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ISS Crew Install Cables For 2017 Arrival of Commercial Capsules
The Associated Press, as carried by the San Francisco Chronicle, reports that
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Terry Virts have attached more than 300 feet of cable to the exterior of the International Space Station in a series of three planned spacewalks; in total, the wiring job they're undertaking will involve 764 feet of power and data cables.
The extensive rewiring is needed to prepare for NASA’s next phase 260 miles up: the 2017 arrival of the first commercial spacecraft capable of transporting astronauts to the orbiting lab.
NASA is paying Boeing and SpaceX to build the capsules and fly them from Cape Canaveral, which hasn’t seen a manned launch since the shuttles retired in 2011. Instead, Russia is doing all the taxi work — for a steep price.
The first of two docking ports for the Boeing and SpaceX vessels — still under development — is due to arrive in June. Even more spacewalks will be needed to set everything up.
Mission Control left two cables — or about 24 feet worth — for the next spacewalk coming up Wednesday. Four hundred feet of additional cable will be installed next Sunday on spacewalk No. 3.
I've read rumors that Russia is getting antsy to reuse the core block for ISS for its own station some day, and that they don't allow non-Russians into the Russian parts of the station without escort. If there's substance to this rumor, is there a plan in the works to have a replacement module so that humanity's most expensive construct ever doesn't become so much floating orbital debris?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Nice try blaming "neocons" for your own Luddism, but it's because the left decided we didn't need space exploration any more and is making the government abandon the field to private industry. Those who put up the money will take the risks now, so let them reap any reward.
Everyone has lazy and unproductive workers. Why should any worker give half a fuck about his company if he can clearly see that even the CEOs are trying their best to milk it for all it's worth and then move on to the next corporation to pump and dump?
There is no work ethic left. On no level of the work force. What I see today in our economy reminds me in a stunningly way of what went down in the former communist countries. Same shit. Same mismanagement with the same disillusioned workforce, with everyone trying his best to waste as little energy as possible doing work, knowing that if he put in more all that would be his reward is more workload shifted onto him. Mostly because it just doesn't friggin' matter whether you try to work hard or whether you slack. Your chances for promotion are zero, your chances to get fired are not influenced at all by how you work. So why bother with anything?
There is simply no identification with your workplace anymore, and no faith in the ones steering the company's course.
And bluntly, whether you think your politicians are greedy, selfish idiots with zero qualification for their job and no well being in their mind aside of their own, or whether you think your boss is like this, where exactly is the difference between public and private sector?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The left is cutting NASA's budgets?
http://www.space.com/22023-nas...
By definition the private sector has to be more expensive at achieving a goal than the public one.
Exactly. This is why capitalism collapsed in 1989, when in the "Moscow Consensus", the world decided that the Soviets and Cubans had a better economic model, and, gosh darn-it, central planning was just so much more efficient.
Per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... It was formally scheduled for mandatory retirement in 2010 in accord with the directives President George W. Bush issued on January 14, 2004 in his Vision for Space Exploration.[20] Unless maybe GHWB was a closet Left-sider? So. whats the vision he had? Dumping our leadership position?
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Thank God Kennedy was a Republican!
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
By definition the private sector has to be more expensive at achieving a goal than the public one.
Not at all. The public sector tends not to care about costs, since they take the money more or less by force (implied force, if nothing else), and they have little to no threat of competition to force overheads to remain low. And of course one government providing a service for money to another government also has the motive of profit, making this situation more or less the worst of all possible worlds. In a theoretical optimum world, public sector would be by definition cheaper. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, which isn't always quite so nice (a tiny snag that many political philosophers/economists/et al often overlook).
In this case, for example, SpaceX is attempting to lower costs through a practical reusable design, whereas the Space Shuttle (in practice) ended up raising them considerably, despite being reusable, due to a number of ridiculous design constraints enforced on it by various government interests.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
"Price" in this case may be an imprecise word. The monetary cost may not be all that bad compared to SpaceX or Boeing. (It may even be favorable, for all I know.) However, it does carry serious risk to have only one supplier that can get you to the ISS. Sometimes the public and private sector properly take the (potential) costs of risk into account. This is what the insurance industry does - putting a monetary cost (price) on risk. Other times people get blindsided by something that, in retrospect, they couldn't afford. Sometimes the risk is not quantifiable - can you put a price on the strategic risk of Russia getting one over on NASA (and, by extension, the USA)?
In other words: risk can be very, very expensive, whether it is included in a pricetag or not.
Can anyone explain why this is needed? why are more connections/a different type of docking port needed to support crewed pods than cargo pods? why can't they use the same docking ports the shuttle used?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
latches, that need something massing close to the mass of the shuttle to engage properly.
They are also in inconvenient locations, and they need to be able to dock two crew capable vehicles at the station at all times to serve as life boats.
There are currently always 2 Soyuz capsules docked to the Station except during crew change. Each Soyuz can carry three crew members, and 2 docked Soyuz give them the ability to evacuate the entire 6 man crew in an emergency.
The new crew capsules are capable of carrying between 4 and 7 crew members depending on configuration, and that will allow them to expand the full time station crew to the full compliment of 7. But they'll need to be able to have 2 docked at all times (probably a Russian Soyuz for the Russian Crew Members and a Dragon or Boeing capsule for the US + International Crew.
The Current Dragon capsule flies close to the Station, and is then grappled with the CanadArm2 and maneuvered into docking with one of the Common Berthing Ports. Dragon Cargo flights next year will be bring up two new Common Berthing Ports to be installed for the new crew vehicles. I believe the Dragon v2 and Boeing Crew vehicles will engage in piloted/automated docking, rather than needing to be grappled with CanadArm2. There are also issues with clearance around some of the open ports, which is why they'll be reconfiguring the station (including moving the Leonardo MPLM Module to another port, and moving the PMA off the Bow Port where the Shuttle used to dock. They space walk they did today was around the PMA (Pressurized Mating Adapter) on the Bow port.