Another NASA employee told Digital Trends that the transfer of the ISS to commercial companies is already well underway, and the influx in commercial launches to the ISS ought to reduce NASA’s overall involvement in this particular project.
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Extravehicular activity has become a regular part of the job for ISS astronauts, with almost 200 successful EVAs completed since the ISS’ inception. The second docking adaptor will be launched to the space station in late 2017. The adapter will work with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. The funding for the space station will not be extended beyond 2024 because NASA will leave low-Earth orbit to go to the moon, Mars and far, far away galaxies. Ten years later, the landscape of humanity’s doorstep into the cosmos has fundamentally changed, thanks to efforts by NASA and American commercial companies. “Whether a commercial space station is a hotel, a research facility, a university, or a combination of all of these ideas is open for discussion”.
As NASA prepares to stop funding the International Space Station (ISS) in about a decade, the agency is appealing to companies to use the science lab to test their wildest space-business ideas while they still can.
“With that, we have a new port of call”, NASA commentator Rob Navias said as the space station flew over Singapore at 10:40 a.m. (1440 UTC).
It’s the first spacewalk for Rubins, a biologist specializing in infectious diseases now on her first spaceflight. SpaceX’s Commercial Crew Program will offer a newly designed Crew Dragon capsule for ferrying crew members to and from the ISS. But the initial unit, which was to be attached to Harmony’s forward port, was lost in June 2015 when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket suffered a catastrophic launch failure, destroying a station-bound Dragon cargo ship.
However, NASA spokeswoman Tabatha Thompson, through an email, emphasized that NASA is only looking to gather ideas on operating models, contract structures, and other business plans for ISS commercial efforts. NASA also announced the selection of six companies to help advance the Journey to Mars by developing ground prototypes and concepts for deep space habitats. It was the first significant water-related issue with a NASA spacesuit since a much more serious leak flooded Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano’s helmet in 2013.
Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies, which also work with NASA, declined to comment.
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