MILLEDGEVILLE — Last February I came home from work to discover a pipe had burst in my laundry room, flooding my garage and washing down my driveway. Of course it was late on a Friday evening, because these things never happen during normal business hours. A quick consultation of the Yellow Pages revealed that there are quite a few local plumbing businesses willing to come to your house after hours and on weekends — for a price, of course.

The City water department stopped by within half an hour to shut off my water, and the plumber showed up about an hour later. He quickly fixed the busted pipe, installed a new valve and turned the water back on. Then he charged me an arm and a leg, but by that point I was just grateful everything was working again. It could have been a lot worse.

When something goes wrong with the plumbing on the International Space Station, it’s never a quick or easy fix, and let’s not even talk about money. The astronauts have to gear up, put on space suits more often than not and get to work themselves.

If the air conditioning croaks at your house, you call in your trusty mechanic and usually the problem can be solved the same day or soon thereafter (again, if your AC goes out, half the neighborhood will suddenly have the same problem and the mechanics make a killing). You might be uncomfortable for a little while, but you can always turn on a fan, spritz some water on yourself, take a cool shower or head for the grocery store produce section to cool off.

When the plumbing on the ISS goes bad, it’s always a life-or-death situation. And there is a whole lot of plumbing up there: pipes for air, water, waste, hydraulics and coolant, just to name a few. And all those pipes have literally thousands of connections, because as you know, the ISS is made up of many smaller modules that are all interconnected. Any connection is therefore a potential leak. Furthermore, without the benefit of gravity, fluids don’t just move through pipes by themselves — you need pumps for everything.

The coolant systems on the ISS are especially critical to life support. The ISS has two major sources of heat to deal with: sunlight and electronics. Temperatures soar into the hundreds of degrees on the sunny side, and of course every module is crammed full of computers and other delicate electronics that all generate a lot of heat.

A few weeks ago they had both a leak and a pump failure in one of the coolant loops on the ISS, prompting the station residents to shut down a bunch of equipment not needed for day-to-day survival, so a lot of research came to a grinding halt.

Two astronauts with prior ISS plumbing experience were working on the problem as of press time. They replaced coolant pumps, disconnected a lot of lines and reconnected them with new equipment. Just like plumbing at your house, it really isn’t a lot of fun. As they say, it’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it. And if your very life depends on it, you learn fast and you will love doing it.

Luckily the ISS has a lot of spare parts in store, because unlike your friendly neighborhood plumber, you can’t run to the hardware store and pick up that funky pipe fitting or that odd valve while you’re fixing things. Sending supplies into space takes months, even years, of planning. Space agencies all over the world are big believers in redundancy — there are backups for the backup to every backup, and you will need it at some point. If it’s something mechanical, some engineer on Earth can talk you through the process, and if you made it to the ISS in the first place, you are a smart cookie anyway. And if you want to do your scientific research, you better take good care of your equipment and have some rudimentary understanding of how it all works.

It’s still the good old pioneer spirit of those brave folks that ventured out into unknown territory, and they have to fix and maintain everything themselves. It’s good to have repair skills. Anyone feels confident changing a light bulb, but would you trust yourself to replace a socket in a lamp? Again, with a good guide to talk you though it, you would do just fine.

The ISS is a very complicated habitat, and hundreds of people look after its well-being, ultimately all with the same goal: to keep the station residents safe and healthy and to support them in any emergency that arises. The grounds personnel have to be ready for anything. You know the classic movie scenario where all the pilots on a plane get sick and the flight controller at the airport talks a passenger through landing the plane?

It’s a little bit like that.

Anything you ever wanted to know about the International Space Station can be found here: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Beate Czogalla is the associate professor of theater design in the Department of Music and Theater at Georgia College & State University. She has had a lifelong interest in space exploration and has been a solar system ambassador for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/ NASA for many years. She can be reached at our_space2@yahoo.com