The CRS (Commercial Resupply Service) Dragon currently docked to the International Space Station is about to be tested in a way the Dragon family has never been tested.
A Dragon cargo spacecraft docked to the International Space Station (ISS) will fire its engines for 12.5 minutes on Friday (Nov. 8), NASA officials said at a press conference Monday (Nov. 4). Other spacecraft have done this before, but it will be a first for a SpaceX capsule — and an important precursor to a bigger Dragon vehicle that will one day drive the ISS to its demise.
"The data that we're going to collect from this reboost and attitude control demonstration will be very helpful ... and this data is going to lead to future capability, mainly the U.S deorbit vehicle," Jared Metter, director of flight reliability at SpaceX, told reporters at the livestreamed teleconference.
All of this relates to NASA hiring SpaceX to develop the "US Deorbit Vehicle" to bring the Space Station down from its orbit in a controlled reentry. This is loosely set for "No Earlier Than 2030" after new commercial space stations are ready to take over for the aging complex.
To date, Russian Soyuz spacecraft have done this heavy lifting when periodically required, and Northrop Grumman's Cygnus cargo craft has done a similar test to the one being done Friday on the CRS-31 Cargo Dragon.
"It's a good demonstration," Metter said of the reboost. He did not immediately have the expected delta v, or the impulse per unit of spacecraft mass that the maneuver would impart, but emphasized the duration would be enough to "gather a lot of data" for the U.S. deorbit vehicle.
The CRS-31 dragon launched Monday, Nov. 4 evening (Eastern time) and docked with the ISS on Tuesday Nov. 5. Image credit: NASA
Cool. This is something that Boeing has been saying in order to keep the Starliner contract, that only Boeing can push the ISS for orbital corrections.
ReplyDeleteBe interesting to see if the data shows that Dragon can do orbital corrections.
As to deorbiting, there's a small group of scientists/astronauts/engineers who want to potentially boost the ISS into a garbage orbit for future processing/recycling of all the 1 million pounds of material that's already outside of the really heavy part of Earth's gravity well.
Which, if you can slow and drop the ISS, you can also boost and up-orbit the pile of junk and harvest stuff off of it, like the new solar panels and stuff.
I don't know, I guess it's my inner hoarder that wants to keep the thing where we can access and smelt the snot out of it in the future.
I join Bean's "inner hoarder" thinking raising the orbit is a damn fine idea. Recycle it or turn it into a museum that schoolkids can go on field trips to in a 100 years. Something, don't just throw it away in the ocean. Think of all the fish it might kill on impact. Heck, if Elon has to consider how many whales Starship might impact when crashing how about an entire space station EdC
ReplyDeleteI'm with you guys - I'd love to see it raised to a new orbit with really small amounts of junk in it. Say a few thousand miles up instead of 250 and way short of geosynchronous.
ReplyDeleteIt just makes the move many times more expensive. The amount of Delta V to bring the thing out of orbit is much smaller than for pushing it up.
Any movement of that ungainly thing needs be at a very low acceleration. Those solar panels particular would need some guy wires to hold them in place. It would look like an early biplane.
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