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Talk:List of accidents and incidents involving the International Space Station

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Inclusion criteria[edit]

After expanding the article quite a bit, here are some of my considerations on what should be included and what's missing. These are serve as notes for myself if I get into a rabbit hole of adding more stuff here in the future.

What's included:

  • Issues that prevented docking/berthing to the station. Usually launch failures. Missions like Progress M1-7 also count here but it also uses another rule listed here.
  • Issues that resulted in docking/undocking postponement or considerations of it. Pretty self-explanatory, includes stuff like Progress M-06M, Soyuz TMA-18, SpaceX CRS-2 and so on, also Cygnus NG-18 as it required considerations to perform. Small process delays like on STS-130 and STS-133 docking shouldn't count, I think
  • Off-nominal landings, including ballistic landings for Soyuz. While they play role of backups of nominal landing sequences, they add extra risk due to landing in unprepared locations and require a while for rescue teams to locate --- one of such landings started a small fire, for example. Another example of off-nominal landing is Soyuz MS-02 depressurizing earlier than planned.
  • Any spacewalks terminated early, even if termination took place after completion of all tasks like VKD-9 on Feb 2004. Terminations occur due to risk increasing to unacceptable levels (or steadily trending there) even if they are cleared in retrospect (like STS-126 EVA-2 and 4). I may have missed one or two.
  • Unexpected loss of attitude, like Nauka post-docking one. Expedition 9 EVA in Aug 2004 is a special case since it was expected but as the spacewalk was interrupted for moving away from thrusters and resulted in changed procedures, it also belongs.
  • Visiting spacecraft issues that resulted in spacewalks to work on them to resolve, like STS-114, STS-117, Progress M-58 and Soyuz MS-09. Such spacewalks are not planned in advance and include additional risk of damaging the vehicles, so issues that are significant enough to warrant these are a big deal.
  • Any instances of safe haven when the crew shelters in their spacecrafts, usually in the event of a collision risk. They are a pretty rare and never resulted in an actual damage but as this is triggered due to when probability of debris hit exceeds a threshold, they are a big enough deal. Crew-2 is also here because at the time of warning the risk was considered real.
  • Associated debris that damaged property. While there are reports of multiple Dragon 2/Crew Dragon trunks being found, they haven't resulted in damage specifically.
  • Significant medical issues --- covering blood clot.
  • Significant ground testing failures --- Crew Dragon explosion.
  • Significant social issues --- the thing on 23 August 2019. Was added before my expansion, but an interesting case, these are rare.
  • Spacecraft leaks --- a total of 3 leaks in 2022 and 2023.

Other things that should be included:

  • Issues resulting in contingency (and maybe also unplanned?) EVAs. Couldn't find an exhaustive list separating the spacewalks into planned/unplanned/contingency to decide.
  • ISS-internal issues. They are mostly covered in Maintenance of the International Space Station page. Maybe these two pages should be merged at some point, it will also help with the latter's identity crisis.

Not sure:

  • Eye irritations due to helmet antifreeze getting into eyes during spacewalks. There are several incidents like these, and they are technically listed as injuries, but there's limited info available on how bad it is. It doesn't seem to me like a significant problem, but I'm not sure.
  • Delayed chute expansion. It happened on both crewed and uncrewed flights of Dragon a few times and the chutes opened in full eventually, but definitely not a great scenario.
  • OFT-2 and CFT thruster issues, while bad, didn't seem to affect docking other than process delays. Initially considered removing OFT-2 altogether, but with CFT undocking delays it may become a big deal after all.
  • Progress MS-01 manual docking exercise resulted in a pretty big thruster oscillations that were barely mentioned in official press releases and then promptly forgotten. Need more info to decide, but I think it belongs here

SpacySpaces (talk) 01:34, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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