Space News by Jeff Foust — July 30, 2019
As NASA praises the increased amount of research being performed on the International Space Station, the station’s manager cautions that uncertainty about commercial crew vehicles may disrupt station operations in the year ahead.
In an opening keynote at the ISS Research and Development Conference here July 30, Kirk Shireman, NASA’s ISS program manager, warned that the upcoming transition to commercial crew vehicles for transporting astronauts to and from the station may create “startup transients†that could disrupt the current smooth pace of operations there.
“There are some great opportunities in our future, but also some challenges, some significant challenges,†Shireman said.
The biggest challenge he cited was the uncertainty of when Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon would be ready to start carrying astronauts. That depends on when the companies are able to complete their test flight program, including both uncrewed and crewed tests of Starliner and an uncrewed in-flight abort test, followed by a crewed test flight, of Crew Dragon.
More:
https://spacenews.com/nasa-warns-commercial-crew-delays-create-uncertainty-in-iss-operations/
