By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
WE don’t do a lot on the expertise facet of issues right here at Cairns Information, however we actually shouldn’t be ignoring the a lot hyped-up rescue of two astronauts circling the earth in orbit for almost 10 months within the Worldwide House Station (ISS).
The independently produced, animated video provides a superb overview of the expertise concerned in an area venture has has been working longer than 1 / 4 of a century. We at the moment are properly and really into the house age.
Whereas many people argued about whether or not the Apollo Moon touchdown missions actually occurred (we received’t received down that rabbit gap for now), and the way bizarre the NASA crowd are, the house trade went forward regardless with a number of nations and personal corporations launching their satellites into house to carry out all method of communications and scientific capabilities.
House information tends to get crowded out by our extra speedy and related earth-based information, however trying into the 26 years of the ISS operations and the current “rescue” of astronauts Sunni Williams and Butch Wilmore by Elon Musk’s Crew Dragon house craft capsule, is an academic expertise.
Williams and Wilmore had been rocketed to the ISS in June 2024 by Boeing’s huge Star Liner rocket however their supply capsule developed technical issues making the deliberate, manned return to earth after eight days, unsafe.
The pair are nonetheless, extremely skilled within the navy and psychologically robust and defined to a New York Occasions interviewer how they dealt with the very prolonged keep on the house station.
Flying up on Crew10 to rescue the pair was a really world, gender-equitable staff of Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, US astronauts Nichole Ayers and Anne McClain and Takuya Onishi, the Japanese astronaut representing the JAXA house company.
Williams and Wilmore returned to Earth on one other SpaceX capsule that had been docked on the house station since final yr.
The ISS, after being partly assembled remotely piece by piece in house (an incredible technological feat in itself) acquired its first human occupants on November 2, 2000, two days after blasting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The Expedition 1 crew members had been NASA astronaut William M. Shepherd and Russian Aviation and House Company (now Roscosmos) cosmonauts Yuri P. Gidzenko and Sergei Okay. Krikalev.
After a profitable docking, the crew transferred aboard the station and started bringing it to life, in a four-month mission set up and activate the life assist and communications methods and dealing with three visiting house shuttle crews to proceed the meeting of the ISS.
The trio returned to Earth in March 2001 aboard house shuttle Discovery, having turned the ISS over to the Expedition 2 crew.
PS: If you happen to’re questioning how poos and pees work in house, it’s carried out with a small (and mild) vacuum hatch and separate hose in a small “throne room” … with a curtain for privateness. Sunita Williams demonstrated her sleeping and morning routine.
The astronauts do each day fitness center exercises to counter the consequences of weightlessness on bone density for example.
