Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Russian Module To ISS

If schedules hold, April 5 will be a big day at Cape Kennedy. That day, shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch on its next-to-last space mission. Also that day, a Russian module is scheduled to be loaded into the payload bay of shuttle Atlantis for delivery to ISS on a flight slated for May 14.

The module, which contains another docking port, is among the finishing touches completing construction of ISS. It is being readied at the Cape in a building previously used to prepare Spacehab modules for shuttle flights. Spacehab is an American commercial company that flew modules containing research pallets covering a range of science in the shuttle payload bay. After a few more shuttle flights, the only way to get to ISS for a few years will be in a Soyuz capsule. Soyuz has no payload bay. There might be an important truth in there somewhere. Maybe truths.

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