CNN is a garbage company with garbage privacy invasion. Here's a link to the article where you don't have to sign your soul away to this devil.
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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archive.today isn't fantastic either, unfortunately. A while back they took advantage of their popularity to DDoS another site that they had a beef with. uBlock Origin had to add a rule to prevent visits to the site from causing your computer to make an entirely unnecessary network request that contributed to the attack.
What's an alternative? I'm open to using a different one.
Only one I know of is archive.org / The Wayback Machine, but that's got limitations that archive.today never had, since the latter ignored corporate restrictions & U.S. copyright law. So not a perfect replacement, sadly.
I did try org first, but it didn't seem to work with CNN (for copyright issues, I'm assuming). Is there a foss self hosted alternative?
None that I'm aware of unfortunately.
Tl;dr. The geniuses at nasa didn't take frozen space into consideration, and piss froze in the pipes, clogging the lines. Morons.
Saying they didn't take it into consideration sounds overly harsh, especially without a source for it. Reminds me of that old tale of how "NASA made a space pen, the Russians used a pencil," which neglected to mention how problematic pencil graphite was in space.
I think it's fair to give NASA the benefit of the doubt.
Why the animosity?
You send people to space, where they can't just pull over when something goes wrong, and you put their lives at risk by not thinking of the things that could harm or kill them? That's why.
I'm pretty sure the astronauts signed up knowing the risks. They're also extremely trained for this mission which is why they were able to resolve it. They aren't just along for the ride.
And by 3:30 p.m. ET Saturday, early in Day 4 of the flight, mission controllers had a plan of attack
Mission control temporarily solved it, while the astronauts were sleeping. But, yes, I know they're highly trained and are far better equipped for these types of missions than any of us. However, the risks they signed up for don't include those borne of stupidity and carelessness. Nasa should have done better. These astronauts deserve better. Nasa has no excuses here.
Pretty sure giving Lockheed or Boeing contracts at this point covers the careless and stupid part.
Yeaahhh but there's at least some shared accountability. Lockheed messed up and NASA didn't catch it.
That isn't really how contracts work, NASA is paying Lockheed to do the work and certify its good to go. Unless there is some meeting where Lockheed engineers were saying "the pee gonna freeze" and NASA said nope we have to go we don't have time to fix it (sort of what happened with Challenger), its up to Lockheed to deliver what they were paid to. In this case a working human spaceflight certified capsule.
It seems plausible to me that a noncritical system like this wouldn't be specifically called out in the certification of the capsule, we have only made a few like this before, and the worry is more "will this blow up and if something goes wrong can we fix it" not "is the pee tube warm".
I do think NASA should be more involved in the engineering of these things, but the rich want to mine asteroids or whatever, so they lobby for private spaceflight and that's what we've got now. Thus the corporations get the blame when they screw up, not NASA.
Orion isn't Dragon, Starliner, or Dream Chaser, though. There was much much heavier NASA involvement in all the minute requirements and designs compared to those other examples.
Haven't they done this before?
Hopefully they have a backup system or a way to heat the pipes.
They've done this many time, and, apparently, didn't think of it. Per the article, they turned the shuttle to face the sun, so the piss melts.
Next problem, they have to waste fuel turning the ship to defrost the piss.
Or they have to turn the ship after peeing to freeze the shit because it stinks.
They don't even need to burn fuel to turn the ship. If it has reaction wheels or CMGs they can do it by making a few minor adjustments in the gimbals or reaction wheel speeds.
I'm not sure they need much fuel anymore, their current trajectory gets them around the moon and back towards earth using just the moon's gravity.