Paint obviously is not the right tool for making seals air tight.
Doing the whole module sounds like a lot of mass though.
A few years ago a Soyuz was improperly drilled during manufacture. This was patched with a super epoxy... and then began leaking air on orbit. Paint won't seal what a super aerospace epoxy failed to seal.
Because it's more extreme.
Do you think a soft vacuum of 0.002 atmospheres of pressure would be notably easier to prevent leaks into?
> A few years ago a Soyuz was improperly drilled during manufacture. This was patched with a super epoxy... and then began leaking air on orbit. Paint won't seal what a super aerospace epoxy failed to seal.
Wasn't the fix on the ground a secret patch by the person that drilled the hole? I don't trust that to have been done properly.
And then when they noticed it was leaking... they used the super aerospace epoxy. Which was labeled as temporary but as far as I know it's still the fix.
Also that was a serious hole, 2mm wide, not a microhole like you'd try to fix with paint.
Now, will it immediately off-gas and embrittle on exposure to vacuum? Different question.
In college, we'd use toothpaste for the holes left from nails in the walls we hung up our posters with.
Or coat the outside with a soapy water solution.
If you mean on the inside, it'd be a lot of time and disruption to devote to maintenance on a station that's already having to spend an increasing amount of time on maintenance instead of science.
The modules have a lot of stuff that has been wired between them over the years, all that would need to be sorted out, consequences understood and more before ever starting the work, and by then it'll be time for the ISS to retire anyway.
Wouldn't all paint works well in microgravity? If it didn't, I would think you wouldn't be able to apply it to your floor, walls, and ceiling, with the same paint.
Paint that would fall to the ground if it didn't stick to anything on Earth, would just be floating around in microgravity. Any dissolved gasses or moisture can usually passively sort themselves out due to their differing masses, but again, not in microgravity.
> Any dissolved gasses or moisture can usually passively sort themselves out due to their differing masses, but again, not in microgravity.
This is a solved problem with the ECLSS system [1], required from humans releasing ~3.3 lbs of water per day, and exhaling gases that must not accumulate or form dead zones, and normal VOCs scrubbers [2] due to most modern materials releasing them.
I suspect it would be more of a "how many extra filters do we send" type problem and cycling the collected water a couple more times.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-concentrations-o...
It might be hard to access the actual pressure hull from the inside (there's probably insulation and padding on top)
If you use paint, you somehow have to get rid of the solvent in it when it dries, which might be a problem when painting a whole module
I don't know what solvents would do, but I remember that astronauts' bone density loss in space means there are challenges around managing the significant amount of calcium captured by the air scrubbers in the ISS.
Clearly this needs some JB-Weld :P
Because, space. It's hard. Unbelievably hard.
Paper?
No Paper. No string. No sellotape.