One thing that I would point out is that ITTL STS-38R launched in July 1989, or about 17 months prior to the OTL launch of STS-38, mostly because of the added pre-disaster flights. This is not to say that the flight count will stay about 18 months ahead (OTL's "Summer of Hydrogen" was in 1990, and slowed the flight rate considerably), but is something to keep in mind....
Boldly Going: A History of an American Space Station
- Thread starter e of pi
- Start date
True. Although as I got the date wrong (sts 99 wasn't until 2000) it could still be anytime before that (assuming no foul ups).
Just binge-read everything that's up so far, and yet again you've blown me away with a fantastic TL. Really looking forward to what's to come. Enterprise as a sort of alternate-Space Station Freedom being up and running in 1989, coupled with whatever Bush has in store for NASA (words I thought I'd never say) has me excited.
We know exactly when the Shuttle derived heavy lifter first flies. It's right there in the OP.
Which suggests they remain about 18 months ahead of OTL suggesting a similar flight rate to OTL in the 90's.
Part 8: STS-38R arrives and works against the clock to activate the full solar array.
Boldly Going Part 8
The External Tank’s bulk was a familiar one to any orbiter flight crew, who had all had their encounters with the giant orange monsters in ground training and on the ride up the elevator to the pad just days before. However, to find one here, its white anti-popcorning sealants nearly glowing in the orbital sunlight, was almost unnerving. For the first time, a flight crew made rendezvous with something larger than the Space Shuttle, and their challenge was not merely to stash it within the orbiter’s payload bay, but to belly up and dock to it. With Enterprise’s keep alive panels deployed, access to the docking port on the Leonardo Lab Module was blocked, as the port was mainly planned for future expansion. Instead, Engle and Nagel guided Atlantis around the station to the ventral side of the external tank, opposite OV-101. There, a panel replaced in the intertank offered a docking hatch and the access to the inflatable passages located inside the ET’s intertank. Atlantis’s flight crew made the docking look easy, and the orbiter settled into a hard dock. However, before reaching Enterprise’s core modules, the STS-38R crew had to activate, inflate, and verify the so-called “hamster tubes” which Marshall had grafted around the thrust beam inside ET-007’s intertank. The intertank was massive, stretching the full 8.4m diameter of the tank. At the maximum point, the two tank domes allowed nearly the same 8.4m of axial length, but in the middle the two dome ends were separated by bare feet, allowing only enough room for the massive structural beam which carried the thrust from the two Solid Rocket Boosters during Enterprise’s first and only ascent.
Late on Flight Day 2, Owen Garriott opened the hatch between the orbiter and the vestibule, with the station-side hatch still separating him from his second space station. In this awkward liminal space, Garriott and the rest of the flight crew worked to connect the fittings designed to allow Atlantis to inflate and deploy the intertank tubes. The process was the largest flareup of Marshall’s past space station legacy to date. While the Marshall team had expected the first pressure introduced into the intertank passages to easily begin their deployment against the vacuum of space filling the rest of the intertank, the passages did not seem to inflate at first. The crew tried again, but after reaching several psi on the station-side of the hatch, they discontinued attempts for the day to allow ground controllers to work the problem. With Skylab looming large in program leadership minds, the crew resumed the next morning. It was decided that friction between the fabric folds might have exceeded ground expectations, and the crew were directed to simply slowly but steadily supply air into the module. The risk existed that a sudden “snap” to inflation would occur, which could damage the connections between the inflatable tubes and the rigid portions of the station. However, the friction seen as the pressure mounted--literally and metaphorically--reassured controllers that the risk was small. Finally, the tubes began to budge open. After consuming most of Flight Day 3 (putting the mission almost a full day behind schedule), the crew was finally able to open the hatch and gain access to the precious cubic meters of volume they had won in the passages between the tanks. Contrary to the common mental image of inflatable modules as similar to terrestrial bouncy castles, the walls of the module were quite bulky, three redundant bladders, a small MMOD layer in case the rigid outer skin of the intertank structure was holed, and internal insulation and fabric to cushion crew working their way around the circular hallway, a torus roughly two meters in diameter. Netting lined the inner and outer walls, serving both as hand-holds for locomotion and stowage for future gear.
The “hamster tubes” started at the “visitor entrance” to the station and wrapped more than 180 degrees around the intertank to the pressure hull leading to the Core Module Access Passage leading on to Enterprise’s middeck. Two branches broke off as the passage wound under the thrust beam, one each accessing manholes into the LOX and LH2 tanks of ET-007, creating in total roughly 20 cubic meters of pressurized volume at what would, when the tanks were opened, eventually become the core of the station’s traffic patterns. For the moment, these branches were ignored beyond verifying the modified orbitally-accessible manholes remained sealed, as Engle, Garriott, and Nagel worked to make up for lost time. The rigid passage between the intertank and the Enterprise core modules proved much easier to work with. Installed on the ground, clearing through the CMAP was simply a matter of checking and opening two pressure hatches, one on the intertank end and one at the other end recessed into the belly of the former OV-101. After checking air for breathability and watching carefully for any floating particles or debris, the STS-38R crew ended Flight Day 3 by finally gaining access to Enterprise’s mid-deck. The crew celebrated by retrieving a waiting snack of ice cream from the station’s galley freezers before closing the hatches for safety and retiring to Atlantis for a well-earned rest.
On Flight Day 4, the Atlantis crew awoke to the sound of synthesized chimes and the ethereal soprano of Loulie Jean Norman, as a specially-recorded voiceover from William Shatner (never afraid of publicity) offered the crew a benediction for their “ongoing” mission and bid them to go now “where no one had gone before.” (A modification of the script which managed to frustrate many of the same fans the skit was meant to entertain.) Still, taking the words to heart, the crew pressed on into some of the most delicate work of the mission: activating Space Station Enterprise and deploying the rest of its solar power system. When fully active, Enterprise’s base load would rise from the 6 kW sustainable from the keep-alive panels to more than 16 kW (slightly more than Atlantis’s own 14 kW due to the larger volume and modified systems). Once drawn on by the fully active systems, even the station’s nearly fully-charged batteries could sustain it for only a few days. To help bridge the gap, Atlantis’ crew first rigged the connections between Atlantis and Enterprise. With Atlantis’ payload bay carrying no experiments and only a Spacelab module full of cargo for future station crews which the crew had been too busy to begin to transfer, Atlantis could spare a few critical kilowatts to stretch Enterprise’s batteries while the crew went to work to deploy the station’s arrays.
To do so, STS-38R moved their main base of operations from Atlantis to Enterprise for the day, the middeck just different enough in layout to confuse the crew. Larger differences lurked on the cockpit level, which was converted to an “Orbital Operations Center”. The flight chair which Joe Engle had used so long ago was gone, providing more open space on the deck and places to hang checklists and procedure manuals. After getting main power online and getting their first view of the inside of the payload bay since calling tally ho on the station, the STS-38R crew broke up to divide and conquer. While Engle and Merbold went through the process of activating and accessing the Leonardo Laboratory Module, Garriott and Nagel did the same for the station’s robotic manipulator, the CanadArm 2. Unlike the Shuttle version, the station’s arm was capable of detaching from its main base, as it had a grapple fixture at each end which included the ability to draw power from any grapple point which offered it. With this, the arm could be “walked” to multiple locations inside the payload bay and on the structure of the Enterprise Power Module, increasing the reach of the station’s crew. Future plans called for installing bases on the outside of ET-007, allowing the arm to “walk” to within reach of visiting orbiters to hand off future cargo and expansion modules. With Garriott and Sullivan suited and ready for an EVA in case anything went wrong, Nagel and Thuot commanded the Enterprise Power Module to fold up and out of the bay. The hamster tubes appeared to have absorbed any residual “Marshall Luck’ with space hardware, as the primary structural element of the EPM smoothly rotated up and out of the payload bay proper, allowing the “keep-alive” panels to extend over the starboard door sill like an oar. Flight Day 4 was completed by deploying the other solar array wing on the starboard side, adding another critical 12 kW of peak power to the station’s generating capabilities. Even averaged over an orbital night and day, that was enough to reduce the station’s parasitic draw on Atlantis to just 2 kW. Though the STS-38R crew had begun the day almost 24 hours behind schedule, judicious parallel processing by the crew had reduced many of the “catch-up” tasks, as Merbold and the rest of the crew had worked in the LLM even as the operations to extend the solar arrays proceeded only meters behind them in the bay.
Images by @nixonshead (AEB Digtial on Twitter)
The External Tank’s bulk was a familiar one to any orbiter flight crew, who had all had their encounters with the giant orange monsters in ground training and on the ride up the elevator to the pad just days before. However, to find one here, its white anti-popcorning sealants nearly glowing in the orbital sunlight, was almost unnerving. For the first time, a flight crew made rendezvous with something larger than the Space Shuttle, and their challenge was not merely to stash it within the orbiter’s payload bay, but to belly up and dock to it. With Enterprise’s keep alive panels deployed, access to the docking port on the Leonardo Lab Module was blocked, as the port was mainly planned for future expansion. Instead, Engle and Nagel guided Atlantis around the station to the ventral side of the external tank, opposite OV-101. There, a panel replaced in the intertank offered a docking hatch and the access to the inflatable passages located inside the ET’s intertank. Atlantis’s flight crew made the docking look easy, and the orbiter settled into a hard dock. However, before reaching Enterprise’s core modules, the STS-38R crew had to activate, inflate, and verify the so-called “hamster tubes” which Marshall had grafted around the thrust beam inside ET-007’s intertank. The intertank was massive, stretching the full 8.4m diameter of the tank. At the maximum point, the two tank domes allowed nearly the same 8.4m of axial length, but in the middle the two dome ends were separated by bare feet, allowing only enough room for the massive structural beam which carried the thrust from the two Solid Rocket Boosters during Enterprise’s first and only ascent.
Late on Flight Day 2, Owen Garriott opened the hatch between the orbiter and the vestibule, with the station-side hatch still separating him from his second space station. In this awkward liminal space, Garriott and the rest of the flight crew worked to connect the fittings designed to allow Atlantis to inflate and deploy the intertank tubes. The process was the largest flareup of Marshall’s past space station legacy to date. While the Marshall team had expected the first pressure introduced into the intertank passages to easily begin their deployment against the vacuum of space filling the rest of the intertank, the passages did not seem to inflate at first. The crew tried again, but after reaching several psi on the station-side of the hatch, they discontinued attempts for the day to allow ground controllers to work the problem. With Skylab looming large in program leadership minds, the crew resumed the next morning. It was decided that friction between the fabric folds might have exceeded ground expectations, and the crew were directed to simply slowly but steadily supply air into the module. The risk existed that a sudden “snap” to inflation would occur, which could damage the connections between the inflatable tubes and the rigid portions of the station. However, the friction seen as the pressure mounted--literally and metaphorically--reassured controllers that the risk was small. Finally, the tubes began to budge open. After consuming most of Flight Day 3 (putting the mission almost a full day behind schedule), the crew was finally able to open the hatch and gain access to the precious cubic meters of volume they had won in the passages between the tanks. Contrary to the common mental image of inflatable modules as similar to terrestrial bouncy castles, the walls of the module were quite bulky, three redundant bladders, a small MMOD layer in case the rigid outer skin of the intertank structure was holed, and internal insulation and fabric to cushion crew working their way around the circular hallway, a torus roughly two meters in diameter. Netting lined the inner and outer walls, serving both as hand-holds for locomotion and stowage for future gear.
The “hamster tubes” started at the “visitor entrance” to the station and wrapped more than 180 degrees around the intertank to the pressure hull leading to the Core Module Access Passage leading on to Enterprise’s middeck. Two branches broke off as the passage wound under the thrust beam, one each accessing manholes into the LOX and LH2 tanks of ET-007, creating in total roughly 20 cubic meters of pressurized volume at what would, when the tanks were opened, eventually become the core of the station’s traffic patterns. For the moment, these branches were ignored beyond verifying the modified orbitally-accessible manholes remained sealed, as Engle, Garriott, and Nagel worked to make up for lost time. The rigid passage between the intertank and the Enterprise core modules proved much easier to work with. Installed on the ground, clearing through the CMAP was simply a matter of checking and opening two pressure hatches, one on the intertank end and one at the other end recessed into the belly of the former OV-101. After checking air for breathability and watching carefully for any floating particles or debris, the STS-38R crew ended Flight Day 3 by finally gaining access to Enterprise’s mid-deck. The crew celebrated by retrieving a waiting snack of ice cream from the station’s galley freezers before closing the hatches for safety and retiring to Atlantis for a well-earned rest.
On Flight Day 4, the Atlantis crew awoke to the sound of synthesized chimes and the ethereal soprano of Loulie Jean Norman, as a specially-recorded voiceover from William Shatner (never afraid of publicity) offered the crew a benediction for their “ongoing” mission and bid them to go now “where no one had gone before.” (A modification of the script which managed to frustrate many of the same fans the skit was meant to entertain.) Still, taking the words to heart, the crew pressed on into some of the most delicate work of the mission: activating Space Station Enterprise and deploying the rest of its solar power system. When fully active, Enterprise’s base load would rise from the 6 kW sustainable from the keep-alive panels to more than 16 kW (slightly more than Atlantis’s own 14 kW due to the larger volume and modified systems). Once drawn on by the fully active systems, even the station’s nearly fully-charged batteries could sustain it for only a few days. To help bridge the gap, Atlantis’ crew first rigged the connections between Atlantis and Enterprise. With Atlantis’ payload bay carrying no experiments and only a Spacelab module full of cargo for future station crews which the crew had been too busy to begin to transfer, Atlantis could spare a few critical kilowatts to stretch Enterprise’s batteries while the crew went to work to deploy the station’s arrays.
To do so, STS-38R moved their main base of operations from Atlantis to Enterprise for the day, the middeck just different enough in layout to confuse the crew. Larger differences lurked on the cockpit level, which was converted to an “Orbital Operations Center”. The flight chair which Joe Engle had used so long ago was gone, providing more open space on the deck and places to hang checklists and procedure manuals. After getting main power online and getting their first view of the inside of the payload bay since calling tally ho on the station, the STS-38R crew broke up to divide and conquer. While Engle and Merbold went through the process of activating and accessing the Leonardo Laboratory Module, Garriott and Nagel did the same for the station’s robotic manipulator, the CanadArm 2. Unlike the Shuttle version, the station’s arm was capable of detaching from its main base, as it had a grapple fixture at each end which included the ability to draw power from any grapple point which offered it. With this, the arm could be “walked” to multiple locations inside the payload bay and on the structure of the Enterprise Power Module, increasing the reach of the station’s crew. Future plans called for installing bases on the outside of ET-007, allowing the arm to “walk” to within reach of visiting orbiters to hand off future cargo and expansion modules. With Garriott and Sullivan suited and ready for an EVA in case anything went wrong, Nagel and Thuot commanded the Enterprise Power Module to fold up and out of the bay. The hamster tubes appeared to have absorbed any residual “Marshall Luck’ with space hardware, as the primary structural element of the EPM smoothly rotated up and out of the payload bay proper, allowing the “keep-alive” panels to extend over the starboard door sill like an oar. Flight Day 4 was completed by deploying the other solar array wing on the starboard side, adding another critical 12 kW of peak power to the station’s generating capabilities. Even averaged over an orbital night and day, that was enough to reduce the station’s parasitic draw on Atlantis to just 2 kW. Though the STS-38R crew had begun the day almost 24 hours behind schedule, judicious parallel processing by the crew had reduced many of the “catch-up” tasks, as Merbold and the rest of the crew had worked in the LLM even as the operations to extend the solar arrays proceeded only meters behind them in the bay.
Images by @nixonshead (AEB Digtial on Twitter)
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Nice. I particularly like the bit about CanadArm being able to walk—I imagine a time lapse of it would resemble a slinky toy, turning itself over as it moves.
Would they even need OMS systems and the weight involved and not simply just use the main engines for the entire orbital insertion, with or without more fuel needed?
If you don't care about the orbiters landing/abort flying ability could they not even cut and shut the fuselage since you need major surgery to remove the wings anyway, to make it longer to accommodate more payload?
They would. The SSMEs were not airstartable or restartable (at least without extensive and expensive modifications that by themselves could take many years), so they had to have an auxiliary propulsion system to circularize the orbit, i.e. the OMS.
Also since its already installed you don't need an extra system for orbital reboost or station keeping (although as others have mentioned I guess its a little bit powerful for that job). Presumably the station is designed to use the dead SSME's as ballast of some kind since they're pretty much dead weight at this point.
If it were me, I’d classify the SSMEs as “an experiment on the effects of long term space exposure on rocket engine materials”. That way, you can keep a budget line open on them.
Good morning Enterprise! Nice to see the station waking up, although the narrated alarm clock might have been a bit much. 
Also pleased to see a version of the Canadarm 2 already part of this timeline, although I assume a Canahand/DEXTRE attachment is a few years away.
What's the orientation of Atlantis relative to Enterprise? I always imagined the 'stack' with both payload bays facing Earth (as normal for shuttle operations) with the docked shuttle at 90 decrees to Enterprise's long axis.
Also pleased to see a version of the Canadarm 2 already part of this timeline, although I assume a Canahand/DEXTRE attachment is a few years away.
What's the orientation of Atlantis relative to Enterprise? I always imagined the 'stack' with both payload bays facing Earth (as normal for shuttle operations) with the docked shuttle at 90 decrees to Enterprise's long axis.
The real CanadArm 2 on the ISS walks, I'd recommend checking YouTube for a timelapse.
She's finally getting up and running! Personally, I can think of very few thing more beautiful than rendezvous pictures, and the renders from this and the last chapter fully capture that; great work nixonhead!
I'll probably keep responding to at least the next few chapters yet just gushing on the renders. Eventually I'll get used to them and have comments on the actual writing and events again.
I'll probably keep responding to at least the next few chapters yet just gushing on the renders. Eventually I'll get used to them and have comments on the actual writing and events again.
Chungus Spacelab for the win - nice postBoldly Going Part 8
The External Tank’s bulk was a familiar one to any orbiter flight crew, who had all had their encounters with the giant orange monsters in ground training and on the ride up the elevator to the pad just days before. However, to find one here, its white anti-popcorning sealants nearly glowing in the orbital sunlight, was almost unnerving. For the first time, a flight crew made rendezvous with something larger than the Space Shuttle, and their challenge was not merely to stash it within the orbiter’s payload bay, but to belly up and dock to it. With Enterprise’s keep alive panels deployed, access to the docking port on the Leonardo Lab Module was blocked, as the port was mainly planned for future expansion. Instead, Engle and Nagel guided Atlantis around the station to the ventral side of the external tank, opposite OV-101. There, a panel replaced in the intertank offered a docking hatch and the access to the inflatable passages located inside the ET’s intertank. Atlantis’s flight crew made the docking look easy, and the orbiter settled into a hard dock. However, before reaching Enterprise’s core modules, the STS-38R crew had to activate, inflate, and verify the so-called “hamster tubes” which Marshall had grafted around the thrust beam inside ET-007’s intertank. The intertank was massive, stretching the full 8.4m diameter of the tank. At the maximum point, the two tank domes allowed nearly the same 8.4m of axial length, but in the middle the two dome ends were separated by bare feet, allowing only enough room for the massive structural beam which carried the thrust from the two Solid Rocket Boosters during Enterprise’s first and only ascent.
Late on Flight Day 2, Owen Garriott opened the hatch between the orbiter and the vestibule, with the station-side hatch still separating him from his second space station. In this awkward liminal space, Garriott and the rest of the flight crew worked to connect the fittings designed to allow Atlantis to inflate and deploy the intertank tubes. The process was the largest flareup of Marshall’s past space station legacy to date. While the Marshall team had expected the first pressure introduced into the intertank passages to easily begin their deployment against the vacuum of space filling the rest of the intertank, the passages did not seem to inflate at first. The crew tried again, but after reaching several psi on the station-side of the hatch, they discontinued attempts for the day to allow ground controllers to work the problem. With Skylab looming large in program leadership minds, the crew resumed the next morning. It was decided that friction between the fabric folds might have exceeded ground expectations, and the crew were directed to simply slowly but steadily supply air into the module. The risk existed that a sudden “snap” to inflation would occur, which could damage the connections between the inflatable tubes and the rigid portions of the station. However, the friction seen as the pressure mounted--literally and metaphorically--reassured controllers that the risk was small. Finally, the tubes began to budge open. After consuming most of Flight Day 3 (putting the mission almost a full day behind schedule), the crew was finally able to open the hatch and gain access to the precious cubic meters of volume they had won in the passages between the tanks. Contrary to the common mental image of inflatable modules as similar to terrestrial bouncy castles, the walls of the module were quite bulky, three redundant bladders, a small MMOD layer in case the rigid outer skin of the intertank structure was holed, and internal insulation and fabric to cushion crew working their way around the circular hallway, a torus roughly two meters in diameter. Netting lined the inner and outer walls, serving both as hand-holds for locomotion and stowage for future gear.
The “hamster tubes” started at the “visitor entrance” to the station and wrapped more than 180 degrees around the intertank to the pressure hull leading to the Core Module Access Passage leading on to Enterprise’s middeck. Two branches broke off as the passage wound under the thrust beam, one each accessing manholes into the LOX and LH2 tanks of ET-007, creating in total roughly 20 cubic meters of pressurized volume at what would, when the tanks were opened, eventually become the core of the station’s traffic patterns. For the moment, these branches were ignored beyond verifying the modified orbitally-accessible manholes remained sealed, as Engle, Garriott, and Nagel worked to make up for lost time. The rigid passage between the intertank and the Enterprise core modules proved much easier to work with. Installed on the ground, clearing through the CMAP was simply a matter of checking and opening two pressure hatches, one on the intertank end and one at the other end recessed into the belly of the former OV-101. After checking air for breathability and watching carefully for any floating particles or debris, the STS-38R crew ended Flight Day 3 by finally gaining access to Enterprise’s mid-deck. The crew celebrated by retrieving a waiting snack of ice cream from the station’s galley freezers before closing the hatches for safety and retiring to Atlantis for a well-earned rest.
On Flight Day 4, the Atlantis crew awoke to the sound of synthesized chimes and the ethereal soprano of Loulie Jean Norman, as a specially-recorded voiceover from William Shatner (never afraid of publicity) offered the crew a benediction for their “ongoing” mission and bid them to go now “where no one had gone before.” (A modification of the script which managed to frustrate many of the same fans the skit was meant to entertain.) Still, taking the words to heart, the crew pressed on into some of the most delicate work of the mission: activating Space Station Enterprise and deploying the rest of its solar power system. When fully active, Enterprise’s base load would rise from the 6 kW sustainable from the keep-alive panels to more than 16 kW (slightly more than Atlantis’s own 14 kW due to the larger volume and modified systems). Once drawn on by the fully active systems, even the station’s nearly fully-charged batteries could sustain it for only a few days. To help bridge the gap, Atlantis’ crew first rigged the connections between Atlantis and Enterprise. With Atlantis’ payload bay carrying no experiments and only a Spacelab module full of cargo for future station crews which the crew had been too busy to begin to transfer, Atlantis could spare a few critical kilowatts to stretch Enterprise’s batteries while the crew went to work to deploy the station’s arrays.
To do so, STS-38R moved their main base of operations from Atlantis to Enterprise for the day, the middeck just different enough in layout to confuse the crew. Larger differences lurked on the cockpit level, which was converted to an “Orbital Operations Center”. The flight chair which Joe Engle had used so long ago was gone, providing more open space on the deck and places to hang checklists and procedure manuals. After getting main power online and getting their first view of the inside of the payload bay since calling tally ho on the station, the STS-38R crew broke up to divide and conquer. While Engle and Merbold went through the process of activating and accessing the Leonardo Laboratory Module, Garriott and Nagel did the same for the station’s robotic manipulator, the CanadArm 2. Unlike the Shuttle version, the station’s arm was capable of detaching from its main base, as it had a grapple fixture at each end which included the ability to draw power from any grapple point which offered it. With this, the arm could be “walked” to multiple locations inside the payload bay and on the structure of the Enterprise Power Module, increasing the reach of the station’s crew. Future plans called for installing bases on the outside of ET-007, allowing the arm to “walk” to within reach of visiting orbiters to hand off future cargo and expansion modules. With Garriott and Sullivan suited and ready for an EVA in case anything went wrong, Nagel and Thuot commanded the Enterprise Power Module to fold up and out of the bay. The hamster tubes appeared to have absorbed any residual “Marshall Luck’ with space hardware, as the primary structural element of the EPM smoothly rotated up and out of the payload bay proper, allowing the “keep-alive” panels to extend over the starboard door sill like an oar. Flight Day 4 was completed by deploying the other solar array wing on the starboard side, adding another critical 12 kW of peak power to the station’s generating capabilities. Even averaged over an orbital night and day, that was enough to reduce the station’s parasitic draw on Atlantis to just 2 kW. Though the STS-38R crew had begun the day almost 24 hours behind schedule, judicious parallel processing by the crew had reduced many of the “catch-up” tasks, as Merbold and the rest of the crew had worked in the LLM even as the operations to extend the solar arrays proceeded only meters behind them in the bay.
(Images by @nixonshead )
Great update. And great renders by @nixonshead.
I admit, I am having difficulty visualizing the docking system between Atlantis and the ET, and more specifically just how it handles all the clearance issues with the orbiter.
I admit, I am having difficulty visualizing the docking system between Atlantis and the ET, and more specifically just how it handles all the clearance issues with the orbiter.
I have to imagine that the orbiter is coming in at a 90 degree angle to the ET, which leaves the solar panels (once deployed) as the main clearance concern.
Gotta say that I do hope for a render of this station with two shuttles docked simultaneously though.
Oh definitely, I assumed that; but that still leaves plenty of opportunity for things to bump into one another. On Mir, the Mir docking module provided the clearance, and on ISS, the zenith PMA docking module (where Crew Dragon is now docked) did the same.
The Mir Docking Module, ready to be docked to Mir's Kristall module.
There looks to be enough space to clear the solar panels with the bulk of the wet lab/tank between the two orbiter bodies. The panel mounts and orbiter docking port are at opposite ends of Enterprise presumably for just this reason.
Future expansions are likely to only increase that distance if they add a second tank or expand the panels along with a new mounting.
Future expansions are likely to only increase that distance if they add a second tank or expand the panels along with a new mounting.