The International Space Station (ISS) has been orbiting Earth for the last quarter of a century.
But it was only this week that all eight of its docking ports were filled at the same time.
The spacecraft currently docked at the orbital outpost are: two SpaceX Dragons, a Cygnus XL, JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) HTV-X1, two Russian Soyuz crew spacecraft, and two Russian Progress cargo ships.
The record-breaking moment came on Monday with the reinstallation of Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft to the Earth-facing port of the station’s Unity module.
The Cygnus XL arrived at the station in September but briefly undocked last month to make way for the arrival of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying one NASA astronaut and two Roscosmos cosmonauts.
“The Cygnus XL movement was coordinated between NASA, Northrop Grumman, and Roscosmos to provide appropriate clearance for the arriving crewed Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft on November 27,” NASA said in a post on its website.
Cygnus will stay at the ISS until at least March 2026 when it’ll depart and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, disposing of up to 11,000 pounds of trash and unneeded cargo.
Filling up all of the station’s ports for the very first time marks the facility’s evolution into a bustling international hub for low-Earth orbit operations, and signals strong demand for future orbital infrastructure.
This is especially encouraging as the ISS is expected to end operations around 2030 due to high maintenance costs.
A number of U.S-based companies are already working on commercial designs to replace the ISS, while Russia is planning to deploy its own habitable satellite in the coming years. China already has a space station operating in low-Earth orbit.
For more on how astronauts live and work aboard the ISS, check out these insightful videos made by various visitors to the facility over the years.
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.