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.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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They’re mechanically secured, of course. I don’t see why they’d need locks though.
Aliens?
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.
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.
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.
TIL the ISS astronauts are sitting ducks.
Security through inconvenience.
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!
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.
I think the question has two answers:
Are they locked from the outside? And are the locked from the inside?
My understanding is that they are actually locked. Here are two links with some information.
First, there's an interesting bit of lore about the doors on the space shuttle that might shed some insight:
*What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back? [Ars Technica]*
Apparently the Space Shuttle originally had a handle for opening the door that was found after the shuttle entered use to have a bad habit of instilling a bit of "call-of-the-void". They eventually added a padlock. Also, it should be noted that these doors are not Star Trek-like sliding doors with a bunch of electronics. They're much more like submarine bulkheads with big-ass mechanics, as I understand it. This was on the shuttle, but I think the design logic of the ISS was inherited from the space shuttle.
Second is this post on Stack Exchange:
User TidalWave explains how hatches in general on the ISS are not accessible from the outside. They're opened from the inside. I would assume that some exceptions probably exist for edge cases. They must have had a way to get in the first time, for instance. But by and large, it appears that the ISS is not accessible from the outside.
They must have had a way to get in the first time, for instance.
Not necessarily. There are lots of comparisons to submarines but it's more comparable to airplanes. Part of the security on a plane is that it is physically impossible to open the door while the plane is flying. The pressure difference between the pressurized inside and thin air outside would require superhuman force to open.
In a similar vein, when the ISS was constructed it wasn't initially pressurized. This would make opening the door from the outside trivial from a pressurization standpoint. As long as the only means to pressurize it could be triggered from inside, there'd be no way it would be pressurized without someone inside.
Is it physically impossible or physically impossible for a human? Obviously something can punch a hole through it, but is the material not strong enough to sustain the force needed for it and to hold together?
Physically impossible to open the door in a fashion it was meant to be. Airplane doors are designed to open inwards. The air pressure inside the plane pushed the door into place evenly over the entire surface. Given an approximate pressure differential of 8psi spread across a minimum 24x48" airplane for would be 10,752 pounds of force that would need to be overcome to open the door. There is no way to apply that kind of force from inside the plane that wouldn't catastrophically damage the door prior to opening. You can't just pull the handle that hard without it breaking. There'd be nothing to grab that would pull out in without failure.
So maybe you could rig up a machine to break a portion of the door and create a hole. But the door would in no way be intact or functional afterwards.
For a human. By having doors open towards the side with the higher pressure it makes actually moving the door exceptionally difficult even if the handle is actuated to allow it to open. I'm also pretty sure that most airplanes have mechanical latches that prevent the handle from moving to the open position as well.
However, everything is possible with enough and properly applied forces. You may not end up with the door in the same shape you started with though.
That is a super cool implementation of physics.
Interesting. But surely they must have had a plan to recover the station if crew were all incapacitated? With it now being near end of life it doesn't matter as much, but early on when billions had been invested? They surely wouldn't have canned the station in event of a catastrophic air leak?
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 ‘no’ 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.
"Lockpicking lawyer here, and this one is a doozy"
HAHAHAH
When they eventually deorbit the space station they'll need a way to close and lock the door from the outside when everyone else is out.
Yes, they won't need an atmosphere if there are no people on board but undocking the station side hatch open would cause it to vent the atmosphere and anything not tied down. This could cause the station to spin uncontrollably and potentially do damage to the return craft with the crew on board.
So there must be some sort of way to manipulate the lock from the outside on at least one of the docking ports.
This would also be necessary in an event where they needed to evacuate the station.
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.
This is a question I never ever thought about, but thank you for posting it - now I wonder about it as well