The POT announced last month that it had selected SpaceX to build the spaceship that will be responsible for destroying the International Space StationISS, by its acronym in English, by deorbiting it. The ISS will reach the end of its operational life in 2030 After more than three decades in space and NASA plans for the structure burn up safely upon re-entry into the atmosphere, over the oceanThe US space agency has now revealed that the deorbiter vehicle will be a modified Dragon capsule so that it has the additional thrust necessary to perform the deorbiting maneuver.
The aerospace company Elon Musk has obtained a contract of $843 million to manufacture and deliver the modified Dragon to NASA. The United States Deorbital VehicleUSDV for its acronym in English, will be operated by the space agency and will have a total of 46 Draco thrusters Of these, 16 will be dedicated to altitude control. The standard Dragon 2 capsule has only 18 of themThe USDV will carry six times more fuel than a standard Dragon, allowing it to reach four times more thrust. That means that more than half of the spacecraft’s 30,000-kilogram launch mass will be accounted for by the same and Your tank will be twice as big as it is now.
With 6x more propellant and 4x the power of today’s Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX was selected to design and develop the US Deorbit Vehicle for a precise, controlled deorbit of the @Space_Stationhttps://t.co/GgtuplTwqQpic.twitter.com/E23sS7CE4U
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 17, 2024
The current plan calls for the closure of the ISS in 2030. The agency intends to launching the USDV simultaneously with the sending of the last crew to the International Space Station. After docking with the ISS, the crew will check out the spacecraft and prepare the station for its final farewell. NASA will allow the station’s orbit to naturally decay from its usual altitude of 400 kilometers to 330 kilometers. At that point, The crew will leave the ISS and leave the USDV to finish its work.
Six months after the crew left, USDV will use its thrusters to deorbit the ISSNASA plans to drop the ISS into the Earth’s atmosphere in a 2,000-kilometer-long stretch over the ocean. Most orbiting objects are small enough to burn up completely during reentry, but not the ISSNASA expects parts of the station to remain intact until they impact the water; Some of these fragments could be the size of a car..
Because the USDV is larger than the standard Dragon, NASA will not be able to launch it with the Falcon 9 which currently carries Dragon capsules into space. The agency will have a launch vehicle three years ahead of the planned mission date.
The SpaceX Dragon is the reusable spacecraft developed by Musk’s company that for a decade, between 2010 and 2020, has been used to resupply the ISSIts successor, the Dragon 2, has been in operation since 2020 and is available in two versions, One for resupply tasks, the Cargo Dragon 2, and another for transporting astronauts, the Crew Dragon 2..