The docking adapter will allow SpaceX and Boeing to park their spacecraft on the space station and allow crew to come aboard.
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“Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-Earth orbit”, NASA’s Bill Hill said.
Space station astronauts are taking a spacewalk to install a new door for visitors. The Canadarm2 robotic arm help Rubins and Williams carry out their work by extracting a docking adapter from the latest SpaceX Dragon resupply capsule.
The spacewalk will see Rubins and Williams connect the adaptor to its port, a job made easier by the fact that the necessary cables have been positioned by astronauts on four previous spacewalks.
The ISS has typically featured a six-person team: three Russians, two Americans, and generally one astronaut from Canada, Japan, or the 11-nation European Space Agency.
Nasa also requested ideas on operating models, contract structures, and other sustainable business plans for future commercial endeavours 400km above the planet.
Two astronauts of NASA went on a spacewalk today 8:05 am (1205 GMT) to attach a docking port on the exterior of International Space Station (ISS). If you would like to discuss another topic, look for a relevant article. Jon Cowart, Mission Manager for the Commercial Crew Program said, “By enabling commercial companies to take over trips to the space station and low-Earth orbit, we are helping pave the way for further exploration of our solar system”.
Williams and Rubins plan to make another spacewalk on September 1 to retract an out-of-use solar array cooling panel and install a high-definition television camera on the ISS’s exterior frame. Before the installation, only Russian vehicles could dock with the space station. This will be his fourth spacewalk and Flight Engineer Rubins’ first.
The spacewalkers finished the task in just over two hours. Both will remain out in the space for around six hours for arranging parking space for commercial spacecraft that would arrive on the ISS in near future. Today’s almost seven-hour EVA has come a long way since man’s first venture into open space, when Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov spent twelve minutes outside the Voskhod 2 spacecraft.
This combination of images provided by NASA shows the inflation of a new experimental room at the International Space Station on Saturday, May 28, 2016.
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SpaceX’s crew Dragon ship will fly on the company’s own Falcon rocket from a former shuttle launch pad at Kennedy Space Center and, at mission’s end, splash down off the Florida coast. But that mission failed when the launch vehicle disintegrated about two minutes after launch.
