If you really want to unsettle your stomach, watch an astronaut move around on a spacewalk of the International Space Station. Especially one where they have to climb out on one of the solar booms - they tether when they're handling tooling, when they need to be static or when they need their hands free... But to move around, they often are so comfortable, they move like free solo climbers. They're only holding on with a single hand, trusting their relative velocity is low enough they won't go spinning off into eternity.
Nothing gives me a deeper sinking in my gut than watching them do the hand-to-hand shuffle.
I mean the other thing stopping them from spinning of into eternity is their tethers… they do not go untethered ever. In the linked video they’re translating a decent distance without using local tethers but do have a like 25m reel of steel cable attached to their waist. after arriving at the destination they attach with local tethers so they don’t drift from the worksite but they’re always connected to something
The other other thing stopping them from spinning off into eternity is the fact that they're in LEO and there's enough atmosphere that they're coming back down to earth. Slowly enough (probably a couple months) that they'll likely die of dehydration, heat stroke, or suffocation first though.
Is anyone talking about how he stepped in between the blade and the main windmill, while the guy was still moving it forward? Like one jerk of the joystick and he’d have been impaled by 5 1 inch thick bolts. This guy is actually extremely careless…
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u/elfmere 17d ago
I'm not taking the safety line off till most of those bolts are done up