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The grease gun burst that sent the tool bag drifting - and threatened the repair · Space Exploration Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: 250 miles above Earth on November 18th, 2008, a backpack-sized
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: bag drifted away from the International Space Station and became
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: its own orbiting object. It contained $ 100, 000 worth of tools.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: The astronaut who lost it watched it go and then
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: kept working. That detail stops most people cold. A tool
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: bag tumbling alone through low Earth orbit, visible through a
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: backyard telescope from the ground. And the mission it came
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: from did not fail. It succeeded completely. There is something
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: about that image that refuses to let go. A mistake
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: made at the edge of the atmosphere, circling the planet
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  Speaker 1: for nine months and 16 days, while the crew that
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  Speaker 1: made it finished the job anyway. The questions it raises
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: are not about blame. They are about what happens when
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  Speaker 1: everything goes wrong in the most unforgiving environment humans have
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  Speaker 1: ever worked in, and what it takes to keep moving.
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  Speaker 1: Heidemarie Stefanyschein-Piper flew as lead spacewalker on Space Shuttle Endeavour's
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  Speaker 1: STS-126 mission. It is a story about a grease gun,
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  Speaker 1: a redundancy protocol, and a piece of hardware that orbited
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  Speaker 1: Earth-285 times before burning up west of Mexico on August 3rd, 2009.
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  Speaker 1: To understand what was lost that November morning, you have
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  Speaker 1: to understand what was at stake on the station above.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: The International Space Station runs on solar power. Eight enormous
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: arrays capture sunlight and convert it to electricity. Those arrays rotate.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: They track the sun as the station moves through its
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  Speaker 1: 90-minute orbital day. And they rotate on a mechanism called
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: the Solar Alpha Rotary Joint. By 2008, the starboard joint
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  Speaker 1: had been grinding. Engineers on the ground had watched its
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  Speaker 1: performance degrade for over a year. Metal shavings had worked
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  Speaker 1: their way into the bearing surfaces. The joint was limping
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  Speaker 1: along at reduced capacity, and the station's ability to generate
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  Speaker 1: full power was compromised. STS-126 was the mission built to
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  Speaker 1: fix it. The crew of Endeavour launched on November 14th, 2008,
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  Speaker 1: carrying the tools and replacement hardware needed to clean the joint,
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  Speaker 1: lubricate it, and swap out its trungle bearing assemblies. The
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  Speaker 1: lead space walker assigned to that repair was Stefanation Piper.
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  Speaker 1: She was not a random assignment. She had worked on
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  Speaker 1: that same joint mechanism in September 2006 during STS-115, when
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  Speaker 1: she helped configure it during initial installation. She knew its geometry.
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  Speaker 1: She knew its tolerances. She had spent two full spacewalks
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  Speaker 1: at 250 miles altitude, familiarizing herself with the structure she
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  Speaker 1: would be asked to repair two years later. She had also,
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  Speaker 1: on that earlier mission, fainted twice at the welcome home ceremony.
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  Speaker 1: The body remembers gravity after weeks without it. She stood
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  Speaker 1: at the podium, accepted the applause, and her legs gave out.
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  Speaker 1: NASA attributed it to readaptation. She returned to training. By
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  Speaker 1: the time STS-126 launched, Stefanie Schein-Piper had accumulated 12 hours
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  Speaker 1: and eight minutes of spacewalk time from her first mission.
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  Speaker 1: She held a bachelor's and master's degree in mechanical engineering
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  Speaker 1: from MIT. Before NASA, she had served as a naval
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  Speaker 1: diving and salvage officer. The kind of work that means
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  Speaker 1: staying calm while something expensive and irreplaceable sinks beneath you
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  Speaker 1: and figuring out how to bring it back. She had
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  Speaker 1: helped de-strand the Exxon Houston off Oahu. She had developed
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  Speaker 1: a salvage plan for a Peruvian submarine called the Pococha.
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  Speaker 1: The common thread in her career before space was this.
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  Speaker 1: Broken things in hostile environments. and the methodical work of
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  Speaker 1: recovering them, NASA selected her as an astronaut candidate in
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  Speaker 1: April of 1996. Twelve years later, she stood outside the
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  Speaker 1: International Space Station on the first spacewalk of STS-126, holding
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  Speaker 1: a bag the size of a backpack, preparing to start
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  Speaker 1: the most technically demanding repair of her career. The bag
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  Speaker 1: contained grease guns, cleaning wipes, and assorted hardware. everything she
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  Speaker 1: needed to begin work on the joint. Her EVA partner
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  Speaker 1: was Stephen Bowen. Inside the shuttle, Robert Kimbrough was coordinating
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  Speaker 1: the spacewalk from the crew cabin. Then, quietly, something went
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  Speaker 1: wrong inside the bag. She felt it before she saw it.
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  Speaker 1: Inside the bag, the backpack-sized bag clipped at her side,
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  Speaker 1: holding everything she needed for the next several hours. Something
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  Speaker 1: had ruptured. A grease gun. The pressure inside a grease
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  Speaker 1: gun at room temperature on Earth is manageable. At 250
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  Speaker 1: miles above the Pacific, in a suit running its own
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  Speaker 1: pressurized atmosphere against the vacuum outside. The dynamics are different.
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  Speaker 1: The gun had failed. Grease was everywhere inside the bag.
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  Speaker 1: She radioed Kimbrough. Her voice was level. I think we
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  Speaker 1: had a grease gun explode in the large bag, she said.
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  Speaker 1: Because there's grease in the bag. Kimbrough relayed the situation
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  Speaker 1: to mission control. The answer came back quickly. Stop work
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  Speaker 1: on the joint. Clean the grease first. Use the wipes
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  Speaker 1: in the bag. Do not let contaminated hardware touch the
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  Speaker 1: solar alpha rotary joint, the mechanism that had been degrading
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  Speaker 1: for months the one the entire mission had been built
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  Speaker 1: around fixing. So she opened the bag. The problem with
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  Speaker 1: cleaning grease in a spacesuit is that you cannot feel
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  Speaker 1: your hands the way you normally would. The gloves are pressurized.
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  Speaker 1: Fine motor tasks, the kind that feel routine at a workbench,
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  Speaker 1: require concentration and deliberate force. She was working inside a
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  Speaker 1: bag the size of a backpack at the end of
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  Speaker 1: a robotic arm platform, traveling at 17,000 miles per hour
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  Speaker 1: relative to the earth below, trying to wipe grease from
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  Speaker 1: hardware without touching the wrong surface. At some point during
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  Speaker 1: that cleanup, the exact mechanics were never confirmed. She pushed
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  Speaker 1: the bag. It was not a dramatic movement. It did
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  Speaker 1: not require force. In microgravity, a push of any size
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  Speaker 1: translates directly into motion, with nothing to slow it. The
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  Speaker 1: bag drifted aft. Then, starboard. It cleared the edge of
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  Speaker 1: her workspace and kept going. I guess one of my
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  Speaker 1: crew lock bags was not transferred. She radioed Kimbrough. And
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  Speaker 1: it's loose. Loose. A hundred thousand dollars of NASA hardware.
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  Speaker 1: A backpack of grease guns and cleaning supplies and specialized
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  Speaker 1: tools drifting free above the Earth. She watched it go.
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  Speaker 1: It was very disheartening to watch it float away. Here
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  Speaker 1: is what a $ 100, 000 tool bag looks like from the ground.
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  Speaker 1: A slow, faint point of reflected light, moving steadily across
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  Speaker 1: the sky. Moving steadily across the sky, visible through a
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  Speaker 1: standard amateur telescope. In the days after November 18th, 2008,
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  Speaker 1: people on Earth trained their optics upward and found it.
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  Speaker 1: The bag was not falling. It was not tumbling into
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  Speaker 1: the atmosphere. It had entered a stable orbit of its own.
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  Speaker 1: trailing the International Space Station by a safe distance a
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  Speaker 1: piece of debris with a known origin and a precise
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  Speaker 1: tracking number assigned by the United States Space Surveillance Network.
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  Speaker 1: It was, in the most literal sense, a satellite. An
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  Speaker 1: accidental satellite, made of grease guns and cleaning wipes. The
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  Speaker 1: question that hung over mission control that morning was not
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  Speaker 1: about the bag itself. The bag was gone. The question
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  Speaker 1: was about the joint. The starboard solar alpha rotary joint
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  Speaker 1: on the International Space Station is a mechanism roughly the
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  Speaker 1: size of a small car. It rotates the station's solar
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  Speaker 1: arrays to track the sun as the station orbits, which
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  Speaker 1: means it is always moving, always bearing load. By 2008,
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  Speaker 1: it had been grinding for over a year. Metal shavings
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  Speaker 1: had been found in its lubrication. The joint was operating
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  Speaker 1: at reduced efficiencies. which meant the station's solar arrays were
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  Speaker 1: not rotating freely, which meant the station was not generating
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  Speaker 1: full power. The crew aboard had been on rationed electrical use.
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  Speaker 1: Non-essential systems had been throttled back. The mission to fix
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  Speaker 1: it required cleaning contaminated surfaces and replacing the trundle-bearing assemblies,
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  Speaker 1: small components that carry the joint's rotational load. The work
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  Speaker 1: required grease guns. It required cleaning wipes. It required specialized hardware.
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  Speaker 1: All of it was in the bag that was now
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  Speaker 1: orbiting the Earth. Except that it wasn't. Not all of it.
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  Speaker 1: Stephen Bowen had his own bag. EVA protocols on complex
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  Speaker 1: missions include redundancy by design. Bowen, Stefan Scheinpiper's partner on
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  Speaker 1: the spacewalk, carried a separate set of tools in his
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: own equipment bag. Duplicates of the critical hardware. Not everything.
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  Speaker 1: Not a perfect mirror of what had been lost. But enough.
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  Speaker 1: Enough to continue. Mission Control ran the assessment. The EVA
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  Speaker 1: would be extended. The timeline would be adjusted. But the
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  Speaker 1: core objectives, cleaning the joint surfaces replacing the trundle bearing assemblies,
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  Speaker 1: restoring the rotary mechanism to full function, those objectives were
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  Speaker 1: still reachable. Stephanie Shine Piper kept working. This is the
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  Speaker 1: detail that does not make the headline. She continued as
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  Speaker 1: lead space walker, the same person who had watched $ 100, 000
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  Speaker 1: of hardware drift into its own orbit stayed outside the station,
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  Speaker 1: and led the repair. She worked through the adjusted timeline.
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  Speaker 1: She and Bowen completed the critical tasks on the Solar
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  Speaker 1: Alpha Rotary Joint, the joint that had been grinding for
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  Speaker 1: over a year, the same joint she had helped configure
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  Speaker 1: on a spacewalk two years earlier, during ST. the same
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  Speaker 1: mechanism she had come back specifically to fix began to
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  Speaker 1: move freely. Ginger Carrick, the lead ISS flight director, faced
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  Speaker 1: reporters at the mission status briefing. She did not assign
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  Speaker 1: blame to a moment of carelessness. She did not say
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  Speaker 1: a tether had been forgotten. We don't know that this
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: incident occurred because they forgot to tether something, Couric said.
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  Speaker 1: We do the best we can, and we learn from
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  Speaker 1: our mistakes. The bag continued its orbit. The station, below
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  Speaker 1: it and ahead of it by a carefully tracked distance,
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  Speaker 1: ran on restored power, nine months and sixteen days after
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  Speaker 1: it floated free. On August 3rd, 2009, the bag entered
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  Speaker 1: the upper atmosphere west of Mexico. It burned completely. Nothing
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  Speaker 1: reached the ground. The accidental satellite ceased to exist in
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  Speaker 1: the same medium where it had been born, in the
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  Speaker 1: airless dark above the Earth moving at speed, doing nothing
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  Speaker 1: and everything at once. STS-126 landed at Edwards Air Force
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  Speaker 1: Base on November 30, 2008. Twelve days after the bag
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  Speaker 1: had drifted into its own orbit, the crew walked off
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  Speaker 1: Endeavour onto California desert tarmac. The mission was complete. Stephen Lindsay.
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  Speaker 1: chief of the astronaut office, put it in the record.
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  Speaker 1: Her superb leadership as lead space walker during the STS-126
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  Speaker 1: mission resulted in restoring full power generation capability to the
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  Speaker 1: International Space Station. That was the official accounting, not the bag,
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  Speaker 1: the joint. The solar alpha rotary joint had been grinding
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  Speaker 1: for more than a year, degrading the station's ability to
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  Speaker 1: track the sun. bleeding power from a platform that runs
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  Speaker 1: entirely on what the solar arrays can gather. Now it
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  Speaker 1: moved freely. The trundle-bearing assemblies were replaced. The surfaces were
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  Speaker 1: cleaned and lubricated. The station's power generation was fully restored.
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  Speaker 1: That was the mission. That was what she went up
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  Speaker 1: to do. The bag was still up there. It had
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  Speaker 1: settled into a slow, predictable decay. Low Earth orbit is
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  Speaker 1: not a permanent address. The thin upper atmosphere bleeds kinetic
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  Speaker 1: energy from any object that wanders into it, pulling it
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  Speaker 1: lower by fractions over weeks and months. The bag was tracked.
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  Speaker 1: Mission controllers knew its position. They could calculate within a
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  Speaker 1: window when it would come down. It posed no risk
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  Speaker 1: to the station, no risk to the orbiter. The geometry
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  Speaker 1: of its drift had taken it far enough away that
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  Speaker 1: collision was never a serious concern. It was simply there, orbiting.
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  Speaker 1: A backpack-sized piece of hardware worth $ 100, 000, making laps around
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  Speaker 1: the Earth at roughly 17,000 miles per hour, visible through
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  Speaker 1: a telescope from the ground if you knew where to look.
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  Speaker 1: Think about that for a moment. For nine months and
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  Speaker 1: 16 days after the mission ended, anyone with the right
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  Speaker 1: equipment and the right coordinates could look up and find it.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: The mistake had an orbital period. It was, in its
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  Speaker 1: own way, the most public piece of space debris in
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  Speaker 1: recent memory. Not because it threatened anything, but because its
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  Speaker 1: story was known. People tracked it. Amateur astronomers logged its passes.
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  Speaker 1: It became, briefly, the most famous lost item in human history.
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  Speaker 1: Stephanie Scheinpiper returned to Earth and kept working. She did
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  Speaker 1: not step back from EVA duties. She was not disciplined,
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  Speaker 1: not removed from the astronaut rotation. No disciplinary action appears
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  Speaker 1: anywhere in the record. What the record shows is a
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  Speaker 1: lead space walker who completed three extravehicular activities on STS-126,
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  Speaker 1: accumulating a total of 33 hours and 42 minutes of
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  Speaker 1: cumulative EVA time across her career, placing her 39th on
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  Speaker 1: the all-time list of spacewalkers by duration as of 2017.
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  Speaker 1: She retired from the NASA Astronaut Corps in July of 2009.
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  Speaker 1: Eight months after landing, she returned to the Navy and
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  Speaker 1: was appointed Chief Technology Officer at Naval Sea Systems Command
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  Speaker 1: in August of 2009. In May of 2011, she took
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  Speaker 1: command of the Carderock Division of Naval Surface Warfare Center.
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  Speaker 1: She retired from the United States Navy on July 1st, 2015,
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  Speaker 1: 30 years of active duty, closed. The bag outlasted her
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  Speaker 1: NASA career by three weeks. On August 3, 2009, nine
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  Speaker 1: months and 16 days after it floated free of her
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: grip outside the International Space Station, the tool bag entered
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: the upper atmosphere, west of Mexico. The friction was immediate
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: and total. $ 100, 000 of grease guns, wipes, and hardware compressed
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  Speaker 1: into a backpack hit air moving at orbital velocity. It
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: burned completely. Nothing reached the ground. No fragment. No trace.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: The accidental satellite that had been visible from Earth through
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: telescopes for the better part of a year was simply gone,
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: converted to heat and light in a few seconds over
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: the Pacific. The station it had left behind was running
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: at full power. There is a particular kind of story
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: that space exploration produces and that almost no other human
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: endeavor can match. It is not the story of a catastrophe.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: It is not the story of a triumph. It is
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  Speaker 1: the story of a problem that arrives without warning in
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: a place where no one can help you in time.
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  Speaker 1: And the question is only whether the people already there
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  Speaker 1: can solve it before something that matters is lost forever.
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  Speaker 1: November 18th, 2008, 250 miles above the earth, a grease
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  Speaker 1: gun fails inside a sealed bag. The contents contaminate everything.
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  Speaker 1: A cleanup order comes from the ground. During the cleanup,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: a push, Accidental. Undeniable. Irreversible. $ 100, 000 of hardware drifts aft
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  Speaker 1: and starboard, and a lead spacewalker watches it go. It
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: was very disheartening to watch it float away. That sentence
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: carries the weight of the whole event. Not panic. Not excuse. Disheartening.
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  Speaker 1: The word a professional uses when something goes wrong that
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: cannot be undone, and the job still has to be finished.
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  Speaker 1: She finished it. Stephen Bowen. had duplicates. That detail, planted
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: in the redundancy protocols long before anyone imagined it would matter,
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: became the hinge on which the entire mission turned. The
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: EVA extended. The timeline adjusted. The Solar Alpha rotary joint,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: the same mechanism she had helped configure two years earlier
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: on STS-115, the mechanism that had been degrading the station's
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: power for over a year, was cleaned, lubricated, repaired. It
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  Speaker 1: moved freely. Ginger Carrick stood in front of reporters and
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: said something that deserves to be remembered outside the context
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: of a press briefing. We are working with humans here,
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: and we are prone to human error. Not deflection. Not
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: damage control. A statement of operational truth. The environment is hostile.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: The margins are thin, and the people doing the work
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: are still people. You build in redundancy. You build in
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: backup tools, duplicate equipment, fallback procedures. You accept that error
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: will happen at altitude. and you design the system so
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: that error is survivable. The bag survived for nine months
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: and 16 days. Then it didn't. It burned up on
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: August 3rd, 2009, west of Mexico, and the last loose
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: thread of STS-126 ceased to exist. What remained was the
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: joint turning freely. The station, generating full power. A career
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: that continued. 30 years of Navy service. Closed in 2015.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: and one number, sitting quietly in the record. 30, 3 hours,
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: and 42 minutes, the total time, Haida Marie Stefani Schein-Piper
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  Speaker 1: spent outside a spacecraft, in the void, doing the work,
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  Speaker 1: the bag, that orbited the Earth for 9 months, and
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: 16 days, is gone. The power it was lost, trying
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  Speaker 1: to restore, is still on. This show is made by
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: Oba Media.