Incidents in space.

A few months ago an accident happened in space, with two NASA astronauts who had to extend their stay at the international space station because the Boeing company's Starliner ship had failures in its propulsion system. Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, instead of spending a week at the international space station, were stuck for more than 9 months. This incident occurred due to a technical failure of the ship.

Another similar incident occurred on the Russian space station Mir, where cosmonaut Sergei Krikalv was stuck in space during the disintegration of the Soviet Union, that story is very interesting, the poor guy had his return postponed and postponed and he was not told why, but he became friends with a radio amateur in Australia who gave him more information than his own government.

But the most alarming incident to that date occurred in 2022 when astronaut Frank Rubio's mission to the International Space station was extended from 6 months to more than a year due to a perforation in the fuselage of the Soyuz ship in which he had to return, this made him break the record for the longest stay in space by an American.

In all these cases, the astronauts and cosmonauts had options, in case of an emergency, there were ways to evacuate them with the functional ships available, extending their missions was more of a decision made for logistical reasons so as not to interfere with the launches of the scheduled missions.

But in the most recent case of the Chinese space station the crew of Shenzhou-21 had no options, for 11 days, from November 14 to 25, they had no lifeboat to jump to during a critical emergency, they were really left to their own devices.

I can imagine how during those days hearing any strange noise in the Tiangong must have been much more exciting, to say the least. And space stations actually creak and make noises all the time due to the constant expansion and contraction of the fuselage and metal structure as they heat up and cool down during each of the 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets they experience each day.

Fortunately, the 11 days passed without incident and on November 25, the Tiangong crew welcomed the Shenzhou-22 ship with relief, loaded with medical supplies, food, spare parts for the station and equipment to repair the window of the Shenzhou-20 that will remain docked at the station. If the window can be successfully repaired, Shenzhou-20 will be used in April 2026 to transport the crew of Shenzhou-21 back to Earth and together with Shenzhou-22 will serve as lifesaving ships if an emergency arises.

This incident reminds us of the need to have redundant security measures, a ship for emergency evacuation and a spare ship at all times.

We must rethink that the damage from a microscopic particle of no more than 10 thousandths of a millimeter, moving at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour, had enough force to chip a window, as the image shows. The chip is 7 mm in diameter to one of the four-layer glass panels of the dome of the international space station.

Imagine the damage that a 1cm screw, which is much smaller than this, with thousands of times more mass than the particle that made this, could cause.

It is estimated that among the space debris in orbit there are 34,000 objects larger than 10 cm, although it is complicated, these can still be tracked to keep track of them and alert the crews of the space stations in advance in case of a risk of collision so that they take preventive measures, but it is estimated that there are about 900,000 objects between 1 cm and 10 cm, such as a screw.

These objects can no longer be tracked and it cannot be predicted when one of these will impact. and objects smaller than 1 cm like the 10-micron particle that did this to the dome of the International Space Station, it is estimated that there must be something like 128 million. The earth and the sky above it are big, but not that big.

At some point a long time ago we thought, "What if we put the garbage in the sea?" Nothing happens, it is so big that it will not be noticed and now it is noticeable, the same thing happened with the air and in the 20th century we hit rock bottom.

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