The International Space Station has been the center of some drama over the past few days.
To begin with, astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the station took emergency shelter in their spacecraft after NASA learned a Russian satellite had broken up within the station’s orbit and had generated a debris field.
Nine astronauts on the space station briefly moved to their docked return spacecraft late Wednesday (June 26) as a satellite broke up in low Earth orbit.The Expedition 71 crew on the International Space Station (ISS) went to their three spacecraft, including Boeing Starliner, shortly after 9 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT), according to a brief NASA update on X, formerly known as Twitter. As the ISS follows a time zone identical to GMT, according to the European Space Agency, the astronauts were likely in their sleep period when the incident occurred.The procedure was a “precautionary measure”, NASA officials added, stating that the crew only stayed in their spacecraft for about an hour before they were “cleared to exit their spacecraft, and the station resumed normal operations.”
Two of those who sheltered in place were Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. They were the test pilots for the Boeing Starliner, who were originally scheduled to return home a couple of weeks ago, completing a test flight spacecraft. However, their departure has been delayed while NASA and Boeing engineers continue to study misbehaving thrusters on the vehicle.
But officials don’t want to use the term “stuck” for their situation.
“We’re not stuck on ISS,” Mark Nappi, program manager at Boeing for Starliner, said during a news conference Friday. “The crew is not in any danger.”Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, also tried to allay worries.“The vehicle at station is in good shape,” he said. “I want to make it very clear that Butch and Suni are not stranded in space. Our plan is to continue to return them on Starliner and return them home at the right time.”
No, they are not “stuck”. Their mission has been merely . . . extended.
Still, Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said Friday that the space agency is considering extending the maximum length of Starliner’s mission from 45 days to 90 days. And there is no firm return date on the horizon.Part of that desired extension is driven by ground tests that Boeing and NASA plan to carry out in New Mexico, seeking to better understand why some of the Starliner’s thrusters unexpectedly failed during the first leg of its journey. (Four of the five failed thrusters on Starliner have since been restored; however one thruster is not expected to work for the remainder of the mission.)“We’re just looking at the timeline to execute (the test in New Mexico) and then review the data,” Stich said at a Friday briefing. “And that’s what’s really the long pole, I would say, determining a landing date.”
Finally, NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract to deorbit the station and bring it back to Earth.
According to the space agency’s plans, SpaceX’s specially designed deorbit vehicle will drag the football field-size ISS back to Earth sometime after the end of its operational life in 2030. The ISS will smash into our planet’s atmosphere at a speed of more than 17,000 mph (27,500 km/h) before landing in a crashdown spot in the ocean.Deorbiting the space station “supports NASA’s plans for future commercial destinations and allows for the continued use of space near Earth,” Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for Space Operations Mission Directorate, said in a statement.The floating laboratory’s first parts were launched in 1998, and it has been occupied by astronauts from the U.S., Japan, Russia, Canada and Europe since 2000, who have completed more than 3,300 scientific experiments in a close orbit above Earth.
While it sounds easy to crash the ISS into the atmosphere, it is tricky to do it so chunks don’t hit potentially populated areas.
With the space station weighing in at around 880,000 pounds, this massive bulk of science will definitely benefit from a guided effort for its disintegration in the Earth’s atmosphere — a process that’s far from easy. In March 2021, for example, NASA released a 5,800-pound cargo pallet containing old nickel hydride batteries using the robotic arm aboard the ISS.The idea was for the entire pallet to burn up on reentry three years later. Things did not go according to plan as a small piece survived the fiery descent and impacted a home in Naples, Florida. So, just imagine the damage something 150 times heavier could do.
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