"NASA will take ownership after development and operate it throughout its mission," according to the statement. "Along with the space station, it is expected to disintegrate as part of the re-entry process." SpaceX's vehicle for landing the International Space Station is an improved Dragon
NASA has chosen SpaceX to develop and deliver a spacecraft that will take the International Space Station (ISS) off orbit after the end of the ISS's life in 2030, the space agency announced on July 17, 2024.
The contract awarded to Elon Musk's SpaceX may be worth $843 million, according to a NASA statement.
The spacecraft will be a beefed-up version of SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which is currently used to transport astronauts and cargo to orbit.
Unlike SpaceX's other big NASA wins, where NASA simply purchases services for spacecraft that SpaceX owns and operates, SpaceX will design and deliver the spacecraft to NASA, but the responsibility for launching, operating the spacecraft, and returning the ISS to Earth will rest with the space agency .
NASA awarded SpaceX the major contract to develop the landing vehicle. Last month. NASA noted that SpaceX won the bid - over the only competitor, Northrop Grumman - in part because the design makes extensive use of proven designs. However, despite the extensive use of Dragon components, approximately 50% of the USDV will be completely new, and 100% of the deorbiting functions will be completely new to this spacecraft.
USDV's goal is to perform a series of critical burns in the last week of the station's life, but NASA plans to launch the spacecraft about 18 months before those burns. It will dock in the front port of the ISS and remain there while the station slowly descends towards Earth. The agency will keep a crew on the station as long as its orbit can be maintained, but they will abandon it about six months before entering the atmosphere.
The USDV will go into action when the station reaches a height of about 220 kilometers above the Earth. It will perform a series of burns to determine the re-entry route over the course of four days, before performing a final burn. The parts of the station that do not burn up in the atmosphere will fall in an uninhabited area in the Pacific Ocean. This is the same disposal method the station has used for other large spacecraft, such as Northrop Grumman's Cygnus or Japan's HTV cargo spacecraft.
The mission is complex, and SpaceX will need to develop a vehicle powerful enough to propel the station through increasing atmospheric drag. As Sarah Walker, Dragon's director of mission management at SpaceX, explained, "The most complicated and challenging thing is that the final burn has to be strong enough to move the entire space station, while withstanding the forces and contractions caused by the drag of the atmosphere overcoming the space station, to ensure that it ends up in place the planned.”
The end result is a spacecraft that will hold six times more fuel and power for production and storage than the Dragon capsules. The end result, at least according to a rendering released by SpaceX, looks like a conventional dragon with a huge cargo hold attached to its back.
The payload bay will contain all the additional fuel, power generation systems and electronics required to complete the mission, including 30 additional Draco engines, in addition to the 16 found in the capsule's standard configuration. Massive final combustion will help ensure that the volume of waste is small - and there will likely be pieces of waste the size of a hand from microwave ovens to small cars.
NASA agreed with the other partners on the station - Roscosmos, the European Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency - to submit a request for the development of a vehicle to bring the station down from private industry after realizing that the capabilities provided by Roscosmos were not suitable for the size of the station. NASA issued a request for proposals last year. The contract was awarded now because it takes years to develop such a complex spacecraft.
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Comments
Why isn't there a picture or a link to a visualization of this special spaceship?
Why is there no picture or reference to the visualization of this special spaceship?
I am very hopeful that NASA and SpaceX are going to devise a way to disconnect the new spacecraft in the final stages, then change course and land it in a safe place so that it can be reused. You can even raise it several kilometers and then return to the atmosphere to land in a preferred location.