why is shuttle retrieving stranded astronauts not returning until February? SpaceX shuttle launched yesterday. The ISS is close to earth. What will it do for next 5 months?
In: Planetary Science
Because the crew that launched on it are scheduled to be there for 5 months and launching spacecraft is very expensive. So it won’t be coming back until they were due to finish their mission. And the two stranded astronauts get to do the work that the other two astronauts who were supposed to launch on it would have been doing, while they wait for their ride back.
As to what it will do it will be doing, it will be there attached to the ISS, ready to be used in an emergency if the crew need to abandon the ISS for any reason. It will also be used as a shelter if the ISS is in serious danger of a collision with space junk.
The SpaceX Crew 9 capsule already have two astronauts on it who have a mission to do on the ISS. They do not plan on leaving until February. In fact they planned on having a crew of four so they have work planned for two astronauts who can not go because their seats are needed for the rescue.
The situation is not treated as any kind of emergency. Nobody is going to take any risks or even waste any resources on returning the astronauts. If it was an emergency they can be down on the ground in 10-20 minutes, in fact they could have returned on the Starliner that brought them up and they would be fine. But as this is not an emergency and the astronauts are fine and healthy they are just added to the normal crew rotation. No need to launch an extra rescue mission for them. There is even room for them in the Dragon capsule which is preparing to leave now, but the seats are just improvised and might not work well in an emergency crash. So the astronauts are willing to wait 5 months to get proper seats.
A) Shuttle refers to a specific vehicle, the space plane. The generic term is Capsule, and the specific name for the SpaceX one is Dragon. The missions are also given their own names, the one that launched yesterday was SpaceX Crew-9 or just Crew-9
B) Space launches are very expensive, like $50,000,000 per seat expensive, so NASA (Who is paying) really doesn’t want to waste a launch. They could send up a capsule just to retrieve them, but that’d be $100,000,000 basically down the drain, which NASA doesn’t want.
Crew-9 was going to happen anyway, NASA bought the launch a few years ago. Before the Boeing problems, the plan was that it would launch with 4 people on board, wait 6 months while the crew did science stuff, then come back down again with the same 4 people.
With the 2 Boeing crew up there as well, NASA could pay for a capsule to get them down and then do Crew-9 as planned, but that would cost more than it had to. Instead, NASA launched it with 2 crew, and it will then wait up there for 6 month while the crew does science stuff, and then it will bring it’s 2 crew down as scheduled and bring the Boeing crew down with it as well. The Boeing crew will basically just stand in for 2 of the crew who were going to launch on Crew-9 anyway.
And in case you were wondering, they aren’t going to run out of science stuff to do. There has been a backlog of science stuff to do on the ISS for years now, it’s a lot easier and cheaper to design an experiment than to train and launch an astronaut, so there’s basically always more science that needs doing than astronauts to do the science. The past few months while the ISS had 2 more crew members than it was planned to helped to get through some of the backlog, but they haven’t gotten through it all.
Tl;dr they didn’t launch the capsule yesterday just to pick up the stranded astronauts, they launched it to do science (As with all other launches to the ISS), and are picking up the stranded astronauts as well because someone has to. It is staying for 5 months to do science, as it would normally do.
The ISS has an optimum crew of about 7. More is overcrowded, less is wasteful.
The SpaceX Dragon can carry 4 crew in the configuration NASA uses. Soyuz can carry 3. NASA had 4 already on a Dragon what wanted to go home because they launched in March, and the Soyuz rotation is separate.
Then Butch and Sunny got launched, and it was deemed too dangerous to return them on Starliner. So Nasa flew up a Dragon with only 2 seats occupied to pick up the two spare crew.
They could return everyone, but that would leave the ISS with only a crew of 3 Russians.
Now they have 8 Nasa astronauts and 8 seats across 2 vehicles. But who to send down? Well they chose to send down the crew who have been up since March in the spacecraft that’s been up since March.
I’m going to quote from an earlier post I made about them being “stuck”
> They aren’t “stuck”, but yes the plans have changed.
> Crews are usually 4 people who go for 6 month rotations on the ISS. These two astronauts have done those rotations before. This time the idea was to send them up for a quick 8 day test flight to test out the Boeing Starliner. Starliner had some issues, so NASA evaluated all the options on the table.
> NASA could have chosen to send them back in Starliner but deemed it too risky. They could contract SpaceX to send an entire separate Dragon capsule to bring them back to earth, that’s definitely an option that was considered. But the next crew of 4 is due to come up in September for their 6 month rotation, so instead of sending up 4 new crew and paying millions for a separate SpaceX launch to bring down Butch and Sunni now, NASA decided that they will send a 2 person crew that will join with Butch and Sunni and form the crew for the next rotation.
> This means Butch and Sunni will spend 8ish months in space, but that’s not a bad thing. Plenty of folks have stayed longer than that. In the meantime they’ve been doing science and contributing to crew operations on the station.
> They aren’t “stuck” or “stranded” any more than the usual crew. There are two other vessels docked at the ISS right now besides Starliner. There’s the Crew 8 Dragon and a Soyuz. If they needed to abandon station in emergency there are enough spots in those to make it happen. It would be a little more packed than usual but still safe to do.
> So Boeing has a bad day, but we get more science, Butch and Sunni get more time in space (I doubt many astronauts would complain about that!) and everybody is safe.
> Overall I think this was a good call from NASA.
In the days of the Space Shuttle, shuttles would take people up to the ISS, leave them there (maybe staying docked for a few days) and then return to Earth with the previous crew. Another Shuttle would go pick up that first crew and drop off the new crew.
This would leave the people on the ISS “trapped”, with no way off in the event of an emergency, but was useful because Shuttles were huge and took up a lot of docking space.
Now, with smaller crew capsules, the spacecraft take people up to the station and stay docked while those people are there for their stay. The crew then return on the same craft after their ~6 month stay. This has a few benefits; the crew always have a way home, they get to use the same craft (so they are more familiar with it), they can leave things in the craft, and they can use the craft as an emergency shelter if there is ever a risk to the station.
In general over the last few years there have been 7 people on the ISS at once; 3 people on a Russian Soyuz craft, and 4 people on a Nasa Space-X craft. During handovers there may be 10 or 11 people there – after the next team arrives but before the team they are replacing leaves (as will be the case tonight, assuming the docking works).
Back in June a Boeing Starliner Test flight docked with the ISS with two test crew, but had technical problems. It wasn’t clear if it was absolutely safe for the crew to return on the Starliner (it turned out it would have been fine, but there was still too high a risk to their safety). So instead, the two Starliner crew stayed on the ISS.
Having two extra people on the ISS is fine, but Nasa doesn’t like having people on the ISS without their own, dedicated way off. The solution they came up with was to leave two seats empty on the next Space-X mission (which launched yesterday), and the two Starliner crew will join that Space-X team.
So the Space-X Crew 9 flight which launched last night will (hopefully) dock with the ISS in a few hours, and its capsule, the “Crew Dragon *Freedom*” craft, will stay docked until February when it returns to Earth with the two people it took up, and the Starliner crew.
In the mean time it will stay docked to the ISS, ready if the crew needs to leave in a hurry. Although it is expected to move over to a different docking port once the Space-X Crew 8 flight leaves in a week or so.
If you are interested, [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_SpaceX_Dragon_Spacecraft_is_Pictured_Docked_to_the_International_Space_Station_(iss071e200795).jpg) is a photo of the current Space-X Crew Dragon *Endeavour*, docked to the ISS (taken from the Starliner). [Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Commercial_Crew_Program_vehicles.jpg) is one the other way, showing *Endeavour* in the foreground connected to the ISS, and the Starliner in the top right (and the Earth behind it). The Starliner left a few weeks ago, returning safely (but without a crew) to Earth. The new Space-X Crew 9 flight will dock where the Starliner was, and sit there until the current Space-X craft has left, and then will move to where the current one is.
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