you should be proud, and support your heroes – which is what astronauts are – when they turn out to be just human.
Third – it’s amazing someone on the ground could find something so small as a bag floating in space. Can you just imagine the brilliance of the calculations involved and the patience to look and spot it?
Keep up the great work, NASA!
Miguel==whats your not so secret agenda?
Can’t tell if you are infatuated by Heide, or just don’t want your NASA program to lose funding.
“Seems to me the best of the brightest at NASA could come up with a field expedient to recapture the toolbag?”
Sure, at a cost of a mere couple million. Easier to replace a $50,000 tool bag.
Personally, I think astronauts on spacewalks should be equipped with a lasso.
Bobbo, LOL 😀
A NASA program of mine? In my dreams, man, in my *fondest* dreams!!! 🙂
As for Heide, and all women astronauts, I tend to have some admiration for them and the work they do! They set a good example to all of us down here.
Miguel==ok. Yes, any sane person would give a lot to perform well on a space mission, and I don’t fault Heidi AT ALL for the loss of the tool bag. She showed excellent judgment in not going after it.
What I do fault is NASA!!!!!
I can’t judge all the safety issues we don’t know about and must wait for the next explosion to reveal but when an agency launches rockets outside of their written protocols for temperature AND they don’t attach their equipment with cheap pieces of string, I have no faith in them at all.
YOU seem to applaud this objective lack of expertise. Every activity has cheerleaders.
“Seems to me the best of the brightest at NASA could come up with a field expedient to recapture the toolbag?”
NASA today announced a new program intended to retrieve the lost toolbag. The new program, called OTRTBASASOC (Operation To Retrieve Tool Bag And Spend a Shitload of Cash) is estimated to cost between $50 and $900 billion.
NASA plans to spend at least half of the money contributing to the campaigns of any politician who will approve spending the other half. The new program is expected to get huge bipartisan support.
#9 – Made in USA post new reality. Get used to it.
Bobbo, no, I applaud the astronauts, who do their very best, not NASA’s bureaucracy. Those useless guys are the cancer that’s going to kill the NASA we know. They made mistakes that cost billions – and lives – and ARE making mistakes that WILL cost lives in the future. Just look at the state of the Constellation program.
What I think is that people should care more about NASA. Under closer scrutiny by the people it would be harder for good-for-nothing bureaucrats to have their fun while heroes die and funds are squandered.
In any case, a wire holding everything an astronaut carries an added risk, just think of the number of wires they would have to carry and how astronauts could get all entangled. That could become dangerous fast in zero G.
Perhaps more doable would be to have someone in an MMU ready to ‘pick up the pieces and tidy things up’ after the work. If we can’t do tidy faultless work in the ground, why would we think we can do it in space?
Miguel==like most cheerleaders, you display mushy thinking.
1. If you think NASA is a beuracratic cancer then don’t post: “Keep up the great work, NASA!” When you post the opposite of what you actually think, you get misrepresented rapidly.
2. “Closer scrutiny” by the people is so idiotic as to need no further comment.
3. “just think of the number of wires they would have to carry and how astronauts could get all entangled” /// Ok, I’m thinking of a number and its====”one.” One 3 foot wire to attach the toolbag to the astronaut. How many people could get fouled up in that? And if Heide is that spastic, then use a clip like Batman does.
4. “If we can’t do tidy faultless work in the ground, why would we think we can do it in space?” /// Thats not the issue. We should take into space what we have learned on the ground. High steel workers commonly attach their hammers and pliers to their belts as they don’t want to kill anyone beneath them on an accidental drop.
Space is not the final frontier. Seems human idiocy is.
Bobbo, I agree with *some* of your points, but like all organizations, there’s a part of NASA that does a great job, and you’ll have to agree on that. Then there’s a cancer growing inside.
Tethering tools… well, maybe, maybe not, but we’re not really experts on this are we? Do we really understand what’s involved in repairing a solar panel on the ISS? I don’t…
Not having a tether to hook up tools is not a *big* fault on the part of NASA, decommissioning the shuttle without an alternative and creating a 5 year gap with no human space launch capability, that’s one hell of a mistake. An even bigger mistake seems to be the ‘alternative’ being created, that basically is a 40 year jump into the past, and being created with no real know-how… since the people who sent others to the moon are either dead or retired…
Why should close scrutiny be idiotic? There’s a whole bunch of websites I could suggest that give you in-depth info on the goings on at NASA, in down-to-earth, non-technical language. NASAWatch.com is but one, the most vocal and critical. You can see the real issues there if you want, and criticize NASA where it needs to be criticized. People could pay attention to the info provided by these sites and see the good and the bad that NASA does. Praise the good, try and eliminate the bad. Is that too naive? Maybe, but your country is still great because there’s people criticizing, and every now and then people listen to them and correct mistakes, even if just a few. That’s not something you see in other so-called ‘democratic’ countries like mine, and is the great hope for you guys! So apply it to NASA also.
Miguel, you really want to believe don’t you. When you and I demonstrate that two men of good will (sic) can’t agree on even whether or not tools should be tethered to astronauts, how can the general populace who can’t find space on a map legitimately decide on the alternatives to manned space flight/development?
I support unmanned missions as cheaper and more productive. Surely there are a few notebooks and home movies left over from years back on how to do it == or USA can focus on giving tax dollars to the richest in America and let China, India, and Rutan exploit space in the 21st Century.
As I said, too wishy washy. “Parts of NASA do a great job.”===ok, I’ll bite, which part is that===and throw in a cost/benefit analysis if you dare.
Seems to me the best of the brightest at NASA could come up with a field expedient to recapture the toolbag?
Clearly, NASA’s best can’t do this for less than the cost of the tools themselves.
If anything, someone should make a contest out of this, and invite NASA as one of the contestants. NASA can only progress with competition.
Just a small point regarding unmanned missions – you’re right that for the buck they provide more bang – just look at the return of Cassini, Voyager, the MERs Spirit and Opportunity, etc, and what came out of Apollo in terms of scientific knowledge.
However, you MUST, simply MUST, learn how to live in space, and start doing it NOW. Start a base on the moon, then a colony, then Mars, and so on. Call me idealistic, but we HAVE to move on and create colonies of life outside this planet, or one day the asteroid will fall and we’ll have missed the chance at being the first species that avoided it’s own extinction.
Also, don’t underestimate the practical value of human interventions – the Hubble service missions are an excellent example of what can be accomplished with people instead of just machines.
Manned vs. Unmanned isn’t an either/or proposition, both are needed.
Mr. Rutan will never go to space, he’s into show business and entertainment. Ditto for the other COTS people. The levels of safety certification are simply not at par with NASA’s – the good part. That’s how they stay cheap. That’s not to say NASA can’t do it cheaper, maybe it can, but not the way the commercial guys are doing it.
China and India will go to space, though, but will do so for national prestige, much as the US and Russia did in the 60s.
Now, if America goes to the Moon in 2020, it will be for something more – to learn how to give the next steps to live out there.
As for the rest of your comments, I agree there’s a lot of difficulties in getting ‘the populace’ to decide on anything, but remember they’re kept as the populace for reasons not of their best interest.
People can do better. And I want to believe in that 🙂
Bobbo,
Even if they tether the tool bag, what about the individual tools? Should those all be tethered too, or is it OK if a few tools are loose? That’s where it gets dicey — too many tethers, and you have a tangle. Not to mention, the tethers could make the tools much more difficult to work with (tether gets in the way, restricts motion, etc).
I think Mr.Edward Light should get a job at NORAD. Maybe he would have seen the planes coming on September 11th with his binoculars.
This guy, James Hill, is onto something:
“Clearly, NASA’s best can’t do this for less than the cost of the tools themselves.
If anything, someone should make a contest out of this, and invite NASA as one of the contestants. NASA can only progress with competition.”
How many lugnuts & pieces of space junk are floating around? How long before the ISP “encounters” one? Spacecraft “bots” should be out there finding space junk, sweeping it up & throwing it towards the Sun.
Getting the cleanup bots to do their job 24/7 is a software problem. We have software guys. Right?
#20 – Don’t get too carried away, or else JCD will have to bitch about something other than my trolling on TWiT. God forbid that happens.
In all seriousness, it would seem that for less than $100,000 you could throw something up in to low orbit… like a Roomba… and return it to earth without burning up.
Okay, maybe not a Roomba. I’m sure that Dyson guy could do it.
This isn’t the first tool lost in space, it won’t be the last. Used to be they had the EVA packs to zoom around, but they got rid of those a while back. What they really need is a semi-autonomous bot that can zip around and grab things that get loose.
Exact! Semi-autonomous bots, plural.
Little scavengers hone in on the pieces & phone home with coordinates.
A bigger vehicle is the “garbage bot” that goes & collects the detritus eventually.
Okay, dead thread.
We could have done all this stuff easy BUT FOR Cheney’s bonehead war.
The way we’re headed, we won’t ever get our highways widened out where they need to be.
The toolbag will eventually be picked up by the United Galaxy Sanitation Patrol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syllN9GJcjQ
Why don’t they put magnets on the tools? Use the Space Station like a giant refrigerator.