Friday will see a new event for the International Space Station (ISS) as a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is used to boost its altitude for the first time. As drag works on the space station, its altitude gradually degrades over time, and so it needs to be given an occasional push to keep it at its correct altitude, around 250 miles from the Earth’s surface.
The reboost is scheduled for today, November 8, as one of the Dragons that is currently docked to the space station will fire its thrusters for around 12.5 minutes. There are currently two Dragons docked — one of which carried crew and one of which carried cargo to the station. The cargo vehicle will perform the boost maneuver. As this is the first time this has been attempted, NASA and SpaceX personnel will observe the event carefully.
“The data that we’re going to collect from this reboost and altitude control demonstration will be very helpful,” said Jared Metter, SpaceX director of flight reliability. Metter also said that the data would be important for a future job of SpaceX: deorbiting the space station in the 2030s when it comes to the end of its life.
The job of boosting the space station has traditionally been performed by Russian Soyuz spacecraft, but NASA has been looking for another solution to lessen its dependence on Russia, particularly following the invasion of Ukraine. The idea of using a Crew Dragon for reboosting not only the ISS, but also other missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope, has been raised in recent years as the vehicles have been frequently used for carrying both astronauts and cargo to the station and back.
There were also occasional tests of using Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo vehicles to reboost the station, but these cargo vehicles are designed to be expendable — they are sent to the station to carry cargo, but then are disposed of in space rather than landing back on Earth — so they are not ideally suited to reboosting. The Dragon is also not specifically designed to do this job, as its main task is to carry cargo, but the option to use it will give more data on eventual ISS deorbit plans. The Dragon arrived at the station carrying around 6,000 pounds of supplies this week and will stay docked until it returns to Earth.
There have been some unusual issues with SpaceX launches using its Falcon 9 rocket recently, which are notable as the rocket is generally so reliable. But NASA said it was confident that SpaceX could continue to do the job.
“We work very closely with SpaceX on everything that we do relative to these Dragon launches,” said Bill Spetch, operations integration manager for the NASA’s International Space Station Program. “They share data with us very freely, and we work through all the issues jointly. We obviously always maintain a top priority on the safety of the vehicles coming to ISS, and so that really hasn’t changed for us.”
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.