You know, “hatch”. But it’s funnier saying door. Could a ship just dock with it, equalise pressure, and open the hatch? Or is there some sort of security? I tend to think there’s no lock because of a macabre situation where the crew are dead and the station is being recovered. But it’s amusing to think in space they don’t need to keep the doors locked.
I mean, if you have the ability to build a spacecraft and get there, you’ve already overcome far larger barriers. Any physical security on the door is going to be comparatively irrelevant as a barrier.
Locks, like walls and other passive defenses, aren’t designed to stop people. They’re designed to keep basically-honest people honest and slow down the rest to the point where other things, like people, can deal with them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe#Burglary_ratings
The highest safe rating here against burglary is 30 minutes of resistance against someone equipped with suitable tools (like, cutting torches and such).
If you can get up to the ISS, it’s a pretty safe bet that nobody’s going to show up in 30 minutes to do anything about you entering.
TIL the ISS astronauts are sitting ducks.
Security through inconvenience.
Well, yeah. If you wanted to take them out all you’d have to do is launch a rocket and rendezvous with the station at high relative velocity. Even low velocity would be destructive. There is no missile defense for space assets.
Oh, I was just planning to steal their PS5 and flat screen.
Didn’t some of the old russian capsules have a gun as standard to shoot any dangerous wildlife when they landed in Siberia? Not sure if that has continued, probably not a good idea anyway!
This is the lock picking lawyer,and today…
Heh. From a legal standpoint, if you burgle the ISS, it sounds like you can manage to get in trouble in an impressive number of jurisdictions.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10869/2
Congressional Research Service
If You Do the Space Crime, You May Do the Space Time
International Space Station Intergovernmental Agreement
Commercial space flights from the United States have included at least one purely private visit to the International Space Station (ISS), a permanently inhabited research-oriented facility in low Earth orbit cooperatively operated by the United States, Member States of the European Space Agency, Russia, Canada, and Japan. Criminal conduct on the ISS implicates an ISS-specific agreement. Modifying and displacing an earlier agreement, the 1998 ISS Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) signed by the governments of the cooperating countries provides that, in general, each country retains “jurisdiction and control” over (1) the “flight elements” or areas it provides and registers in accordance with the agreement (for instance, the habitation module provided by the United States); and (2) “personnel in or on the Space Station who are its nationals.” In other words, unless a more specific provision of the IGA applies, each signatory retains jurisdiction over the areas and personnel it has provided to the project.
So it sounds like basically, from a criminal jurisdiction standpoint, the ISS is a bunch of little territories, made up of bus-length modules.
So if you go through the ISS grabbing stuff, you’re probably now committing crimes in US territory, territory of European states, Russian territory, Canadian territory and Japanese territory.
With the exception of the recent Starliner fiasco, there are never more people on board the station than there are seats on the visiting spacecraft. In the event of a catastrophe, the Soyuz and Dragons function as lifeboats. To leave the station, you need to be able to close the station hatch from the spacecraft side. If you didn’t, the entire station would depressurize in your face when you undocked, which could cause a navigational hazard for the escaping ship.
Therefore, it must be possible to crank the station hatch shut from the visiting vehicle side, and, it stands to reason, the reverse is true.
This is a photo of the space-facing side of Shuttle / Dragon docking port on the station. The middle is a target to assist pilots in manually flying into the port straight and level. It was needed for the shuttle, newer spacecraft have automatic guidance. At 12 o’clock is a handle to help pull the hatch shut. (To open, you push the hatch in.) At 6 o’clock I believe is a socket you can put a crank into to seal or unseal the hatch. At 10:30 is a pressure equalization valve.
Brilliant, thanks :)
They don’t have locks, but they do have a doorbell.
And a cat flap
:<
For when the aliens come to visit?
Them having an additional gate, that is locked by a bikelock is now my headcanon.
I KNEW I should have invested more lockpicking attributes before starting this quest!
How did the first astronauts get inside?
I’m picturing someone lying in a tube while they weld it shut lol…
They built it around them.
Well, they are airlocked
Really only a problem on Midnight. Spectacular views, but the locals are a nightmare.
Is this a Doctor Who reference?
Yes indeed.
People are strange.
They’re mechanically secured, of course. I don’t see why they’d need locks though.
Aliens?
This is a question I never ever thought about, but thank you for posting it - now I wonder about it as well
On occasion they put a padlock on the inside. There was an incident where a guy was suicidal, because his lifetime project was cancelled while he was up there.
