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Early Monday, a Crew Dragon was moored in the “front” harbor of the Harmony module.
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Four crew members were in the Dragon spacecraft Resilience.
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Soon they began to withdraw from the station.
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And further away.
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The spacecraft reached a distance of 60 meters and reoriented itself.
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Then the vehicle came back.
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It was coming in with the “Zenith” port on the same space station module.
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Almost there.
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And less than an hour later, everything was back together.
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Early Monday morning, four astronauts put on their flight suits and boarded their Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience.
But they did not come home. NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, were rather moving the Crew Dragon spacecraft for the first time.
In the course of 38 minutes, the spacecraft returned smoothly from the Harmony module of the International Space Station to a distance of 60 meters from the large laboratory. Under the power of his Draco thrusters, Resilience reorient itself to connect to another port on the Harmony module.
During this autonomous maneuver, Resilience moved from the module’s “forward” port to its “senith” port. The reason for this fluctuation was the expected arrival of another Crew Dragon mission in a few weeks – with four more astronauts – to the space station, as well as a cargo Dragon mission in June.
This cargo mission, the 22nd to be flown by SpaceX, will carry large solar panels for the space station in its trunk. This Cargo Dragon must connect to the Zenith gate so that the space station’s large robot arm can grab the panels for the space station installation. This arm could not reach the spacecraft’s “trunk” if it was moored to the front port.
So on Monday, Resilience moved to this senithave. This will enable the next crew mission, which is not expected to be launched until April 22, to dock at the front port. Then after that Resilience Departing at the end of April, the CRS-22 cargo mission will dock at the port of Zenith free of charge.
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It can all be confusing, we admit, but the bottom line is that SpaceX Dragons creates something of a traffic jam in a lane. NASA is, of course, very pleased that U.S. spacecraft is providing the cargo as well as the crew to the station.
Why then were four crew members needed on board the vehicle when the whole procedure was autonomous? For the Crew-1 mission with Hopkins, Glover, Walker and Noguchi, Resilience is their ride home. Although they never touched the flight controls, the crew had to be in the spacecraft in case an emergency – however unlikely – should occur and they had to abort the maneuver and return to Earth. Fortunately, that did not happen.
List by NASA TV