SpaceX’s new vehicle to bring down the International Space Station will be a monster.
The SpaceX the deorbit vehicle, a variant of its Dragon spacecraft, will carry 46 Draco jet engines. International Space Station (ISS) to its end in the South Pacific Ocean in the next decade, the company said in remarks last week. That’s three times the usual 16 aboard Cargo Dragon missions to the ISS, according to SpaceX.
“The vehicle design will be based on SpaceX’s Dragon cargo spacecraft with an enhanced trunk section that will contain fuel tanks, engines, avionics, power generation and thermal hardware tailored to complete this mission,” said Sarah Walker, the company’s director of Dragon mission control. SpaceX. at a press conference on July 17.
While the ISS remains in good health, NASA he’s already planning the end. Early-stage funding for new commercial space stations is intended to take over the role of the ISS in supporting low-Earth research and hosting astronauts. When this happens, it is still in motion; while most of the ISS consortium is set to operate until 2030, the agency has emphasized that it will deorbit the six-bedroom complex when commercial successors are ready.
Earlier this year, NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract to build a Dragon deorbit vehicle to send the ISS to its doom.
Related: The ISS could be “drifting down” for a year before being destroyed by a SpaceX vehicle
Cargo Dragon has been flying unmanned ISS supply missions since 2012, while Crew Dragon has been sending astronauts into space since 2020. It is no coincidence that SpaceX is planning its new vehicle based on these.
“One of the benefits of leveraging Dragon’s rich flight history is that we can continue to use NASA-certified hardware for a number of key systems, such as the docking system and propulsion system components,” Walker said.
The ISS is expected to return gradually Earth for about 12 to 18 months before a final deorbit burn is ordered to bring it closer to our planet. The vehicle fires 22 to 26 engines simultaneously, Walker said. The contract calls for a speed of roughly 57 meters per second (187 feet per second). That’s just over 127 mph (205 km/h).
Providing such a boost will require a larger dragon, a one-off designed specifically for this unique mission. The trunk section, which provides propulsion, electricity and other vital items, will itself be twice the size of a standard Dragon cargo trunk, Walker said. “This vehicle needs a ton of propellant, a ton of engines to provide a lot of thrust to push the ISS,” she said.
“There are also a number of complexities that come with executing a mission like this,” Walker said. “One example is… it has to continue to operate in a different environment than we’re used to: operating while pushing the ISS with all its accessories, just as resistance is building against them. [due to Earth’s atmosphere]. And you can’t stop her from her mission to get her to her destination.”
While NASA is responsible for the U.S. portion of the ISS, ultimately each of the participating space agencies takes responsibility for its own portion of the orbital complex, Weigel said. Other main modules come from Roscosmos, the European Space Agency and the Japan Space Agency, while the Canadian Space Agency has robotics.
Related: NASA and SpaceX are trying to extend the life of the Crew Dragon spacecraft
The South Pacific Ocean is one of the main locations for the ISS modules that SpaceX will launch from orbit, although NASA has not yet decided exactly where the complex will crash. Most pieces should burn safely Earth’s atmosphereand there are no plans yet to undertake a salvage mission – which would be expensive – to see if there are any items that can be retrieved for the museum. (NASA and others involved space agencies pull out items they want to keep before re-entry.)
“We asked the US deorbit vehicle to get us into a very, very tight track of the debris,” Dana Weigel, NASA’s ISS program manager, said at the same press conference. The goal is to deploy the debris along a narrow path of no more than 2,000 kilometers using the “very high thrust and very strong burning” that the SpaceX vehicle will provide.
What survives the return will depend very much on its construction, but the agency’s calculations suggest that pieces will range in size from household microwave ovens to typical sedans. “Some things will burn out completely, like solar arrays,” Weigel added. “Other very dense structures — or structures that are buried under structures — can survive.”
The timing of the historic burn is expected to be around January 2031, when 11 years will pass solar cycle should be at rest, and the earth’s atmosphere has at least “inflated” because of it. sunuser activity. “Obviously,” Weigel noted, “the environment and the behavior of the solar cycle is something we would monitor and modify the data. [for] as we approach.”