The first of two docks for SpaceX and Boeing are about to be installed on the International Space Station.
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“It is fantastic that now we’ve opened up a new chapter in the story of the International Space Station, putting the front door on this for future commercial vehicles”, radioed station commander Jeff Williams, who worked with astronaut Kate Rubins to attach and outfit the IDA.
Another IDA was expected to be launched in 2018.
Once the CST-100 and crewed Dragon begin operational flights, routinely carrying crews to and from the station, NASA will have independent access to the orbiting laboratory for the first time since the space shuttle’s last flight in 2011. “We’re staring at the IDA daily in the SpaceX trunk and we’re ready to go put it on board”, according to a news report published by Space Flight Insider.
The space station has typically hosted a crew of six in recent years, comprised of three Russian cosmonauts, two American astronauts and one additional astronaut from another primary station partner — Canada, Japan or the European Space Agency.
Nasa told Ars Technica that Russian Federation is considering reducing its ISS crew to just two members, but insisted Nasa and Roscosmos will support the ISS until at least 2024 – with onboard research at an all-time high. “That tends to be our pinch point sometimes relative to some of the research we’re doing. Most importantly, we’re getting there as fast as we can safely fly”. NASA is partnering with Boeing and SpaceX to build a new generation of human-rated spacecraft capable of taking astronauts to the station and back to Earth, thereby expanding research opportunities in orbit.
The MLM is now expected to arrive no earlier than late 2017, and has a long, complicated history dating back to an original launch date of 2007.
In a statement on Monday, NASA confirmed that Russian Federation is considering dropping back to two crew members. The first three happened in quick succession as astronauts Jerry Ross and James Newman worked on the ISS three times in just six days in December 1998.
This is the fourth spacewalk in Williams’ career and the first for Rubins. It is the 194th spacewalk for the space station. Rubins, EV-2, will be using an unmarked suit with helmetcam No. 20. In fact, NASA has also released an early animation of how the spacewalk would be conducted.
During the last United States spacewalk on January 15, a problem with American Tim Kopra’s spacesuit allowed a small amount of water to build up inside his helmet by the end of the outing.
That leak was caused by contamination that clogged an internal filter in the suit’s cooling system.
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Tests on the suit back on Earth showed an apparent flaw in a piece of hardware called a sublimator, which manages condensation in the suit’s heating and cooling loops. (Currently, the only way for Americans to get into space is to hitch a ride with the Russians, out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan.) Both companies have been hard at work, and are on schedule to start sending crews up in 2017.
