The $843 million spacecraft SpaceX is designing to land at the International Space Station at the end of the decade will be a super-powered version of the Dragon capsule currently used to ferry astronauts and cargo into orbit, the company said on Wednesday.
NASA awards huge contract to SpaceX Last month, NASA announced that Northrop Grumman had been awarded the contract to develop the United States Disaster Recovery Vehicle (USDV), as the sole competitor, in part because the design makes use of a lot of flight-proven hardware. Source selection statement It was published on Tuesday.
Dana Weigel, NASA’s ISS program manager, said at a press conference on Wednesday that NASA is seeking proposals that make the most of flight experience, because reliability is key. But even with a significant incorporation of the Dragon architecture, about half of the USDV will be completely new, and 100% of the deorbit capabilities will be new to the spacecraft, she said.
The USDV’s purpose is to perform a series of critical burns during the final week of the station’s life, but NASA plans to launch the spacecraft about 18 months before those burns occur. Weigel said the USDV will dock to the ISS’s forward port and remain there as the ISS slowly “drifts” down to Earth. NASA will keep the crew on board for as long as possible to keep the station in orbit, but the crew will eventually leave about six months before re-entry.
The USDV will activate once the station reaches an altitude of about 220 kilometers above Earth. It will perform a series of burns over about four days to put the station on a precise deorbit trajectory, followed by a final re-entry burn. Any part of the station that doesn’t burn up in the atmosphere will land at a yet-to-be-determined location in uninhabited ocean waters. This is the same disposal method the station has used for other large spacecraft, including Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus and Japan’s HTV cargo capsule.
The mission is complex, and SpaceX needs to develop a spacecraft powerful enough to guide the space station through the increasing atmospheric resistance. Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s Dragon mission management director, explains: “The most complex and challenging part is [final] The burn must be powerful enough to fly the entire space station, but at the same time resist the torques and forces caused by the increasing atmospheric drag on the space station, and ensure that it ultimately lands at its intended location.”
SpaceX’s final design is a spacecraft that can carry six times as much usable propellant as the Dragon capsule and have three to four times the power generation and storage capacity. The end result, at least according to renderings SpaceX released early Wednesday, looks like a traditional Dragon with a giant trunk on the end.
The trunk will house all the extra propellant, powerplants and avionics needed to complete the mission, including 30 additional Draco thrusters in addition to the 16 already installed in the standard capsule configuration, Walker said. The final large burn is intended to reduce the surface area of debris, which could range in size from the size of a microwave oven to the size of a small sedan.
NASA officials said they realized the capabilities Roscosmos could provide were not commensurate with the scale of the space station, so the agency, along with the other space station partners — Roscosmos, the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Canadian Space Agency — agreed to solicit deorbit rockets from private companies. NASA issued a request for proposals last fall.
Weigel said the award is being presented now because developing the complex spacecraft could take years.
But this contract is different from other big contracts SpaceX has won for NASA: While in the space station crew and cargo transportation contract, NASA simply purchases the services of a spacecraft owned and operated by SpaceX, the deorbit spacecraft contract reverses that: SpaceX designs the spacecraft and delivers it to NASA, but the space agency is responsible for procuring the launch, operating the spacecraft, and actually returning the ISS to Earth.
NASA plans to begin the rocket procurement process with a separate tender about three years before the launch, which would see the ISS’s splashdown sometime the following year if ISS operations end in 2030.
NASA officials say they want to ensure overlap with commercial space station providers in low Earth orbit but acknowledge there are many variables that could impede a smooth transition. These include the development timelines of the handful of commercial companies with space stations in development, including Axiom Space, Voyager Space-led STAR Labs and Orbital Reef, a joint venture between Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Currently, NASA is authorized to operate the space station through 2030, but beyond that it will need government approval and cooperation with other partner space agencies, said NASA Deputy Administrator Ken Bowersox.
