Legal Insurrection by Leslie Eastman 7/1/2024
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.”
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.
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.
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https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/07/iss-astronauts-and-cosmonauts-take-shelter-after-nearby-russian-satellite-breaks-apart/
