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
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.
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