Hey, it’s more like a big Vulcan with little legs.
Hey, it’s more like a big Vulcan with little legs.
A big part of the motivation for moving on from the ISS is simplifying maintenance and upgrading systems. That reduces the crew time and system volume needed to run the station and needs fewer different spare parts.
What’s wrong with switching to multiple smaller stations? I’m not optimistic about Orbital Reef or Axiom being fully up and running by 2030, but a handful of Vast and Gravitics modules in orbit should more than cover what the ISS does now.
I bet Roscosmos is angling for money from the other ISS partners to keep things running.
This sucks for Axiom, who needs all the time they can get before becoming independent.
The earliest modules are inseparable, maybe literally. Zarya is attached to Unity on the US side, which has the truss. Zarya has been so intertwined and might be cold welded to Unity. Zvezda, on the other side of Zarya, still handles a lot of station control. You could replace Zarya with basically a new self-sufficient space station, and, at that point, why take on the baggage of the rest of it.
Other companies are working on inflatables and the Bigelow owner was a loon, so don’t mourn that loss.
NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations program is working on private space stations. Orbital Reef will include an inflatable made by Sierra Space. There’s also Starlab, which is a single launch big can, and Axiom, which is like ISS 2.0 and will bud off the ISS.
And there are other companies working in stations. Gravitics and Vast are making cans. Max Space has concepts for inflatables.
Yeah, Axiom is working on a private space station that would bud off the ISS when it deorbits. Although they have some money problems right now.
For asteroid mining, look up AstroForge. They’re working on mining platinum group metals from near Earth m-type asteroids. They launched a forge demo sat and soon will launch an asteroid RPO demo sat.
We’re in a new space race.
There are too many rocket companies to list. This commercialization drives down launch costs and increases capacity, which benefits private companies and public research institutions.
There was just a record number of people in orbit (19) that’ll get broken again in the coming years. The ISS will get new modules. Tiangong has been expanding. The Lunar Gateway station is under construction. Several private space stations are under construction. And multiple companies and countries are working on new crewed vehicles.
Starlink has customers in 99 countries as of March. It’s a global service.
Directed at European launch companies:
You couldn’t live with your own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me.
I still get surprised by how many companies managed to get funding for smallsat launch.
Wow. That’s a lot of money for IM. And NASA. I’m really curious to hear more details about this. It’s a great idea and is definitely needed to expand lunar operations, but I was not expecting that number.
Axiom’s timeline for their station is really dicey because of their dependency on the ISS until they’re ready to dive into the deep end on their own. They can’t just be 10 years late. I hope they make it. I think it’s interesting that they’re switching from Thales Alenia to Gravitics for modules. It must be a huge cost saver, but it might be too little, too late. They started off as ISS USOS v1.5, which adds some challenges vs the single module stations that are trying to be Skylab v2.
The hope was that they could be cheaper, faster, and more efficient than if NASA developed the suits and station themselves. Axiom underbid, either on purpose to win the contract, or accidentally. This is where the firm fixed price model might be breaking down for NASA.
This and BLEO (beyond low earth orbit) are “the acronym knows where it is because it knows where it isn’t”
Yup, and they have to be specifically tailored, and, even then, keeping them tight-fitting at joints is a challenge. There are some concepts with pressurized traditional gloves to work around some of that.
I like AntennaPod for podcasts.
Hopefully some day we get mechanical counterpressure suits.
I forgot SUSIE!
There’s no way those all happen, but I can dream.
I’m sure they still have a lot of work to do to make mobility easier and make them self contained instead of tethered, but it’s a great first step. It’s cool to see the investment and development alongside the Axiom xEMU derivative.
They seemed like vaporware. I didn’t expect a test like this so soon. Cool.