Space Station Spacewalkers Stymied By Stubborn Bolt

you're obviously not an engineer. the big things are made up out of tiny things. its always* a tiny things that gets you

Not a mechanical engineer, no. I'm a network engineer. And when I build a network, I make sure to catch the "low hanging fruit" when I test things.

And when it comes to testing bolts, even with my non-mechanical engineering background, I can see that this is low hanging fruit. Will this bolt be able to turn 15 times in this configuration? I'm sure NASA would have been able to test that in their fish tank, and they probably did; with a different bolt...

Are you seriously saying that you've never tested a network device in your test lab that was supposed to be a drop-in replacement for older technology already installed in the office (which is a unique environment that's not repeated anywhere else in your organization), then had the new device fail to work when it was plugged in without having someone tweak the configuration?

And it's often the "low hanging fruit" that causes the problem when it's something out of the ordinary...like that someone had to force the port from autonegotiate to 100mbit because there's a flaky connection somewhere between the device and the core network so the autonegotiated 1000mbit connection wouldn't stay up, and building management refuses to replace the network cable.

In this case, they discovered metal filings when they unbolted the old unit, and though they sprayed them out with compressed nitrogen, there was apparently significant enough thread damage that the new bolt wouldn't go in.

A test lab tries to approximate reality, but it's hard to do a complete simulation of a component exposed to the vacuum of space with repeated and severe heat/cool cycles as it's exposed to and shaded from the sun.

I don't doubt that they tested everything right down to the exact same bolts (probably machined by the same vendor, and possibly even made from the same ingot of raw metal), but no test lab is a perfect representation of the real-world. Most spacewalk maintenance is rehearsed dozens or hundreds of times on earth before attempted in space.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/gLU8AggfkqM/space-station-spacewalkers-stymied-by-stubborn-bolt

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