Originally set to return in mid-June, Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams may be on the station until February, 2025.
During a press conference today, NASA representatives confirmed they have a contingency plan to bring astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams home from the International Space Station (ISS) early next year. If they’re unable to leave sooner aboard the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that brought them there
Tests conducted at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility pointed to deformed Teflon seals being a potential cause of the Starliner’s thrusters failing, but the agency isn’t expected to make a final decision on whether or not Williams and Wilmore will return using Boeing’s spacecraft until mid-August.
How much food and water do they even have?
The space station has tons of stockpile of consumables like that, and are still being regularly restocked by cargo ships (unmanned).
Can’t they send one of those with a shuttle for them to fly back? Is that just prohibitively more expensive? They can be autopiloted up, right?
Pretty sure cargo dragon is just a stripped down crew dragon to make more space for cargo.
Or maybe, crew dragon is a cargo dragon fitted for passengers… Seeing as cargo dragon flew with cargo and docked to the ISS in 2012 (crew dragon was 2020).
Pretty sure crew dragon has all the auto/remote to fully launch and then dock to the ISS.
Cargo dragon is auto/remote docked. Doesn’t even need canadarm. So would make sense that crew dragon is as well
You could equally fit 2 additional seats in a crew dragon, which was designed for 7 people from the beginning
Not anymore, it was designed for 7 people in 2 seat rows using propulsive landing.
During development they switched to parachute instead of propulsive landing, since parachute can be rougher they had to lean the seat more back for the astronauts to be able to handle more G’s.
In this lean back position there is not enough space for a second row of seats anymore
Plenty. Cygnus capsule that docked a few days ago was a scheduled resupply too.