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Soyuz Leak Fixed With Gauze and Epoxy

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 30, 2018
Filed under ,
Soyuz Leak Fixed With Gauze and Epoxy

Soyuz Leak Repaired On The International Space Station
“The International Space Station’s cabin pressure is holding steady after the Expedition 56 crew conducted repair work on one of two Russian Soyuz spacecraft attached to the complex. The repair was made to address a leak that had caused a minor reduction of station pressure. After a morning of investigations, the crew reported that the leak was isolated to a hole about two millimeters in diameter in the orbital compartment, or upper section, of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft attached to the Rassvet module of the Russian segment of the station.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

57 responses to “Soyuz Leak Fixed With Gauze and Epoxy”

  1. fcrary says:
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    I have to ask. How different is “gauze and epoxy” from duct tape?

    • Adam Beadsmoore says:
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      It’s about $250,000 more probably 😀

      • fcrary says:
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        I actually had that conversation a few years ago. Someone (NASA or JPL, I forget which) has a nice, stock kit for high school and undergraduate college students, which allows them to observe radio emissions from Jupiter. It’s a bit clunky, and the connections between the antenna and the front-end electronics are a bit fragile.

        When some students at CU were trying to make it work, we had an expert on spacecraft instruments designed to do similar things sit in. He said that the best solution was to get the electrical connections right, then bury them in a whole lot of epoxy, to make sure nothing would shake the connections loose.

        That resulted in a discussion about what sort of epoxy to use. And he said that, for anything on the ground or a CubeSat, you could probably just buy it from a local hardware store. But for a serious space mission, buying epoxy would be much, much more difficult and would cost much, much more.

        • Bill Housley says:
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          At work, where we make carbon fiber, we have ignition transformers that I buy pre-filled with resin to keep the fiber out.

        • Jeff2Space says:
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          I find that that Harbor Freight’s “Super Strong Quick Setting Epoxy” at $1.99 works quite well, but it does set up very fast (and get very warm while doing it). JB Weld is one of my favorites, but it takes a long time to set up and tends to flow “everywhere”, so you have to anticipate that or you’ll have a huge mess.

          But pretty much any off the shelf epoxy is going to outgas enough to be worrisome in the confines of a spacecraft, so something “special” might be in order.

          But in this case, it was the Russians who sourced the epoxy, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they just used something “off the shelf”. I wonder what the Russian equivalent to Harbor Freight is.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            JBin my experience Weld has a black particulate filler and appears to have a very high toughness compared to unfilled epoxies. There is a six minute version available. Even in the US off-the-shelf is sometimes used.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      I’d think epoxy would hold up better long term than the Kapton tape they used initially. The funny thing is the NASA astronauts were lobbying US Mission Control to convince the Russians to study the more permanent fix for at least 24 hours (have someone on the ground test it first). The Russians just went ahead and implemented the more permanent fix right away.

      This highlights a difference in philosophy that was discussed on the sci.space newsgroups eons ago. The Russians don’t tend to plan everything out in infinite detail and give their crew more autonomy to go ahead and fix things.

      The Americans plan everything ahead of time and when something unexpected happens, the crew immediately asks the ground what to do. This usually results in someone on the ground trying alternate approaches with copies of the hardware before giving the crew the green light to proceed on the actual, in orbit, hardware.

      • Steve Pemberton says:
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        The concern seemed to be that if they stuffed the hole with an epoxy soaked cloth as planned and the leak continued, that it would be too risky to try and pry the patch back out because of the potential of widening the opening, leading to a worst case scenario that the MS-09 capsule and crew would have to depart early, the capsule and crew having arrived just two months ago.

        Yes that may have been over-thinking and over-worrying but I think the point was why rush it if they don’t have to.

        But I also see the Russian viewpoint, why do we need a committee to patch a 2 mm hole.

        • Jeff2Space says:
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          Agreed. I see the two opposing philosophies as simply different. One isn’t necessarily right and the other wrong.

          • objose says:
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            No Jeff2Space. In the current environment, SOMEONE has to be right and SOMEONE has to be wrong. ABSOLUTELY.

          • fcrary says:
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            You lost me there. Could you make a clearer comment? I think Jeff2Space clearly and correctly described the different approaches to operating manned space mission. Your reply, including words in block capital letters (which is an hallmark of an internet crank or troll) does not seem to contribute to the discussion.

          • Jeff2Space says:
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            I’m hoping that objose forgot the “/s”.

          • objose says:
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            The point I was trying to makes was “In the current environment” is working against your measured, thoughtful analysis. It was meant as humorous, pithy commentary. From your response, it clearly missed the mark.

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            This wrong/right attitude is chiefly responsible for the current Washington antipathy.

          • fcrary says:
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            At the moment, I agree that the two approach are comparable. But imagine a future when far more people are in space and some of them are far enough out that the communication delays add tens of minutes to every ask-and-answer step in a conversation.

            At that point, I don’t think the idea of having a whole bunch of people on Earth, figuring out the optimal solution, will be viable. The people on site will, as a practical necessity, have to solve problems on their own and with whatever they have on hand.

      • objose says:
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        if it hadn’t been for the Russian in Armageddon, the earth would have not made it.

        • fcrary says:
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          Unless I missed something, _Armageddon_ is just a movie, and movies rarely have any solid relationship with the real world. Are you basing you opinions on fiction?

    • Lawrence Wild says:
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      You have to work with what you have. Apparently there is a disturbing lack of duct tape and bailing wire on the station. Clearly none of my family were involved in the requisition or inventory process.

      • fcrary says:
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        I wasn’t criticizing duct tape repairs at all. If fact, it’s something we need to see more of in spaceflight. For any sort of base or colony, or even just a few year mission to Mars, the people involved won’t have exactly the right part or tool for every potential repair. Things are going to break and they will have to improvise with what they have on hand. The Navy has done well putting machine shops and stock on ships, and making parts. (A tradition going back to carpenters being a regular part of sailing ship crews for centuries.) I expect 3D printing will make that easier. But at some point, you need to start thinking in terms of duct tape and chewing gum.

        I’ll also note one of my favorite, obscure laws. In Berkeley, California, the building codes prohibit using duct tape to repair ducts.

    • Bob Mahoney says:
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      In the shuttle in-flight repair documentation it was referred to as ‘gray tape’, not ‘duct tape’. Not sure what they call it now.

  2. james w barnard says:
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    The Twin Moons Preserve Us! A gub’mint project with too little duct tape available? Bailing wire might also be useful, but probably not in this case.

  3. Shaw_Bob says:
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    Ah… …remember the famous Robert A Heinlein story where a slow leak is temporarily fixed by the application of a bare buttock to the offending, er, crack? The brave volunteer suffers a blood blister, and everybody survives. Lo-tech is the way to go, even 50 years later!

    • fcrary says:
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      The story was Heinlein’s short story, _Gentleman_Be_Seated_. The emergency in the story did involve people putting their butts on an air leak. But I think the story was much more about the sort of people Heinlein thought would be working in space. Hard-nosed construction workers rather than hand-picked, politically and socially acceptable government employees.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        Yes, his assumption was that they would just contract the work out to construction firms like they did during WW II. Actually the new South Pole base was built that way.

        BTW another Heinlien story has the teenage hero saving those in his compartment by plugging a leak caused from a small meteoroid with his scout uniform until the crew arrives to seal it. It’s in “Farmer in the Sky”.

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          Is that the one that takes place on Ganymede?

          God I loved those stories. And Heinlein as happens turned into a dirty old man (see “Friday”) just as I was passing puberty.

          Politics aside, a reader for life! 🙂

        • Vladislaw says:
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          Thomas, you have referred before to the notes, minutes, discussions et cetera about the talks behind the formation of the Outer Space Treaty .. I can not seem to locate them .. are those on the UN archives? Are those public documents?

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Those are LOC and also NASA documents, posted by some law libraries. I will post them tomorrow when at the office.

          • Vladislaw says:
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            Thanks a lot. Your arguments have always been the strongest ones I have read and you have mentioned in the past what the people were actually deliberating. It always seemed to me it was a spirit of the law over the letter of the law. The people actually debating the treaty would provide what the spirit of the law was.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            I think this is the report you are looking for.

            https://digitalcommons.unl….

            Report on the Outer Space Treaty from 1967

            This page has all of the UN Treaties and Resolutions.

            http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/

            This is President Johnson’s message on sending the OST to the Senate for Ratification

            http://www.presidency.ucsb….

            This is the WorldCat reference for the Congressional Hearings on it. If you put in your location it will direct you to the nearest physical copy of the hearings.

            http://www.worldcat.org/tit

            I remember seeing it posted at one of the law schools as a PDF, but I am unable to find the link for it.

      • Bill Housley says:
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        {rummaging through his Heinlien stuff for _Gentleman_Be_Seated_}

  4. Bill Housley says:
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    So, how much does NASA pay for a roll of duct tape? 😉

    • fcrary says:
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      If you are thinking of the stories about absurd costs for hammers or toilet seats, you are right and wrong. In those cases (Air Force, not NASA) the cost of the actual hardware was moderately high, but not insanely so. But the reported or full cost included things like verification that they would work under all operating conditions (as if the operability of a toilet seat after being close to a nuclear explosion is a big deal.) Also, the costs of managing the procurements were all lumped together. So if the toilet seat was one item and a really complicated computer for avionics was another, the toilet seat got billed for the same fraction of the overhead costs as the computer. That’s seriously disfunctional accounting. But it isn’t quite the same error that paying a couple thousand dollars for a toilet seat would be.

  5. Lorin Gene says:
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    I hope the the Russians tell nada and esa and jaxa and the Canadian space agency how this happened everybody knows what happened in 1971 to the crew of Soyuz 11

    • Terry Stetler says:
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      Russia is fessing up; the defect was introduced during production. The worker patched it with a glue plug, and it went unnoticed until the patch worked loose.

      https://ria.ru/space/201809

      “” “The reason for the appearance of a hole in the inner case of the domestic compartment of the Soyuz MS-09 ship has been installed on the Earth.” He was responsible for negligence, “the source said.

      According to another source, the employee, most likely, after he realized the error, sealed the crack with special glue, so it was not detected during the test of the spacecraft on the tightness before launching and did not make itself felt the first two months of the orbital flight.

      “However, in the future, the glue dried and was squeezed out, opening the hole,” – said the second interlocutor. “”

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        So is the issue an unannounced but repaired hole? Or is the issue a hole that was repaired rather than the entire metal being replaced (likely the NASA approach)?

        • fcrary says:
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          It it was accidental damage, which is the most likely report I’ve seen, the problem would be concealing it rather than reporting it. There are probably a number of ways this could have been fixed on the ground. (I like your idea of tapping it and screwing in a bolt.) If the guy who made the mistake just improvised a repair (which didn’t last) on his own and hopped no one would notice, that’s a serious problem.

  6. Dewey Vanderhoff says:
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    Not having any of that venerable ” Sputnik” brand blue bubble gum on hand to masticate and plug the hole with , this method was the next best choice for this vital repair. Good work.

  7. Terry Stetler says:
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    Uh-Oh….

    https://twitter.com/planet4

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      Yeah, when I saw the picture of the hole, you could see what looked like tool marks on the metal like someone had accidentally engaged a drill in a spot where they shouldn’t have. Oops. Another poster said the worker must have been under the influence of potato juice.

      • Terry Stetler says:
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        If this really is another Russian QA/QC issue, Commercial Crew becomes even more critical.

        • John Thomas says:
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          Although the QA of the commercial company could make a similar decision as the Russians.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            The problem isn’t NASA QC, which is primarily concerned with paperwork. The problem is traditional craftsmanship. SpaceX had some design flaws but with thier large and demanding customer base of commercial comsat operators, their craftsmanship is good.

          • fcrary says:
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            I’m not too comfortable with the term “craftsmanship.” It’s sometimes used to imply something positive about the product, but to me it implies that the quality of the results is highly sensitive to the person doing the work (and how well he slept the night before, or if he’s coming down with a cold, or whatever.) For some things, you want the same result every time, not a great result when it’s made by Stradivari and a poor one when it’s made by his cousin before having had his morning coffee.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            I agree, but paperwork is not what keeps you alive in a deadly place. There are an infinite number of ways to do a job wrong, and even listing them all on paper doesn’t ensure the job will be done right. The same situation occurs in medicine, my field. A ton of rules do not create good medical care, in fact they make it much more difficult. In the end you have to depend on a human being, with skill, judgement, pride, and concern for others.

            I read a note once by an engineer who was examining a machined turbine wheel from the Apollo program. He measured it and was astonished at its quality; it was made much more precisely than the standards actually required. He concluded that the machinist who made the part was not just following instructions, he was highly skilled and was motivated by a sense of pride in his work and a belief in its importance. That is craftsmanship, and it was part of the reason we reached the moon.

          • fcrary says:
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            Russian, singular. According to the RT story, it was an individual who made the mistake, and who decided to plug it and not tell anyone. Of course, their source could be throwing one person to the dogs. But at least so far, I haven’t heard evidence of Energia knowing about the problem and saying, “Oh well, good enough.” (Although we could also talk about the sorts of management practices which allow a single person to do something like that, and what that says about quality assurance at Energia…)

      • Terry Stetler says:
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        Speaking of the pic

        https://twitter.com/Asteroi

        • fcrary says:
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          Well, that sure looks like a drill hole to me. The cross-section looks constant with depth, I can’t see any sign of the surface being deformed inward, and I think I can see tool marks on the sides of the hole. Plus the slip marks all around the hole.

        • Steve Pemberton says:
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          It’s in a flat surface? I had assumed it was on a curved surface or in a crevice or some other less accessible area. Looking at the photo I would think they could just place something over the hole like a piece of rubber or insulation or something and the vacuum would hold it in place. Of course in theory someone could bump it loose but that’s simple, just don’t bump it, after all everyone knows where it is and being in an orbital module it’s pretty much out of the way of day to day activities. And if someone did knock it loose oh well put it back in place, unless they lose it, well then they would have to find something else to cover the hole with. If the leak was in a permanent module then of course they would want to do a more permanent patch but for a temporary situation like this why couldn’t they just cover the hole with something? It wouldn’t be a perfect seal and might make a whistling noise but it’s not like ISS is all that quiet anyway. Or would the vacuum not be strong enough to hold something in place?

  8. Bob Mahoney says:
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    Someone somewhere wrote a compelling and quite authentic novel more than a decade ago about a cabin leak in a spacecraft being caused by orbital debris, but they couldn’t fix it because of the nature of the impact so they had to go on and dock with the space station and get rescued another way.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      The definitive SF story on this type of incident is “Gentlemen, be Seated!” by Robert Heinlein. Nobody can top that.

      • fcrary says:
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        There is a long list of science fiction stories about air leaks. Another classic one is Clarke’s “Breaking Strain” It may be worth noting that it, and “Gentlemen, be seated!” were published in 1949 and 1948, respectively, and that neither is really about the accident or the technical issues. It’s about how the people involved behave under the circumstances.

  9. John Thomas says:
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    That was obviously not a direct hole to outer space. The flow to space was limited elsewhere in the hull of the Soyuz. A 2mm hole going from 15psi to 0 I think would have a flow rate of like 57in^3 per second. I wouldn’t want to put my finger there.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      Putting your finger over such a small leak for a short time, even to vacuum, would not be dangerous as the total force would be only 0.3 newtons.

  10. ThomasLMatula says:
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    Just more evidence of the decline of quality in the Russian space program. NASA might consider itself fortune it only has a couple flight left playing Technological Russia Roulette with the Soyuz, no pun intend.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      This comment is hard to grok, Dr. M: the Russians have stunningly reliable Soyuz and Proton systems, both in continuous operation for many decades. We have…what? Ok, Ok, Delta/Atlas etc. But none man-rated. And granted both Russian systems are old…but did I mention reliable?