ISS Astronauts and Cosmonauts Take Shelter After Nearby Russian Satellite Breaks Apart
Meanwhile, the stay of the Boeing Starliner crew has been “extended,” and SpaceX gets the contract to deorbit the station in 2030.
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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NASA and Boeing should just detatch and deorbit the Starliner unmanned, and use a different entry vehicle to return the crew. If I recall correctly, the station has a spare Soyuz for emergencies.
The notion of using Russian technology (Soyuz) would be – to put it mildly – politically unpalatable to the Uniparty. Because Putin, or something.
Besides: technological decisions in government and woke corporations are increasingly made to satisfy the DIE agenda and not because it works.
Nobody in their right mind wants a ride in a Soyuz
Is there any chance of using it on Iran? It is a shame to waste it.
Destroying something that we can no longer repair nor replace is a perfect example of the dumpster fire the US space program is turning into.
Yes – SpaceX has been succeeding lately and is pretty much all that is left of the US manned space program. But Elon Musk also returned X (Twitter) to a free speech platform – something the Feds hate him for and will never forgive him. At some point the Feds will come after Musk they way they have gone after Trump.
At least we’ve improved from just letting the damn thing fall on Australia, like we did with Spacelab.
With Trump in office, Dems going after Musk could backfire in a spectacular manner.
Like anything electro-mechanical, and certainly anything exposed to the demands of space, the ISS has a lifetime limited by its materials and construction, and its ability to adapt to newer technologies. Its demise was inevitable. It would be a mistake to push something that humans rely on for their safety past its limits.
I would love to see Musk send something up that actually drags the ISS parts to the moon, instead. I know, there’s a lot of energy involved and all that. But it would be so much more useful sitting on the moon as a possible initial habitat for astronauts than it would on the bottom of the ocean.
Or push it into a higher orbit with some strap-on thrusters and keep it as part of the refueling setup Musk plans on.
At one point it was planned to do exactly that.
Until calculations showed that It would take about 160 metric tons of fuel to push the space station to a higher orbit.
At $2,500 per kilogram to low earth orbit, it is cost prohibitive to launch all that fuel into low earth orbit
Your numbers ($2.5 million/metric ton) only add up to $400 million to push it into higher orbit while they are paying SpaceX $850 million to destroy it.
What happened – ISS astronauts at risk from space debris – is vaguely similar to part of the plot of a recent (and dreadfully bad) Apple TV sci-fi show called ‘Constellation.’
“a small piece survived the fiery descent and impacted a home in Naples, Florida.”
Immediate mental reference to another TV show: Dead Like Me.
Dead like Hollywood?
Dead Like Me
Isn’t that a show about Biden?
We are not stuck on the ISS. We simply can’t get back to earth. Sheesh FJB
I don’t understand this, at all. It costs so much money and takes so much time to put this amount of stuff into orbit, what would be the point of bringing it back down? If anything, I would think it would be well worth the money to pay a little and shoot it to higher orbit so that it can stick around. WHo knows when someone might need something in space that can be salvaged from the dead space station? WHo knows when it might even serve as a last resort emergency option for something? Just the fact that you can have a nice junkyard full of bolts and nuts and panels and machinery of all types – not to mention just its use as a garage, of sorts, would seem to warrant putting it in higher orbit to sustain it there for a long time.
I just don’t get this …
First, it costs a LOT of money/fuel/launches to get enough fuel to boost something that large into a higher orbit, and that doesn’t solve the problem, it just delays it. EVERYTHING in orbit is going to fall back to earth eventually if we don’t keep adding energy/speed to it.
Second, much of the ISS was built in orbit by adding-on subassemblies like the solar panels, which were originally transported and installed while folded-up, and then extended once they were installed. They were not designed to re-fold, and cannot take the stress/forces that would be required to push the station into a higher orbit without breaking and/or falling off.
Finally, the ISS is falling apart. It’s old, and it wasn’t originally designed or built to last forever. It constantly gets bombarded by orbital debris and micro-meteorites which damage key components and cause air leaks. Picture a rural house that is occasionally shot in a random spot with a high-powered rifle, over and over again. Eventually, something important is going to be struck and the furnace or AC or water supply isn’t going to function. In space, if your heat or AC or water-supply stops working, you die. And unlike a house on earth, if your air leaks out, you die.
So … I guess Musk essentially has been given the space station and $840 million just so that NASA doesn’t have to think about it anymore. Basically, they are paying Musk to haul it to the dump. I would assume that it is, essentially, Musk’s property, now, to do with as he wants. If it’s worth it he can spend the money to put into higher orbit and use it for himself.
NASA actually contracted SpaceX to build them a space vehicle they will use to deorbit the ISS, and then they will perhaps be able to use it for other similar missions in the future. Check this video for some details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkwuDxVWJQA