The contract granted by NASA — worth up to $843 million — will see SpaceX develop a vehicle to safely deorbit the space station “in a controlled manner after the end of its operational life in 2030.”
NASA says the station will remain in use until then, and expects both the station and deorbit vehicle to break apart upon re-entry to avoid risk to populated areas.
Closing a loop that began with this 2016 launch, NASA is about to send the fourth and final satellite in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) – R Series into space as part of a system for much better real-time weather forecasting.
NASA has pushed back the capsule’s return to Earth from the ISS to examine helium leaks and a valve issue. The Starliner ran into multiple delays before finally launching earlier this month.
The agency is targeting a return “no earlier than” June 22nd, and plans to hold a teleconference at 12PM ET on June 18th to talk over details of the delayed departure.
NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, who’s been on the International Space Station since March, seems to enjoy sharing his camera settings. For the picture of the Boeing Starliner below, he followed up:
For the photography nerds: 1 second exposure, f 1.4, ISO 2000, 24 mm lens.
It includes images of cloud vortices (white), an aurora (pink), a solar flare (light blue), Jupiter’s North Temperate Belt (brown), Jupiter’s moon Io (yellow), Mars (orange), the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (black), a red sprite cluster (red), an algal bloom (green), Neptune (blue), and crab nebula (purple).
Happy Pride!
I was just chatting about The Moon, a movie I watched last year about a Korean astronaut getting stranded in space. It was a fun sci-fi flick but to my surprise, Korea actually launched its very first space agency last week.
This comes at a time when China, Japan, and India have heavily invested in space exploration. Korea’s pledged roughly $72 billion to its new agency, with a lunar landing planned for 2032, and a Mars landing for 2045.
SpaceX isn’t the only one busy today, as the finally-launched Starliner is closing in on the International Space Station. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have already performed “about two hours of free-flight demonstrations,” and more are planned, despite additional helium leaks detected by flight controllers overnight.
The autonomous docking procedure is scheduled for 12:15PM ET.
SpaceX’s Starship is attempting re-entry over the Indian Ocean, and with the signal going in and out, a live video stream showed some damage and burning on a fin.
