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SpaceX’s new vehicle designed to take down the International Space Station is going to be a beast.
The SpaceX The orbiter, a variant of the Dragon payload spacecraft, will carry 46 Draco thrusters and send them into space International Space Station The company said last week that it will make it all the way to the South Pacific Ocean within the next decade. That’s three times the number of Cargo Dragon missions to the ISS, which SpaceX says will be 16.
“The vehicle design will be based on SpaceX’s Dragon cargo spacecraft with an enhanced fuselage section that will house the propellant tanks, engines, avionics, power generation and thermal equipment designed to complete this mission,” Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s Dragon mission management director, said in a July 17 press conference.
While the ISS is in good health, NASA It’s already planning for the end. Early-stage funding for new commercial space stations aims to take over the ISS’s role of supporting low-Earth exploration and hosting astronauts. It’s still unclear when that will happen; while most of the ISS consortium is set to go by 2030, the agency has stressed that it will only deorbit the six-bedroom complex once commercial successors are ready.
Earlier this year, NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract to build the Dragon orbital vehicle that will carry the ISS to its destination.
Relating to: ISS could ‘float’ for a year before being destroyed by SpaceX vehicle
While Cargo Dragon has been performing uncrewed resupply missions to the ISS since 2012, Crew Dragon has been sending astronauts into space since 2020. It’s no coincidence that SpaceX is planning its new vehicle based on these.
“One of the benefits of leveraging Dragon’s rich flight history is that we can continue to use NASA-approved hardware on some key systems, such as the docking system and propulsion system components,” Walker said.
ISS is expected to fall gradually Soil for about 12 to 18 months before the final deorbit burn is given, bringing it closer to our planet. Walker said the craft will fire 22 to 26 engines simultaneously. The contract calls for a speed of about 57 meters per second (187 feet per second). That’s a little over 127 mph (205 km/h).
Providing that kind of thrust would require a much larger Dragon, specifically designed for this unique mission. The fuselage section that provides thrust, electricity and other vital parts would be twice the size of a standard cargo Dragon fuselage alone, Walker said. “This vehicle needs a ton of propellant, a ton of engines to provide a lot of thrust to propel the ISS,” he said.
“There are a number of complexities that come with actually pulling off a mission like this,” Walker said. “One example is … having to continue to operate in a different environment than we’re used to: pushing the ISS with all its appendages, just as they’re subject to increasing friction on them.” [due to Earth’s atmosphere]And these cannot hinder its mission to reach the target location.”
While NASA is responsible for the U.S. segment of the ISS, each of the participating space agencies will ultimately be responsible for its own segment of the orbital complex, Weigel said. Other major modules come from Roscosmos, the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, while the Canadian Space Agency has the robotics.
Relating to: NASA and SpaceX aim to extend the life of the Crew Dragon spacecraft
The South Pacific Ocean is one of the prime locations for SpaceX’s ISS modules to be launched from orbit, but NASA has yet to decide exactly where the complex will land. Most of the pieces must burn up safely. Earth’s atmosphereand there are no plans yet to launch a recovery mission—which would be expensive—to see if there are any items that could be salvaged for a museum. (NASA and other participants space (Agencies will outline what they want to protect prior to re-entry.)
“We wanted the U.S. deorbit vehicle to put us in a very, very narrow debris footprint,” Dana Weigel, NASA’s ISS program manager, said at the same press conference. The goal is to disperse the debris into a path narrower than 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) using the “very large thrust and very powerful burn” that SpaceX’s vehicle will provide.
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What survives reentry will depend largely on its structure, but agency calculations suggest that pieces will range in size from household microwave ovens to typical sedans. “Some things will burn up completely, like solar panels,” Weigel added. “Other very dense structures — or structures buried beneath structures — may survive.”
The timing of the historic burn is expected to be around January 11, 2031. solar cycle must be at rest and the Earth’s atmosphere must be at least in an “inflation” state Sun“Of course,” Weigel noted, “the behavior of the environment and the solar cycle is something we will monitor and adjust the dates for [for] “as we get closer.”