Heard Starliner’s sonic boom about ten minutes ago. Nothing to see, though. Too hazy from forest fire smoke. Touch down OK.
Thank Og that almost never happens in coastal Florida. 
Do they need to pack the vehicle with silica gel packs before rolling out after assembly?
Russia is withdrawing from the International Space Station:
The Russian segments are necessary for the ISS to operate so the other nations will have to find solutions if they want to keep the station alive. Personally I’d like to see ESA stepping up and becoming a bigger presence, but this is a not a good time for politicians to pledge lots of new money into space programs. I suspect Putin knows this.
However it might be something some of those new private space companies will be looking at.
I hope that NASA has been quietly consulting with SpaceX and other providers over the past few years to come up with ways to fill in the lost functionality from a Russian pullout. I don’t think this was necessarily inevitable, but it was certainly a plausible enough outcome.
Boosting the station will be the first issue to solve. Normally, that’s a service the Russians have provided.
Fortunately, the Cygnus capsule has already proved capable of doing the same:
Unfortunately, it only flies on the Antares and Atlas rockets, both of which are dependent on Russian engines and both of which have a limited number of remaining flights. Maybe it could be qualified for the Falcon 9 or other launchers, however.
Dragon could possibly service this role as well, though apparently its thruster arrangement is less than ideal.
I don’t recall off the top of my head which services come exclusively from the Russian segment, though I’ve seen lists before. NASA will just have to work through them if they want to keep the station running until 2030.
NASA provides a list in its ISS FAQs (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/international-space-station-frequently-asked-questions)
- Russia provides all of the propulsion for International Space Station used for station reboost, attitude control, debris avoidance maneuvers and eventual de-orbit operations by the Russian Segment, Russian propulsion systems, and Progress resupply cargo spacecraft.
- Propellant for thrusters on the Russian Segment is supplied by Russian Progress cargo spacecraft.
- The U.S. gyroscopes provide day-to-day attitude control to control the orientation of the station. Russian thrusters are used for attitude control during dynamic events, like spacecraft dockings, and provide attitude control recovery when the gyroscopes reach their control limits.
- Power from the U.S. solar arrays is transferred to the Russian Segment to augment their power needs.
- NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) provide communications and data transfer capability between the ground and the entire station, with some additional, less-continuous capability through Russian ground stations and satellites.
- There are life support systems on both the U.S. Orbital Segment and Russian Segment, responsible for generating oxygen and scrubbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This allows space station to have more crew on board, and having dissimilar systems enables increased levels of safety for crew.
- Mission control centers for NASA in Houston and Roscosmos in Moscow only command and control their respective segments.
and they say:
“The space station was not designed to be disassembled, and current interdependencies between each segment of the station prevent the U.S. Orbital Segment and Russian Segment from operating independently. Attempts to detach the U.S. Orbital Segment and the Russian Segment would encounter major logistical and safety challenges given the multitude of external and internal connections, the need to control spacecraft attitude and altitude, and software interdependency.”
Will Russia try to sell their parts to NASA, or will they try to remove them, or maybe just close them down and leave the rest of the international community to deal with the junk?
My guess is that they will simply stop funding. They’ll probably be happy to sell replacement parts and such to NASA, but undoubtedly would use it for leverage against sanctions, etc.
Frankly, I don’t see their contributions as being irreplaceable. Dragon may not be ideal for boosting the ISS, but so long as it’s feasible at all it’s probably cheaper than what the Russians were using. The Progress cargo flights can be handled by American space companies. Axiom will be adding modules to the ISS and eventually spinning off into a new station, and they could probably be contracted to provide ancilliary services the Russians are currently providing.
I don’t see Russia taking their modules off the station and de-orbiting them or using them in a separate station. That would just cost them more money and anger their partners even more. More likely they’ll just walk away and maybe move to a fee-for-service model for maintaining what’s still there.
I think it’s past the point where they are simply an unreliable partner. There is at least a non-zero risk that they will take active measures to harm the US segment. I think we should disconnect them as rapidly as technically feasible. Roscosmos should just be seen as an arm of the Russian military at this point.
I don’t disagree that they are a malevolent influence at this point, and I’d be happy to see them gone from ISS. But what do they have to gain from sabotaging ISS? It’s not of any real military or economic advantage to the US. It would be a major escalation in hostilities for no real gain.
But hey, I’m willing to believe Russia would do just about anything these days. Maybe they’d do it just to lower the west’s prestige or something.
I would think that’s plenty of reason.
From what I understand, the Russian module would be completely useless on its own. In order to make it functional would require more work than just building a whole new station anyway.
However, keeping the US side functional without the Russian modules would be quite difficult as well. We probably have more flexibility, both in our capabilities and based on the hardware that is up there, but Russia demanding that we cut their module loose would be a massive blow to the ISS.
I don’t think they’d actively and overtly sabotage the station, like trying to make it fail and fall out of orbit. But passive-aggressively taking small gradual steps that cause it to degrade, which if not countered or corrected would put the station at risk, because they know those corrective steps will cost the West money and put pressure on ally relationships? As long as they have some kind of fig-leaf excuse to justify the action — saving a few rubles, or wanting to reclaim a component for their own station project — absolutely they will do that.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
So it seems the Russian’s clarified that they will leave the ISS “after” 2024. Which could mean at any time. And they want to operate their own station so I’d imagine they will want to wait until that is operational - which could be a long time away.
Does the ISS have any real value anymore?
We’ve figured out how 1600 different species of grubs reproduce in zero-g, so I think that’s it.
I’m disappointed that we haven’t used the ISS more for mesogravity experiments. In particular, lunar (~1/6 Earth) and Martian (38%). Japan has a small mouse centrifuge that they’ve used for some experiments, but only recently, and I’d like to see a lot more.
There were plans for a human-scale centrifuge for the ISS, allowing testing of mesogravity environments, but it was cancelled.
Here’s a new video on the SpinLaunch system which takes a deep dive into the engineering involved. It is a long video (42 minutes) but if you like this stuff it is worth a watch from a good YouTube channel.
Seems mad to me that this is a thing but it seems they are having a real go at making it work.
Having watched almost every centrifugal catapult on Punkin’ Chunkin’ shake itself to pieces while flinging pie in many directions, I’m gonna bet this thing is a wacky pipe dream or a long con on the investors / government, rather than a real project with real potential.
Waht?? 
The Artemis I launch is scheduled for Monday 8/29/22! Here is a big-ass PDF from NASA about the SLS. And here is the NASA Kennedy YouTube channel
So looking forward to it!
Article recapping the agonized history of Constellation/SLS - https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/the-sls-rocket-is-the-worst-thing-to-happen-to-nasa-but-maybe-also-the-best/
Basically, all it takes is Politicians and Lobbyists to arrive at a decision this bad. The SLS will probably end up having one tenth the capability and ten times the cost as Space-X.
I started a thread for the Artemis program: