Image (Credit): Tropical Storm Helene on Sept. 24, 2024 as captured by the NASA/NOAA Suomi NPP satellite. (NASA Worldview)
SpaceX was scheduled to send astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) tomorrow, but the approaching Hurricane Helene has delayed the launch until Saturday, September 28.
The Crew-9 mission is down to two crew members – NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov – as a result of the two Boeing astronauts stuck on the ISS being added to the Crew-9 mission. The new combined crew will stay on the station until February 2025 and then return to Earth together.
NASA is in the process of locking down its Florida launch sites until the hurricane passes.
Patience is always needed with launches this time of year, and NASA seems to need a lot of patience these days for reasons beyond the weather.
Image (Credit): Crew-9 mission patch designed by SpaceX. (SpaceX)
Image (Credit): The Soyuz MS-25 crew ship attached to the ISS as an aurora radiates brightly above the Indian Ocean. (NASA)
Astronaut Tracy C. Dyson is now safely back on Earth thanks to the Russian Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft, which also returned cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub. The no drama return from the International Space Station (ISS) was very different from the recent Boeing Starliner return. The press barely paid attention, which is a good thing.
NASA highlighted Dyson’s six-month tour in this way:
Spanning 184 days in space, Dyson’s third spaceflight covered 2,944 orbits of the Earth and a journey of 78 million miles as an Expedition 70/71 flight engineer. Dyson also conducted one spacewalk of 31 minutes, bringing her career total to 23 hours, 20 minutes on four spacewalks.
I just hope that future Starliner’s can intentionally place astronauts in space for six-months or longer and then return to Earth with little attention. That type of clockwork will be success.
If you are watching the list of fall shows, you might have noticed Hulu’s upcoming series Last Days of the Space Age. The new drama premieres on October 2, 2024.
Here is the summary from Hulu:
In 1979, a power strike threatens to plunge the region into darkness in Western Australia, while the city hosts the Miss Universe pageant and the US space station, Skylab, crashes just beyond the city’s suburbs.
The trailer provides a little more context, but there is a reason that Skylab is mentioned last in the short summary. The space age plays a small part in a bigger human drama. Fortunately, it is not really the end of the space age as much as the end of a bit of the space age as it falls from the sky. The real Skylab disintegrated in the Earth’s atmosphere on July 11, 1979, leading to debris falling into the Indian Ocean as well as Western Australia.
Once the International Space Station is nudged out of orbit in the coming years, we may have more debris fields generating television ideas. I just wonder if it will take another 45 years to make it to your screen.
This series may be as good as it gets on television until Andor returns next year. The space-related television pickings are pretty slim at the moment.
Update: To be fair, there are a few more shows to check out before the end of the year, including Dune: Prophecy coming on November 17 and another Star Wars series called Skeleton Crew premiering on December 3.
Image (Credit): The Russian Soyuz rocket launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstanon September 11 to bring the Expedition 72 crew to the ISS. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
While all eyes were on the Polaris Dawn mission this week, the Russian Roscosmos Soyuz MS-26 was busy bringing a crew of three cosmonauts and one US astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS). Crewed and uncrewed launches to the ISS have been pretty routine for years, which is a good thing.
NASA reports that its astronaut Don Pettit, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, are now safely aboard the space station. Expedition 72 will officially start on Monday, September 23. Members of the Expedition 71 crew – NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson and cosmonauts Nikolai Chub and Oleg Kononenko – will be departing the station shortly.
Let’s remember that while the Polaris Dawn crew will be playing in space for about 5 days, these crews are in space for 6-12 months.
Image (Credit): The Starliner capsule in White Sands, NM. (Boeing Space)
So now that the Starliner capsule is back here on Earth, some may wonder if it was necessary to return it without a crew.
Here is what Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, had to say during a post-landing press conference:
If we’d have had a crew on board the spacecraft, we would have followed the same back away sequence from the space station, the same deorbit burn and executed the same entry. And so it would have been a safe, successful landing with the crew on board.
So that is good news for Boeing, but not likely to thrill Boeing stockholders. No matter how you spin it, only a crewed return would have been seen as a success.
It also appears the flight back was not quite as simple as portrayed by Mr. Stich’s initial statement. For instance, a Quartz article noted that during the capsule’s return another thruster failed and the guidance system blacked out for a moment.
Boeing has been pretty quite on the issue. Its latest update had a simple statement about the landing and an uncertain comment about “next steps”:
Boeing’s Starliner landed safely at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday, Sept. 7 (10:01 p.m. Mountain time, on Friday, Sept. 6). After an extended stay at the International Space Station, Starliner’s reusable crew module touched down at its designated landing site, White Sands Space Harbor at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
“I want to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, re-entry and landing,” said Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program. “We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program.”
The Starliner crew module will be transported back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where Boeing teams will analyze mission data.
Maybe when cooler heads prevail over at Boeing we will learn more. I just hope they are still in the game.
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