A NASA astronaut, Kjell Lindgren scheduled to fly for a five-month trip to worldwide space station (ISS) is thrilled about his upcoming travel and the fiasco of three rockets crash over the past several months does not bother him. The astronauts are set to blast off into space from Kazakhstan July 23.
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Another U.S. supply mission failed when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket broke apart shortly after liftoff.
The problem was a glitch on the carrier Proton-M rocket, similar to an incident previous year when the same model of rocket fell to Earth carrying Russia’s most advanced communications satellite.
The trio will be joining Russia’s Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko, as well as Scott Kelly of NASA, who are continuing research and maintenance aboard the ISS.
Although three resupply missions in the last eight months have experienced catastrophic failure on launch, NASA’s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations William Gerstenmaier commends the worldwide Space Station crew for doing an excellent job of balancing their edible supplies.
In addition to the updated benefits book, NASA released its third iteration of the global Space Station Reference Guide, which explains what the space station does and how it works. “They’ve done a tremendous job of balancing all the consumables on orbit”. One of the most important items lost in the SpaceX explosion was a piece of equipment that filters water.
Last October’s Cygnus re-supply mission didn’t even make it that far, as its newly-upgraded Antares 130 launch vehicle exploded in spectacular fashion a mere 6 seconds after launch at Orbital Science’s Wallops Island launch facility, Virginia. Imagine being cooped up 250 miles above the Earth with no new supplies since April 17.
“I take many types of pictures but the global Space Station is a wonderful target and one I’ve wanted to capture for a long time”, O’Donnell said in a statement. It circles the planet every 90 minutes.
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She said studies conducted on the orbital facility have produced devices engineered to help control the effects of asthma as well as detection systems that allow for better monitoring of the planet and improved response to natural disasters.
