When my laptop goes kaput, my first instinct is to chuck it out the window, but astronauts in space don’t have such luxuries.
Consider this: Yuri Malenchenko, a veteran cosmonaut and flight engineer aboard the International Space Station, had the unenviable job this week of wrestling with a glitchy computer laptop in the outpost’s Russian segment.
While I can call tech support, my computer programmer brother-in-law, or just pay someone to take it out of my sight until it’s fixed, Yuri and his Expedition 16 crewmates have to keep those space laptops running or the $100 billion station doesn’t work.
“It says software license warning,” Yuri told Mission Control in Korolev, Russia, just outside of Moscow on Wednesday during NASA’s daily hour of live video from the space station.
Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko works with communication equipment on the ISS. Flight controllers and engineers there were talking Yuri, who has commanded the station in the past, through the steps to reinstall programs from a software DVD. They were speaking Russian, with a handy English translator, but frustration knows no language.
“[It says] the computer cannot copy the file, and data error,” said Yuri, as he and Mission Control hammered through their troubleshooting.
I may not be a spaceman, but I know how it feels to have that blue screen of death standing between me and my files. At least I only have to face off against one computer at a time, but it’s a different story for station astronauts.
According to the folks at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas – home of the U.S. astronaut corps and shuttle/space station Mission Controls – there are no less than 69 laptop computers watching over the International Space Station right this minute. Here’s a breakdown:
- 50 computers govern all NASA core functions on the station, including operations and many of the payloads.
- 5 of those 50 NASA machines are directly linked to the station’s core avionics computers to send commands and receive telemetry
- 12 laptop computers support all of the station’s Russian core functions, operations and payloads
- 7 new laptops watch over the new, European-built Columbus laboratory for the European Space Agency.
And there’s more coming, I’m sure. On March 11, NASA’s shuttle Endeavour will launch with the first segment of Japan’s massive Kibo laboratory – the station’s largest research module – along with a Canadian-built, two-armed robot called Dextre that will be mounted outside. Kibo will likely need its own laptop computers.
Luckily, flight controllers in Russia and the U.S. have extensive – if not altogether desired – experience working through minor and major computer glitches aboard the ISS. Just last summer, the station’s primary Russian command and navigation computers crashed due to a faulty circuit. Cosmonauts jerry rigged a workaround until the computers could be replaced later.
The station’s main U.S. computers inside NASA’s Destiny lab have also experience their own growing pains, including a major crash back in April 2001.
The folks with NASA’s computer resources and architecture department say that space station computers receive new software updates for different applications several times a year to support new requirements, interfaces and new arrivals of modules and other hardware as the orbital laboratory’s construction continues.