This week will see a special maneuver at the International Space Station (ISS) as a SpaceX Crew Dragon takes one of the tiniest flights ever, hopping just a few meters over from one port of the station to another. And NASA will live stream the event, so you’ll be able to watch the spacecraft take this short flight as it happens.
The changeover is necessary to make space for another SpaceX craft that will arrive on Monday, October 4. But this new arrival won’t carry any crew as it is a cargo craft, part of the 31st commercial resupply services mission by SpaceX. This new arrival will dock at the forward-facing port on the Space Station’s Harmony module, as it is easiest for craft to dock there than on the space-facing side. But the Crew Dragon is currently occupying this port, so it needs to undock, move to the other space-facing port, and redock there.
To move the Crew Dragon, it will be loaded up with a crew consisting of NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
These four make up a rather unusual Crew-9, as only Hague and Gorbunov traveled to the Space Station on their Crew Dragon, which flew with just two crew members for the first time in its operational history. The other two members, Williams and Wilmore, had traveled to the station on the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner, but following problems with the Starliner’s thrusters, NASA officials opted not to have them travel back on the Starliner but rather to stay on the ISS and become members of Crew-9 instead. Now, they will travel back to Earth in their Crew Dragon in February next year.
The crew are aiming to undock from the ISS for their short flight at 6:35 a.m. ET on Sunday, November 3, then will perform the maneuver in under an hour with the aim to redock at 7:18 a.m. ET. To get an idea of what this looks like in practice, you can see a previous redocking of another Crew Dragon spacecraft that occurred in May this year.
You’ll be able to watch the live stream on NASA’s YouTube channel, where coverage will begin at 6:15 a.m. ET on Sunday, November 3, and will run continuously until the redocking maneuver is complete.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.