Re: “Did nobody stop to think what might happen in an emergency in space?”

On 25 Aug 2024 15:22:34 -0000, kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

Paul S Person  <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

<lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

>
The Boeing spacesuit is made to work with the Starliner spacecraft,
and the SpaceX spacesuit is made to work with the Dragon spacecraft,
NASA told Fox News Digital. =93Both were designed to fit each unique
spacecraft.
>
Oops. I suspect that SpaceX will send up a couple of new space suits on=20
the next supply spaceship.

>
For Apollo-Soyuz, the Soviets made up some adaptor boxes that went from the
American space suit connections to the Russian ones (as well as the adaptor
ring to connect the two capsules).  I am surprised this is not a solution.

Sadly, the Soviets (and their technology) are long gone.

Also, there is a difference between two gummint agencies that are
cooperating with each other (ie, sharing data and, I suspect,
equipment samples) and two private firms competing with each other.

OTOH, if they were paid enough, I'm sure the companies involved could
come up with something.

See, /this/ is why the ISO exists.

>
The ISO isn't really all that useful in the real world, partly because they
promote standards without reference to how systems are used in the real world
and partly because they charge money for the standards meaning small
organizations are strongly discouraged from following new ISO standards that
are not already in common use.

That's why the standards a project I am involved in worked from free
drafts of the new C++ standard way back when. Some of the requirements
were incomprehensible; figuring out what (IIRC) supporting
multitasking/multithreading OS capabilities meant for our DOS
compilers was merely a puzzle. Not that we every solved it, but some
puzzles are more fun unsolved.

The whole upside-down-wedding cake of networking protocols looked great but
didn't map in practice to what people were really using, and when tcp/ip took
over the world it was like a steamroller over top of the ISO.

My point, however, that real-world effective standardization of (say)
space suit couplings would have been most helpful at the present
moment, still stands.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"