It is worth mentioning here that the IDA is a piece of vital machinery and its installation means a lot because from now onwards, SpaceX and Boeing vehicles can also be accommodated in the space station, which was earlier impossible.
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Williams and Rubins will install an worldwide docking adaptor sent by a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship last month.
United States astronauts prepare station for commercial space taxis was posted in Sci-Tech of TheNews International – https://www.thenews.com.pk on August 19, 2016 and was last updated on August 19, 2016.
Another IDA is expected to be launched in 2018.
The adapter is one metre tall and 1.6 metres wide. It will work along with Boeing’s CST 100 Starliner and SpaceX’s crew dragon. The docking port will be used by future commercial crew capsules. Power and data cables needed by the IDA were routed out to the docking port during three spacewalks dating back to February 2015.
Williams, 58, and Rubins, 37, plan to begin a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk around 8 a.m. Friday, exiting the Quest airlock.
“The first crew flight is scheduled for February 2018”.
The operation will remain delicate, however, because the SPDM is highly sensitive to external pressure, lead spacewalk officer Glenda Brown said.
Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development at NASA Headquarters in Washington, yesterday confirmed NASA’s wish to sell the ISS.
However, NASA is keen to continue research in low-earth orbit after government funding for the ISS dries up, so it’s looking to private operators to pick up the slack.
2016. The deorbiting date extended to 2024 thanks to President Barack Obama.
The addition is part of a move to hand off space station duties to private companies, allowing NASA to focus its resources on bigger projects like getting to Mars. Currently, it has completed nine missions. Boeing is the prime contractor on the ISS, with a five-year, US$1.2 billion deal through September 2020. “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”.
A report published in Phys informed, “Americans Jeff Williams and Kate Rubins will step outside the orbiting laboratory to attach an worldwide docking adaptor launched aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship last month”.
The spacewalk took place to install the new docking mechanism, the first of two International Docking Adapters (IDA) onto Pressurized Mating Adapter-2.
There are big plans for private companies SpaceX and Boeing to shuttle astronauts to the ISS next year, but if they are going to do that, the worldwide team of astronauts on the ISS needs to setup a docking station first.
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Nasa claims that the docking equipment is the most sophisticated yet by allowing for automatic parking of spacecraft.
