The International Space Station Is Getting Its First Printer Upgrade in 17 Years (mashable.com) 174
Lance Ulanoff, writing for Mashable: Somewhere, 254 miles above us, an astronaut is probably printing something. Ever since the International Space Station (ISS) welcomed its first residents in November of 2000, there have been printers on board. Astronauts use them to print out critical mission information, emergency evacuation procedures and, sometimes, photos from home. According to NASA, they print roughly 1,000 pages a month on two printers; one is installed on the U.S. side of the ISS, the other in the Russian segment. ISS residents do all this on 20-year-old technology. "When the printer was new, it was like 2000-era tech and we had 2000-era laptop computers. Everything worked pretty good," recalled NASA Astronaut Don Pettit, who brought the first printer up to the ISS. But "the printer's been problematic for the last five or six years," said Pettit who's spent a total of one year on the station. It's not that the Space Station has been orbiting with the same printer since Justin Timberlake was still N'Sync. NASA had dozens of this printer and, as one failed, they'd send up another identical model. But now it's time for something truly new. In 2018, NASA will send two brand new, specialized printers up to the station. However, figuring out the right kind of printer to send was a lot more complicated than you'd probably expect. NASA has turned to HP for its IT supply and needs. The agency requires the following things in its printer: print and handle paper management in zero gravity, handle ink waste during printing, be flame retardant, and be power efficient. HP, Mashable reports, has recommended the HP Envy 5600, its all-in-one (printer, scanner, copier, fax) device that retails for $129.99. The model has been modified, according to the report.
However (Score:2)
> However, figuring out the right kind of printer to send was a lot more complicated than you'd probably expect.
Yeah i would expect it to be a lot more complicated than to turn to the most notorious supplier of "crapware", that breaks, or simply refuses to work because you didnt upgrade your service contract to Platinum or Plutonium, or even dared to use unapproved paper or ink...
Linux (Score:3)
Also a requirement : have a good Linux support out of the box.
Re:Linux (Score:4, Funny)
It's the year of the ISS Linux Desktop!!
Crapware? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah i would expect it to be a lot more complicated than to turn to the most notorious supplier of "crapware", that breaks, or simply refuses to work because you didnt upgrade your service contract to Platinum or Plutonium, or even dared to use unapproved paper or ink...
Epson (the old printer) and HP (maybe the new printer) are both capable of building top-notch commercial quality printers. Look at the POS equipment next time you buy something in a store: Epson thermal receipt printers abound - and for good reasons, like their dot-matrix machines, they're pretty damned near unstoppable. And HP is HP. HP invented and popularized the desktop laser printer by strapping a Motorola 68000, a laser, and a spinning mirror onto a Canon photocopier engine. HP is the IBM of printers - like, for all their prowess in computers and typewriters like the Selectrics, even IBM isn't the IBM of printers.
The ISS printers may benefit from the experience of mass-produced cheap printers made of lightweight plastic, festooned with Energy Star stickers, and getting relatively low product return rates at big-box retailers like Best Buy - all of these things are what NASA would want.
But those cheap mass-produced plastic printers probably won't be getting stock firmware, Windows drivers [shivers in horror at the thought of using Microsoft crap on the ISS], and probably won't be getting stock ink or toner cartridges. They'll be getting something better. They'll be getting the "Yes, Sir, Mr. Mission Commander" Service Contract.
"Oh, Mr. Mission Commander, you need to refill the ink cartridges with human urine? Here's how to disable the error message."
1000 pages per month is nothing for any modern printer, if you have the toner/ink, and you're using good quality paper. Throw a few separator pads and transfer rollers onto the next replenishment launch, and you're good to go to print War And Peace anytime you want.
wow, $$$ (Score:5, Funny)
$35 a cartridge, but man, $150M in shipping costs.
The paper isn't cheap either.
Re:wow, $$$ (Score:5, Funny)
That's what Amazon Prime is for...
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Re:wow, $$$ (Score:4, Informative)
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no nasa hacked the roms to take refills / big tanked hooked to fake cartridges
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Amazing success of the "new-HP" business model: The profit is in the INK, not the printer. At today's pricing, each HP 5640 page costs 16 CENTS per single-sided page in ink charges alone (and that's to the common customer; NASA pays a LOT more). But, of course, the promo features the cheap PRINTER price. What great advertising for HP, and many buyers will assume that, because NASA likes it, it'll work for them, too.
What a crock...
Precisely WHEN did integrity die?
With the advent of advertising, I'll warr
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Precisely WHEN did integrity die?
When did it exist? Simple answers only, please.
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Hah! I got by with only $140M for the cartridge and the shipping was FREE! Take that NASA!
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A bladder is expensive. Just charging with an inert gas would be enough with gravity.
See, that's one of the things they don't have an abundance of on the ISS. While the price isn't that important, because it's likely a pittance compared to what it costs to get it up there.
But my question is what do they really need to print on the ISS? I'd think a tablet would serve most of the needs.
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As for why paper, paper doesn't need power. You can hang it anywhere and it's always ready. I doubt the station has outlets every 6'.
On the ISS, paper does need power. If there's no power, there's no light to read the paper, and soon enough no alive humans to read it either. Reliable (and redundant) power is a big thing up there.
Russians (Score:3)
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Ahh yes. The sounds of a Soviet-era chain printer coming from the Russian side of the ISS.
And they were close to regretting it (Score:4, Insightful)
on multiple occasions, the lead broke, and they had small conductive graphite particles floating around the control panels.
This 17 years old printer... (Score:4, Insightful)
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is still probably better than our newest retail printers sold in supermarkets.
Exactly what I was thinking. (Wouldn't be surprised if it was an old LaserJet 4/5)
Don't see how some shitty current-era all-in-wonder device is gonna replace that kind of stability, no matter who makes it. They really don't make 'em like they used to these days (on purpose)
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You probably don't want a laser printer in zero-G. Toxic fumes and the potential danger of toner floating everywhere? Not an option.
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She complains too much.
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Probably.
Frankly I'm amazed that an inkjet printer was recommended. In my experience dating back to the first Deskjets in the nineties, the inkjet printers were always worse than their laser equivalents, and I don't see how they're getting around gravity-feed (or lack thereof) for the pickup rollers.
I also get why they would seek to avoid laser, since laser can suffer from problems of uncontained toner getting out and airborne, which would be a real problem for a space station.
The tech that I would have ex
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Laser printers also require toner, which is extremely finely divided plastic powder. The very last thing you'd ever want to have in microgravity.
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I don't see how they're getting around gravity-feed (or lack thereof) for the pickup rollers.
Spring-loading the rollers from both sides. Having rollers inside the paper cassette.
Floating toner dust would be way worse of an issue.
Current thermal printing fades very qickly. Have you ever tried to save a receipt for longer than a year?
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Frankly I wouldn't want them printing to-retain the permanent instructions. If a permanent procedure is refined to be kept for a long time it probably makes more sense to print it terrestrially and then laminate it or bind it into a booklet and send it up on the next flight. Once the permanent copy is there, they should dispose of the temporary thermal-wax copy.
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This is a particularly shitty model too. It has Wifi and direct internet access, doubtless insecure. According to Trusted Reviews, "for unfathomable reasons, HP's setup program offers to install Google's Chrome browser and toolbar, and like other printers it defaults to sending usage data over the internet."
It needs an expensive supply of ink, and refuses to print when a single colour runs out. I can see the ISS going down in flames when they can't bring some vital service document because their printer ran
a custom rom can fix a lot of that say (Score:2)
with no usage data being sent over the internet
disable no print if color X is out
disable cartridge time limit
disable non HP cartridge lockout
So the WD40 wasn't working? (Score:2)
Couldn't keep restoring the ink on the ribbon using that WD40? Did they run out of spray cans or did the dot-matrix printer finally actually die?
This confirms it (Score:2)
It really does take a rocket scientist to keep a $(#@)%{@* printer working.
I've actually laid hands on the current printers. (Score:5, Interesting)
They're pretty much off the shelf except the connector has been changed to a twist-lock hermetically sealed connector (overkill in my opinion, but I understand why they did it - it's pretty much the standard connector on the station). They also have steel cages around the paper trays, mostly to keep the paper from floating off. I think they use Velcro in space to keep the thing planted, maybe magnets, but on the earth side that particular detail wasn't worried about in the training environment.
Out of pure coincidence after I didn't even work there anymore, I wound up on the phone with one of the people from Epson who was on the project to get the old one going. He confirmed that it was pretty much off the shelf save for the few mods for low-G - such as the a fore mentioned cages. He was just as surprised to talk to someone who knew so much about the printers who wasn't at NASA as I was to actually wind up on the phone with that knowledge for the same reasons....
FYI - working on those hermetically sealed connectors is a pain in the ass. They're not particular difficult in any one sense, it's that if you've ever worked with serial/parallel pin inserters and extractors it's pretty much the same, except the insertion/removal tool is flimsy plastic and tends to bend/break on a regular basis (and just try ordering new stuff on a low end government contract if you're not the right persons buddy - everything is drama in the power struggle between the bottom and the top). The standard tools work, but you run a serious risk of hurting the rubber the pin sits in and even if it's just for training purposes using the standard one will land your butt in a sling. If it were actual flight equipment, even if you did it in such a way you could prove caused no damage they would still rip it out and ding the contract as a whole for such things. I suspect if it actually were for flight equipment those people would have an easier time getting the tools than us ground people did. The flight equipment people were at the cape, us training people were in Houston.
HP LJ 4+ (Score:2)
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I assume they don't want a laser printer in the ISS because of the zero-g environment. The toner dust might float away and get into electrical contacts or something.
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HP was once a giant (at least the printers were), now they just make bloated software with slightly above average hardware.
The LaserJets were really made by Canon...
The only time (Score:2)
Slides? (Score:3)
Is it just me that would actually prefer slides?
Print-to-slide.
Then if you need it in an emergency, just shine a light (which you need anyway to see) through it onto any surface. Bam. Dense information, high-resolution, excellent preservation, low resource usages and you don't need fragile/flammable/soakable paper just floating around and in steel cages to print.
Plus.. it's a bit more space-agey to just hold up the slide to a bulb to look at the information on it. Hell, you could even have a tiny chip in the exterior of it that stores the same information as the image itself, but digitally-readable if you DO still have a device that works.
1" square of HP ink compared to 8.5"x11" or whatever letter paper size is in America.
Surely, in an environment where every square inch and gram matters, a slide makes a better information store than paper?
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1000 pages a month? (Score:2)
It's 10x the amount we print in a 15 people company.
There needs to be something wrong there: two reams of paper is a lot of paper and weight!
Do they really really need to print on paper? No e-ink?
Weird!
Don't forget the extras (Score:3)
HP, Mashable reports, has recommended the HP Envy 5600
Note to NASA: Make sure you sign up for Instant ink "Get ink delivered to your door for as low as $2.99 a month."
A hell of a lot cheaper than getting it Space-X'd up there.
Instant ink gsa is $199.99 / site + fees (Score:2)
Instant ink gsa is $199.99 / site + fees
Err, whats wrong with what works? (Score:2)
I've been using my HP LaserJet 1100 Printer for about that long. Newer tech isn't always better.
I know most printers wont work with now gravity, wonder what Epson 800 Inkjet printer, I always envisioned that they would be using some kind of dot matrix printer with reams of paper with guide holes.
It's all about the supplies (Score:2)
The problem with NASA printers is that while they're pretty cheap, the new ink cartridges are about $1,000,000 each.
Office Space (Score:2)
laserjet update (Score:2)
I have just two questions (Score:2)
Can they Please, PLEASE, re-enact the printer destruction scene from Office Space?
And what region is are the consumables locked to? (Score:2)
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Why?
WHY?
I mean, really....
WHY!?!?!?!
Who prints photos anymore? Who prints ANYTHING anymore?
Erm... My wife ... Show also takes "screen shots" with her iPhone :/
Re:What the... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, the 'paperless office'. Ain't ever seen one those critters despite presumably validated sightings for decades.
I'd believe in Sasquatch before I believe in the death of printers.
And, of course, fax machines. I wonder if the ISS has a fax machine?
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Not realizing you can accomplish the same end electronically....
Yes, when I think "technologically incompetent", I think NASA.
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Yeah, it has to be the rocket scientists who are in charge of administration aboard the ISS!
Seriously, e-paper tablets, even if they had to make/order a custom firmware for it, would be much better. Takes less room, less energy, doesn't need to be re-supplied with paper and ink.
Eyeroll... (Score:2)
Seriously, e-paper tablets, even if they had to make/order a custom firmware for it, would be much better. Takes less room, less energy, doesn't need to be re-supplied with paper and ink.
And I'm sure you know what would work better in space than NASA does. The arrogance of a lot of slashdot posters seldom fails to amaze. Do you seriously think that no one at NASA is aware of what a tablet or e-paper is and that they haven't considered the idea? Why don't you find out why they do what they do with printers before you spout off that you know better than literal rocket scientists how to do their job.
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That's my point. Not everyone at NASA is a rocket scientist. Some are regular administrators, managers, etc.
And? (Score:2)
That's my point. Not everyone at NASA is a rocket scientist. Some are regular administrators, managers, etc.
Those administrators aren't the ones deciding whether on not a printer would be useful on the space station. If anything I'm fairly confident they would try to keep one off the station to reduce costs if possible. They manage the budgets and might veto an idea but they would need the engineers thumbs up and cooperation to get a printer on the station. They use paper on the space station [quora.com] and I'm fairly confident they do so for good reasons. Remember that anything they send up there generally has to last
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It would be a good idea to establish what kind of failures have occurred over the years before spouting "but, tablets and e-ink". The article states that printers have been replaced over the years, so they've failed one way or another.
The occupants of the ISS have to hide in a hardened shelter occasionally, to avoid the effects of increased radiation whenever the sun burps.
How many devices have been fried during these events? Only un-hardened ones, presumably.
Having your day-to-day checklist, or your emerge
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Yeah, and when the electricity is gone so is your data. Pen and paper for me, thanks.
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Hint if you don't have the power to charge an eink display that needs what a charge a week then your already dead. Hells some have solar panels on back that could charge it to full in a few hours.
FTFA: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What the... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What the... (Score:4, Insightful)
Who prints ANYTHING anymore? Seriously, a 10" tablet does everything paper can do and more
Well, here we are hundreds of miles above the Earth and a catastrophic solar flare has whacked all the computers on board including the tablets. How do we get life support started up again? Oops, can't look up that PDF... if only there was a way to keep information in some non-electronic retrieval system..,
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Why?
WHY?
I mean, really....
WHY!?!?!?!
1000 pages per MONTH? For WHAT?!?
That seems patently absurd. This is 2017, when printers are all but obsolete, for ANYTHING. Who prints photos anymore? Who prints ANYTHING anymore? Seriously, a 10" tablet does everything paper can do and more.
There is just no need for this senselessness.
I'm assuming that the astronaut's haven't switched over to using tablets for their manuals/work instructions. Perhaps it has something to do with batteries always dying, or being dead, when you need it the most...
On earth, it's usually not a big deal if your tablet dies while following a set of instructions to do maintenance on your car, for example. You just stop to charge the tablet then get back to it in an hour. However, if the battery dies during a space walk maintenance it could cause a lot of prob
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Seriously, a 10" tablet does everything paper can do and more.
.
So how long exactly does your 10" tablet go without a charge? :-)
The paper I printed 20 years ago is still legible and I haven't had to charge it in all that time.
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Use your brain.
If the power goes out on the space station - in SPACE, you need hard copies for emergency procedures.
If you lose cabin pressure - in SPACE, I'm sure a tablet will still work just fine. Good luck using the touch interface with those big fat SPACE GLOVES, you need hard copies for emergency procedures.
See where this is going? you need hard copies for emergency procedures IN SPACE.
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Wait, if the power goes out and you do not already have hard copies, then how does having a printer help you? If you need to print the whole thing you're screwed. Likely it's so they can print updated pages and insert into hard copy.
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I'm reminded of a wise bit from an old soldier, "A GPS unit with a bullet hole in it is junk. A map with a bullet hole in it is still a map."
When you have a lot of fancy equipment on board that require complex procedures to operate you want that stuff written down, often in a place highly visible, quickly accessible, and in a way that is not likely to be obliterated.
Paper is cheap, reasonably durable, and so small and light that a lot of information can be placed upon it. You keep your mission logs, light
Printing (Score:2)
This is 2017, when printers are all but obsolete, for ANYTHING.
Evidently you are too young to actually work in a real office. Printers are about as far from dead as one can imagine. I personally print several thousand pages of documents every month. Work instructions, log sheets, customer orders, packing slips, and quite a lot more. I'm an engineer and the work instructions we send to our production floor are on paper. A tablet would be less useful, less flexible, and probably break quickly with the abuse it would take even if we disregard the fact that replacing
Paper (Score:2)
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That seems patently absurd. This is 2017, when printers are all but obsolete, for ANYTHING. Who prints photos anymore? Who prints ANYTHING anymore? Seriously, a 10" tablet does everything paper can do and more.
Have you ever heard of a term called a manual backup? Especially on a space mission. The astronauts do use tablets but they also have a printer for certain things that need to be printed (and don't require power).
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What? This is easy. Power budget.
Paper doesn't need power to view it. A sheet of paper can be stuck on anything in a space station. It can also be put on a clipboard. There are lots of clipboards up there, I'll bet.
Uh, a space station has a finite amount of space.
A fucking eReader is the easy solution for a power budget. Probably consumes less power than a device shitting out 1,000 pages every month. The only thing there are "lots of" right now is piles and piles of pointless shit laying around in paper form, taking up valuable real estate.
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Uh, a space station has a finite amount of space.
A fucking eReader is the easy solution for a power budget. Probably consumes less power than a device shitting out 1,000 pages every month. The only thing there are "lots of" right now is piles and piles of pointless shit laying around in paper form, taking up valuable real estate.
Because I'm sure NASA hasn't done the math on this tradeoff... /sarcasm
Re: What the... (Score:2)
E-readers totally SUCK for reading multi-page technical documents where you have to rapidly flip pages & view multiple pages at once. They're just too damn slow... slow rendering, slow updates, and even slower UI.
One simple improvement the e-ink industry could make to improve performance: split the page into 2-16 chunks that can be updated in unison, just like how dual-scan LCD displays made passive LCDs semi-tolerable until TFT technology became affordable.
COULD someone build something like a bound e-
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I'm sure you know far better than the NASA engineers who work on the ISS program.
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If they throw them out the window, that's probably quite a long way.
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it costs $10,000 per pound to put something into orbit
I don't think that carries over to putting something into something else that's already in orbit. Besides, that's an average cost and having lighter paper will not equate to $625 an ounce in cost savings. Printers need thicker paper to absorb ink anyway - you'd have to do a lot more work to make non-standard paper work.
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I still have a LaserJet 4000 and LaserJet 4100
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Fundamentally there was not a lot of difference in HP laser products other than the speed of paper handling for something like two decades. We've only recently seen a push to retire out the HP LaserJet 4 and 5 printers, and only because of the costs for toner due to lack of availability. Until then we just let them naturally go when they physically failed, which was not often.
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Really? I have just done a quick check and I can get a toner cartridge of a LaserJet 5M for 18GBP delivered next day. Heck I can also get one for a LaserJet 5L. My LaserJet 5L purchased in 1995 after a roller replacement about 15 years ago is still going strong. At some point it got a 4MB RAM upgrade for printing complex pages and sits on a JetDirect print server these days. They don't make printers like they used to.
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Indeed. Those old HP lasers were built like a tank. I know of quite a few 4 and 5L models still working great.
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Yes, but when you've got 2000 printers and you want to maintain ready stocks of other parts besides the toner cartridges to avoid excessive downtime, it starts to make sense to surplus them when you've exhausted your parts and subsequently had enough non-repair failures that meant users had overly long outages. Besides, the replacement printers kick out pages 5x faster and may have job-control features that let the printer hold the job until the user keys in their code, similar to how the copiers do it.
Re:The inevitable comment. (Score:4, Interesting)
It means that the Paper Cassette needs attention, and the attention is to "load letter" paper in to it.
HP printers had two-character displays back in the day. "PC" for paper cassette was what they came up with. When they increased the number of characters they simply added to the existing messages. I'm going to hazard a guess that industrial printing control platforms could take that information through some kind of management network, and with newer printers still using that same system it was easier to just leave the original two-character message so that the control system still knew how to parse it.
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As informative as your post is, it is unfortunately a WOOOOOOOOSH [youtu.be] moment.
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I've seen Office Space. I am well aware of the original reference.
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Not for fucking pictures of Timmy and Lucy playing with old yellar and your wifes upskirts or husbands dick pics.
To quote Elton John, "I miss the Earth so much, I miss my wife, It's lonely out in space, On such a timeless flight..."
Seems like a way of keeping the astronauts sane, probably no small feat.
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can they get a tablet with a battery that is easy to swap? and has SD cards?
Re:A printer? In space? (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with you 100%. I think a 9" e-reader (hard to come by these days) would be perfect.
Here's the deal - flight certification.
On the station they're still mostly using IBM Thinkpads. Not Lenovo Thinkpads, IBM Thinkpads. Let that sink in for a moment.
Everything that goes up into space has to be flight certified other than a few personal effects for each astronaut, and even then there's criteria that must be met. It was a pretty big deal during the last few shuttle missions when the Astronauts were allowed to bring personal iPods for music, but only if they were modified to run on Alkaline AA's and they had to stay on the shuttle, they were not allowed to pass through the airlock into the station which they were not certified for.
Getting things certified for flight is part of the reason so much of the equipment used in space missions is antiquated. The moment something actually passes the certification process and is allowed to fly it's been in the process for so long it's several generations behind, and they don't look to replace it. If something gets certified for use in space and they need exactly one on the station in active use they'll buy a dozen or more, send three up keeping two in storage in case it's needed for a replacement and keep the rest on the ground. Every time they dip into a spare on the station they'll send a new spare up to put back in storage.
If they thought e-paper was the way to go, which BTW I agree - I can tell you about the old system that predates what they're using now - and they were sending up e-paper today it would likely be a Nook Simple Touch or a fourth gen Kindle - the original Kindle Touch that didn't last long, because that's how far back the certification process would have started.
The OLD system before they started sending everything up as PDF's about five years ago, was something that looked a little like a transparency projector, you know the thing they probably used in your classroom in the 1990's, only instead of a mirror at the top it was a bad-ass Sony camera with a super expensive lens pointed at a flight book. Seriously, somebody on the ground would turn a book to a page they needed, set it on this setup and transmit a video signal over the K-Band up to them, and it was likely to transmit for hours.
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Would you use a printer that wasn't field-tested by millions of consumers?
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I don't know why they even bothered to mention the Envy 5600 in the story:
Except they removed the fax capability, removed the copy capability, removed the scan capability, removed the glass, 3D printed a whole new paper handling mechanism, changed the rod+printer carriage system so it would operate in zero G, replaced a whole slew of parts with fire-retardant plastic and added a bunch of absorbent pads to capture any st
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I don't know why they even bothered to mention the Envy 5600 in the story:
Except they removed the fax capability, removed the copy capability, removed the scan capability, removed the glass, 3D printed a whole new paper handling mechanism, changed the rod+printer carriage system so it would operate in zero G, replaced a whole slew of parts with fire-retardant plastic and added a bunch of absorbent pads to capture any stray ink drops.
Sounds to me like they built a specialized printer from scratch.
They can now sell the HP Envy 5600 "as used in Space!!!"
I can imagine a lot of slashdot space ...enthusiasts (don't say nutters)...falling for it.
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