![]() The “Palace in the Sky,” or in Chinese, “Tiangong Space Station,” is one of the two space stations currently in orbit around the Earth, next to the International Space Station (ISS). On May 7, it was confirmed that the rocket and capsule were stacked and transported to the launch pad at the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China. No details about the science of this mission, its purpose, and the operation schedule have been released by CASC as of now. This capsule can deliver about 7.4 metric tons of supplies, including 70kg of fruits, to the Tiangong Space Station.īesides the vitamin delivery, more science is expected to fly on this mission, as it will support the next crew rotation on Tiangong. This increases the internal volume from 18 cubic meters to 22.5 cubic meters. At this stage, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) also stated that the capsule allows for 20% more payloads than previous Tianzhou capsules. The Tianzhou-6 capsule was rolled to the fueling and encapsulation building to support final preparations before stacking on top of the rocket. The preparation for this mission began in late April. The launch occurred at 13:25 UTC on May 10 and lofted a Tianzhou capsule on top of a Chang Zheng 7 (Long March 7). (Dave Mosher/Wired.China plans to continue its ongoing supply chain for the Tiangong Space Station (TSS) by launching the Tianzhou-6 mission. *Images: Space shuttle Atlantis lifts off Launch Pad 39A for the last time. Lisa Grossman contributed to this report. "But I'm not the policy-maker, I'm the implementer. We need to learn to live on another body" like the moon, said space shuttle launch director Michael Leinbach in a pre-launch press briefing. "I think we as a species need to be thinking about living off this planet long-term, very long-term. NASA is dreaming up missions beyond low-Earth orbit, however, and awaiting Apollo-era-like clarity from the president. Until then, the United States will purchase flights on board Russia's Soyuz system for its astronaut corps. NASA is seeding money to commercial spaceflight companies to develop a human-ready spaceship, but the space agency expects a viable spacecraft to emerge no earlier than five years from now. No American spacecraft is ready to ferry astronauts to the space station during its anticipated 10-year lifespan. But the shape of things to come is uncertain. human spaceflight won't end with the conclusion of Atlantis' mission. Two of the missions - Challenger's last in 1986 and Columbia’s in 2003 - ended catastrophically and claimed the lives of 14 astronauts. The space agency ultimately launched 135 space shuttle missions since 1981 at a total cost of about $209 billion. "Rather than lowering the costs of access to space and making it routine, the space shuttle turned out to be an experimental vehicle with multiple inherent risks, requiring extreme care and high costs to operate safely," he wrote in an op-ed published Wednesday by MIT Technology Review. "If we really wanted to have something that would have flown as frequently, we would have spent more," he said.īut space-policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University thinks the shuttle was the wrong spacecraft altogether. drew a line on how much money would be spent," said Wayne Hale, a former NASA mission manager who now works as a director of human spaceflight for Special Aerospace Services.Įarly on, Hale said, the program never got the roughly $5 billion it needed to build a robust launch system that could handle 64 launches a year, so it was forced to make costly compromises. ![]() "It's a tough technical challenge to build a reusable spacecraft, and the president's Office of Management.
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