The two Americans, Jeffrey Williams and Kate Rubins, hooked up the docking port in just a few hours. Now, the second would be installed in 2018.
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It will work with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon – both are now under construction and will eventually be used to ferry astronauts to the space station.
NASA is aiming to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, and has been studying the effects of spending time in space on the human body by observing astronauts on board the ISS, which sits in low-earth orbit.
ISS operations integration manager Kenneth Todd called Friday s installation a “very significant milestone on the path to establishing commercial crew capability”. Test flights of those spacecraft start next year.
NASA astronauts are venturing out into space to install a component key to the future of commercial crew mission. “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”.
Until then, Russian Federation will keep providing all the rides – at a hefty price for U.S. taxpayers. The main one being a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s.
The docking adaptor will be the first of two such additions to the space station.
As Loren Grush reports for The Verge, this is not the first IDA to have been launched to the ISS, but it’s the only one that’s actually made it.
SpaceX is targeting a test flight a year from now, and Boeing in February 2018. While a single IDA can handle the expected traffic in the near term, two ports are needed to fully support eventual crew rotations and additional cargo ships. It will be the fourth spacewalk for Williams and the first for Rubins.
The two space travel companies have also won contracts to design and build deep space habitats for NASA astronauts on long haul missions.
This NASA photo obtained October 30, 2015 shows an image taken by Expedition 45 Commander Scott Kelly during a spacewalk on October 28, 2015.
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. A much bigger leak, from the suit’s cooling system, nearly led to a spacewalker’s drowning in 2013. When the suit was returned to Earth for testing, engineers discovered a flaw in a device that regulates the suit’s condensation.
The only work of the astronauts after they set foot off the station is to tether the adaptor.
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Williams and Rubins will keep tinkering with the station until about 2 p.m. ET, attaching ethernet and power cables to the port.
