The International Space Station (ISS) welcomed four new crewmembers on Saturday.
Three astronauts and a cosmonaut arrived at the orbital laboratory after launching aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday.
As their Crew Dragon approached the space station, a camera aboard the capsule shared a dramatic view (below) of the ISS orbiting Earth at an altitude of around 250 miles.
The orbital outpost is viewed from the @SpaceX Dragon as both spacecraft soar into an orbital sunset. Docking targeted for 2:26am ET today. pic.twitter.com/LMhQOjSkEz
“That is such a cool view,” one of the SpaceX commentators remarks as the Dragon makes its way toward the docking port on the space station.
The footage also includes a view of the screens inside the Crew Dragon as the capsule’s autonomous systems prepare it for docking with the ISS.
“There’s a great illustration in the middle of that screen where the line kind of swooshes around — that’s the Dragon spacecraft — and it needs to get to the top of that circle representing the ISS before it can properly align itself to the docking access and get ready to close in for those final few moments before the docking itself,” explains another commentator.
The orbital facility is described by NASA as “larger than a six-bedroom house with six sleeping quarters, two bathrooms, a gym, and a 360-degree view bay window.” To put it another way, the station is 356 feet (109 meters) end-to-end, one yard short of the full length of an American football field, including the end zones.
For the last 25 years, crewmembers have been living and working aboard the station, which travels at a speed of five miles per second, orbiting our planet every 90 minutes or so.
NASA and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, sometimes send crewmembers onto the outside of the ISS to carry out upgrades or maintenance work, which in recent years has included the installation of new solar panels to increase the efficiency of the station’s power supply.
SpaceX’s newly arrived Crew-11 will stay aboard the ISS for about the next six months before returning home in the same Crew Dragon.
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.