[Science] NASA Prepares ISS for Commercial Flights

[lioneatszebra]

NASA Prepares ISS for Commercial Flights
From PCMag

NASA is set to start reconfiguring the International Space Station with docking ports for commercial spacecraft carrying astronauts to the orbiting space laboratory.

The space agency said the remodel of the ISS is expected to be completed by the end of the year, according to Discovery News. It will be the first major overhaul of the space station since it was completed in 2011.

Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet nearly four years ago, NASA and other space agencies have relied on Russia's Roscosmos to ferry crews to the ISS in Soyuz capsules launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Last month, Boeing and SpaceX announced plans to begin ferrying astronauts into space by 2017 as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program.

In 2012, NASA awarded $1.1 billion to Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada Corporation to design and develop vehicles that could carry astronauts into space within five years. Last year, the space agency eliminated Sierra Nevada from the competition, inking a deal with Boeing to fly humans into space worth as much as $4.2 billion and a concurrent contract with SpaceX potentially worth $2.6 billion.

Remodeling the ISS will involve the installation of docking ports for Boeing's CST-100 and SpaceX's Dragon crew capsules, which will attach to two International Docking Adapters set to arrive at the ISS aboard an unmanned Dragon capsule later this year, Discovery News reported.

"One berthing slip will be at the front end of the Harmony connecting node, where the space shuttles used to dock. The other will be on Harmony's zenith, or up-facing, port," the site said.

NASA's space station program manager Mike Suffredini told Discovery News that relocating the Leonardo multipurpose module from the Unity to the Tranquility connection nodes will be the "biggest challenge" in the reconfiguration. The entire job will involve seven spacewalks by ISS astronauts, the first of which is set for Friday, but the relocation of the Leonardo module will be done robotically by ground control.

"This is quite a bit of work. Our plan has always been to have a docking capability in place and operational by the end of 2015 and we're on track to do that," Suffredini told Discovery News.