Astronauts to get putty to fix holes in shuttle
I know they’re trying, but I don’t know about this.
This is one of the most complex vehicles ever built, not a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle, for crying out loud.
I don’t know what pressure they use in orbital operations, but sea-level atmospheric pressure hovers around 15 pounds per square inch.
That’s not a lot. I was stunned when I saw the schematics for NASA’s EV suit. That thing wasn’t designed for a vacuum, it was designed to protect somebody from hellfire and brimstone.
Over-the-counter epoxy putty should be good enough to plug pin-hole leaks
You want to know what’s more amazing? They don’t intend to use some kind of hi-tech sprayer to apply the patching compound, no, they’re going to use foam brushes that you can buy at Wal-Mart!!! The crown jewel of hi-tech is turning into the Millenium Falcon! 
My husband is part of the Gravity Probe B program and I got to see it in various stages of assembly. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I saw how much of it was aluminum foil smushed into various shapes.
Are you sure it was aluminum foil?, it sounds more like aluminized mylar, which is used quite a lot as a thermal protection layer, basically they wrap the whole thing on it; weights hundreds of times less than aluminum foil, by the way.
The sound of the future of space exploration:
Beep!…Beep!…Bib beep!…Beep!…tickatickaticka…Will that be paper or plastic?
[George W. Bush]
What those boys need is some bondo!
[/George W. Bush]
The original tiles are attached with silicone adhesive (cite), so I don’t see why they shouldn’t use similar material for repair. What else are you going to use, anyway? Metal fasteners would melt during reentry, and you can’t weld ceramic tiles.
Anyway what voguevixen saw was probably MLI (multilayer insulation), aka thermal blanket. They are made up of alternate layers of aluminized plastic (usually mylar) and synthetic woven fabric (e.g. decron). You just can’t find a more efficient and lightweight insulation material.
It was good enough to save Luke’s six!!
Low tech solutions to high tech problems.
Ummmmm, I don’t know how to break this to you booker but Star Wars isn’t real, it was a film involving models that were intrically made, but nonetheless crappy in terms of materials.
Now pass me the duct tape, I feel like going to the moon.
Does that come in a Reynolds Wrap box? 'Cos there were plenty of them laying around. There was the more high-tech-y stuff too. Like a super-thin gold foil which is obviously more job appropriate. Oh and the million-dollar gyroscopes that are the most perfectly round things in the world.
Oh, that’s just for use in the lab. We often wrap components and lab equipment in Reynolds aluminum foil for storage. It’s clean, lint free and doesn’t accumulate static charge like plastic films.
The other main use is for vacuum chambers. Before testing sensitive components in a vacuum chamber the chamber is “baked,” i.e. heated to over 100 C to evaporate off any contamination. In most labs we wrap the chamber with Reynolds aluminum foil to insulate it from air. Not a terribly effective insulation but it’s clean (no lint or dust) and it resists high temperatures.