Three incredibly rich men have been delayed on the International Space Station (ISS) for the past week, stranded there due to severe weather at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where their return flight was scheduled to take off. They got to have an actual, though a bit terrifying, modern astronaut experience throughout their lengthy stay: evading potentially deadly space junk. According to CBS News correspondent William Harwood, the ISS performed a “reboost maneuver” on Saturday to avoid colliding with the parts of a Russian military satellite it blew up. The debris was formed after Russia destroyed its own military spacecraft Cosmos 1408 on November 15, 2021.
A land-based missile blew up the satellite, which was launched in 1982. Given its mass of 2,200 kilograms, Cosmos 1408 generated a significant quantity of space debris when it was destroyed (4,850 pounds). It will ultimately slow down and burn out, although this might take a decade or more. The debris may induce the “Kessler Effect,” which is a worry (or Kessler Syndrome). Simply explained, the Kessler Effect occurs when a single incident in low-Earth orbit (such as a satellite explosion) triggers a chain reaction in which debris destroys additional satellites in orbit. If this happens, the junk may continue to collide with other satellites or trash, causing communication issues and blocking access to areas of orbit for missions.
It might wind up looking a lot like the movie Gravity, but with less George Clooney and more “hey, what happened to my GPS?” Some fear that, in the worst-case scenario, we will be trapped on Earth, unable to depart. Due to the issue of space debris, the United States recently stated that it will no longer undertake anti-satellite missile tests, asking other countries to follow suit. Thankfully, the reboost maneuver appeared to be effective, and the ISS’s first space tourists began their journey down to Earth on Sunday, eight days after they were supposed to return.
Today, April 8, the first all-private crewed trip to the International Space Station (ISS) is set to launch. This is NASA’s first-ever space tourism trip to the ISS, which will be operated by Axiom Space and launched on a SpaceX rocket. You can watch it all unfold in real time right here. The 10-day trip, which includes eight days on the ISS, might signal a shift in space research, especially since Russia decided to stop cooperating on the ISS.
Private enterprises such as Axiom, which wants to build its own commercial space station once the ISS is decommissioned, are hoping to cash in. SpaceX has already carried many astronauts to the International Space Station and launched its own all-civilian space mission, but this is the first time it has taken paying guests to the station. Crew Dragon Endeavour, which previously delivered the Crew Dragon Demo-2 and SpaceX Crew-2 flights to the ISS, will carry out the journey to and from the ISS.
