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Monday, May 24, 1999

Astronauts will wear earplugs during visit to space station
Crew will install mufflers over circulation fans, ducts and vents that are making Zarya noisier than a busy highway
Associated Press

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - The Russian half of the international space station is so noisy that astronauts will wear earplugs when they drop off supplies later this week.
   Blasting fans are making parts of the Russian-built Zarya control module as loud as a busy highway. And over on the space station's American-made side, the communication system is on the fritz.
  The visiting shuttle astronauts will spend much of their time repairing the 6-month-old space station, already a fixer-upper.
   Liftoff is set for Thursday, one week late because of hail damage to Discovery's giant fuel tank.
   All seven astronauts are taking earplugs to wear inside Zarya. The earplugs should also help the crew sleep better aboard Discovery, which is in a constant state of clatter but less so than Zarya.
   The astronauts should be able to hear any alarms that go off in Zarya even if their ears are plugged. At the very least, said commander Kent Rominger, they will be able to hear warnings on their battery-powered speaker microphones, which they'll carry over from the shuttle.
  The noise level registers just over 72 decibels in parts of Zarya (Russian for "sunrise"). Acoustic experts say that's roughly equivalent to a busy highway or a turned-up TV 10 feet away.
   The space shuttle limit is 68 decibels, although it's exceeded that on occasion because of unusually loud payloads, said Jerry Goodman, a NASA engineer who's in charge of space station acoustics. One crew even returned with temporary loss of hearing.
  The astronauts who connected the first two pieces of the space station in December told their colleagues it was difficult for anyone in Zarya to hear someone speaking from the Unity module just next door.
  "For the short term, it's not nearly the kind of noise that would damage our hearing," said Rominger. "I guess at this point, it would be considered more of a nuisance than anything."
  The concern is for astronauts who will be cooped up in the space station for three to four months. The first permanent crew is expected to move in early next year.
  To make the station quieter and thereby safer, Rominger and his crew will install 15 foam covers over air-circulating fans, ducts and vents in Zarya while docked for nearly six days.
   Goodman hopes the mufflers will get Zarya's noise level down to the 60 decibels intended for the entire space station, or at least close. If not, permanent crews will have to wear earplugs inside the module - hardly a desirable way to live.
   The potentially dangerous din existed long before Zarya, the first station component, was launched by the Russians last November. The Russians simply did not pay as much attention to acoustics as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration would have liked, Goodman said. (The American-made Unity module, for instance, has a noise level of 58 decibels.)
  Other problems have since cropped up aboard the space station: a U.S. communication system isn't relaying data back to Earth and Russian batteries aren't charging properly.
  Flight director Paul Hill likens the space station to a new car that needs to go back to the dealer for tweaking.
  "And in this case, it's an extremely complicated car that we can't get our hands on after we threw the thing up into orbit," Hill said. "It's been through a lot. But we're all really pleased. Of course, we'd rather have no failures at all, but that's not very realistic."
  James Oberg, an independent consultant on Russian space affairs, said the battery problem could have been caught if Zarya's launch had been delayed to allow for more comprehensive testing of the power system. The noise problem also could have been remedied, he said.
  The mufflers are little more than Band-Aids, Oberg said.
  "If the trend continues ... two years from now or four years from now, the crew will be doing nothing but work-arounds," Oberg said.
  Zarya isn't the only station compartment that's too noisy. Even worse is Russia's so-called service module, which is supposed to be launched as living quarters by year's end. The oft-delayed module also does not meet NASA standards for protection against space debris.
  "We have what we have," said Frank Culbertson, deputy program manager for space station operations, "and we're trying to aggressively deal with any deficiencies that we've found."

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