William Atkins
Thursday, 16 April 2009 21:16
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
In the Guardian article, “
Cosmonauts banned from using astronauts' space station toilet”, it is reported that,
“Padalka told Novaya Gazeta newspaper that officials had rejected his request to work out on the American exercise bike during their pre-training mission. Worse than that, they had also ruled that American and Russian crew members should use their own "national toilets", with Russian crew banned from using the luxurious American astro-loo."
Look at the silliness this generates with regards to media coverage and titles of their articles — headlines about space toilets, astro-loo, and the like — all because some politicians and bureaucrats can’t seem to figure out what is more important: some short-term financial deals or long-term scientific and technological progress and working together with international partners.
And, this is not concentrated on just the Russians. The silliness goes right over to U.S. politicians and bureaucrats, too, and, no doubt, to other countries’ politicians and bureaucrats.
Rules and regulations are great. They are needed to maintain a somewhat steady state in our society.
If we didn’t have rules by which we drive our cars, for instance, we would be driving at excessive speeds, driving on the wrong side of the road (maybe there wouldn’t even be right and wrong sides of the roads), and other safety and health problems on the road.
So, rules and regulations are needed, but sometimes they need to be improved for the sake of logic and common sense.
Let these cosmonauts and astronauts use all of the bathrooms on the International Space Station, and all of the exercise equipment and eat all of the food that is brought up.
When I was working for a major contractor for NASA the same types of silliness occurred just because company officials are so inflexible. In the late 1980s, before personal printers were everywhere, our 300 or so engineers and technicians used two large printers in our department for all of our space shuttle mission preparations.
Page three concludes with this story, and a moral for the toilet story in space.
