What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?

If you hate the format of these kinds of article let me summarize:<p>Guy builds an experiment, flies it, it doesn&#x27;t work, requests more time to get it working, is denied, threatens &#x27;not to come back&#x27;, goes into a depression, worries crew that he&#x27;ll open the door to space, eventually granted more time to work on the experiment, gets it working.<p>There are consequences for letting this kind of person fly and dealing with mental health while on a mission, but that&#x27;s the basic plot.

NASA seems to have a long standing tradition of sweeping problems under the rug. No skylab mutiny, no depressed payload specialists, all fine here gentleman, nothing to see here.<p>I always wondered why this is written that way. To protect the organisation? But the human part of us all is part of that organization, to disacknowledge that is literally inhumane. Because they are funded by taxpayer dollars and should screen better? Companies get funded by tax-payer bailouts and government projects all the time, waste them on not carefully selected conmen all the time.<p>So why is it not okay to write about this? Is this a remnant of the &quot;epic hero&quot; with a rocket from the early scifi days?

&gt; On the second day of the mission, Wang floated over to his experiment and sought to activate the Drop Dynamics Module. But it didn&#x27;t work. He asked the NASA flight controllers on the ground if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. Every crew member has a detailed timeline, with a long list of tasks during waking hours. The flight controllers were reluctant.<p>The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can&#x27;t yet. Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed, especially as he ultimately got it working.<p>Meanwhile the robots just quietly go about their work collecting almost all the data we have from space and celestial bodies.

Mental issues are not uncommon. First japanese astronaut on Mir (Russian commercial passenger on Mir) had mental break down, and had to be restrained on the way back. It was in some Russian archives...<p>Skylab and Sojuz had astronauts on strike...<p>EDIT: it was not ISS, but Mir!

<i>&quot;We put a lock on the door of the side hatch,&quot; Fabian said. &quot;It was installed when we got into orbit so that the door could not be opened from the inside and commit hara-kiri, kill the whole crew. [...]</i><p>I know this is mostly oral history, but that&#x27;s just not what that means and the writer should have corrected or omitted it.<p><i>Hara-kiri</i> means the act of self-disembowelment in a Japanese ritual suicide (<i>seppuku</i>). Not the suicide or the ritual in general, and certainly not killing everyone else in the process, which is Not A Thing in Japan. There were historically sympathy suicides by loyal retainers over matters of honor, but they were voluntary and permission had to be sought in advance. Killing a bunch of other people in despair over your own problem is just murder in Japanese culture, and doesn&#x27;t have any social legitimacy or a special name.

I saw trust being mentioned, but I don&#x27;t really get it. Space is one of the most unnatural environments people can go to. Of course brains that had evolved for life on Earth can malfunction in such completely artificial spaces. Same for airplanes, or submarines, or modern warfare. There was a tense moment in Das Boot where the engineer suffered a mental breakdown while the sub was stuck on the ocean floor and the captain even felt the need to go get a pistol. It&#x27;s not an issue of trust, it&#x27;s basic psychology. Nobody wants to be &quot;that guy&quot; who puts everyone in danger, but I don&#x27;t think there will ever be a reliable way to completely prevent such occurrences, nor do I think there is anyone to blame for them, and nor do I think having safeguards should be interpreted as a silent accusation towards those on board.

The article was interesting, but wow, reading that page used up 20% of my battery and required a reboot stop whatever it was causing excessive lag throughout the OS. I’ve noticed news sites are basically unusable on mobile. Sure I’m using an iPhone 7, but it’s fine for every other use except news site. If even Ars is this user hostile, I think I have to consider news sites as fundamentally user-antogonistic, and not to be used without an ad blocker. (Unlike what iOS allows)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=Taylor_Wang&amp;oldid=1197957506#Spaceflight" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=Taylor_Wang&amp;oldid...</a>

I wonder how much time the duct tape would have actually bought if he tried to open it anyway.

This makes me think that mental health failure modes are not uncommon. 2 in 650 for relatively well-socialized&#x2F;well vetted candidates.<p>And yet, no one really seems to be able to figure out how to plan for these mental health failure modes or even talk about them in the first place. Corporate America for example seems unable to grasp this stuff.

The limited access to space probably contributed to his mental episode. If he could be fairly confident in the experiment being flown again, it wouldn&#x27;t have caused him this amount of stress.<p>So in a way more access to space might lower the percentage of such episodes.

When did Ars Technica start splitting articles into multiple pages?<p>I thought that stupid trend died out 10 years ago.<p>It just results in me abandoning the article on page 1.

&gt; So when I realized that my experiment had failed, I could imagine my father telling me, &#x27;What&#x27;s the matter with you? Can&#x27;t you even do an experiment right?&#x27;<p>When reading it, I heard it with the voice of Steven He.

The reason was this:<p>&quot;When I turned on my own instrument, it didn&#x27;t work,&quot; Wang said. &quot;You can imagine my panic. I had spent five years preparing for this one experiment. Not only that, I was the first person of Chinese descent to fly on the Shuttle, and the Chinese community had taken a great deal of interest. You have to understand the Asian culture. You don&#x27;t just represent yourself; you represent your family. The first thing you learn as a kid is to bring no shame to the family. So when I realized that my experiment had failed, I could imagine my father telling me, &#x27;What&#x27;s the matter with you? Can&#x27;t you even do an experiment right?&#x27; I was really in a very desperate situation&quot;<p>Which made him think out loud of opening the intentional easy to open hatch. (because of Apllo 1 with 3 burned and trapped astronauts who could not open their door)<p>So what happened was a lot of distress while on this flight and from now on there was a lock installed. Which means that in a real emergency, astronauts maybe could then not open the door in time. All because social pressure brought someone close to the point of violently breaking.<p>(and because NASA did not do proper testing for the specialists, like they did for the professional Astronauts)

If you want to see this idea explored even more, I highly recommend watching &quot;For All Mankind&quot; on Apple TV+. My description below hopeful does not contain spoilers.<p>A Fantastic show for tech optimists, imagining a world where Russians were the first to land on the moon. This spurred increased investment by the US, continuing the space race, avoided the cold war, adoption of EVs in the 80s, massive action on climate change, and many other fun things. I wishfully think of &quot;what could have been&quot;, and a world that seems attainable.<p>One of the recurring plot points is Executive action taken by astronauts in space, wars avoided and caused by their decisions, brave rescues and other heroics. In one of the episodes a characters takes such an action.

“This [access to the hatch] is not a particularly pleasant issue to talk about, so NASA, SpaceX, and the people who fly on the vehicles generally don&#x27;t. But it does seem like something the space community should probably have a discussion about as access to space broadens.”<p>The fact that NASA is afraid to address a real and possible failure point of a mission, because it is “not particularly pleasant” would worry me more than the hatch itself.

Is there any such lock mechanism on the doors of an airplane?<p>I would imagine there could be sever consequences of someone opening an emergency hatch at 10,000m

Has anyone else read the story of the astronaut onboard ISS who lost it (if I recall it was over a romantic interest) and destroyed the toilet and drilled a hole in the space station?

HN comments is apparently having a bad night. The volume of whining in this thread is incredible.

&gt; The commander locking a hatch essentially sends a message to the others: &quot;I don&#x27;t trust you to not kill us all in flight.&quot;<p>I mean, the article makes opening the hatch sound pretty damn easy. I think even if I were alone on the shuttle I&#x27;d lock it just to add that little bit of sense of security.

In the 90&#x27;s at a party I heard the story of the scientist who cried because their experiment didn&#x27;t work while in space. It was told around the idea civilians shouldn&#x27;t go to space, only trained professionals.<p>The story never <i>quite</i> added up just because of crying. This I assume was the incident.<p>Good to finally get it 30 years later.<p>The story I thought was related to Richard P. Feynman and maybe his Challenger report. I just had a quick look and it doesn&#x27;t seem to be in there. Memory fail I guess.<p>I respect Taylor Wang&#x27;s honesty in this interview -<p>&quot;So finally, in desperation. I said. &quot;Hey, if you guys don&#x27;t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I&#x27;m not going back.&quot; Well. NASA got nervous at that point. They actually got a psychologist to talk to the other crew members and ask. &quot;Is Taylor going nuts? Fortunately my commander. Bob Overmyer, said, &quot;No. he&#x27;s okay He&#x27;s just depressed, and he really wants to repair the experiment. We&#x27;Il help out. They were on my side. Finally NASA said okay, on a couple of conditions. First, that I wouldn&#x27;t neglect my other responsibilities, and second, that I would quit after a reasonable effort<p>I was relieved, because I hadn&#x27;t really figured out how not to come back if they&#x27;d called my bluff. The Asian tradition of honorable suicide, seppuku, would have failed, since everything on the shuttle is designed for safety. The knife onboard can&#x27;t even cut the bread. You could put your head in the oven, but it&#x27;s really just a food warmer. You wouldn&#x27;t even bum yourself. And if you tried to hang yourself with no gravity, you&#x27;d just dangle there and look like an idiot.&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;spaceshuttle00dkpu&#x2F;page&#x2F;232&#x2F;mode&#x2F;2up" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;spaceshuttle00dkpu&#x2F;page&#x2F;232&#x2F;mode...</a> p232

“Open the payload hatch, ChatGPT.”<p>“I’m sorry, Taylor. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”<p>AI will keep everyone safe. &#x2F;s

I don’t get why they emphasize that he’s Chinese. Seems totally irrelevant

So leave a switch to kill all crew available at all times till you think someone is unstable, then lock it. Genius

Do these people get affiliate money from that I.S.S movie? The topic seems suspiciously timed.