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They won't. By all accounts, Roscosmos is completely corrupt and NASA can't afford to lose Russia as an ISS partner. You'll note that even though a SpaceX Cre
by breput 5y ago
They won't.
By all accounts, Roscosmos is completely corrupt and NASA can't afford to lose Russia as an ISS partner.
You'll note that even though a SpaceX Crew Dragon was also attached to the ISS at the time, it was not used to counteract Nauka's thrust and the only mention of it was that it could be powered up quickly as an escape pod.
Part of that is due to the low lever-arm position of it, but I also believe it was probably never programmed to provide pitch and yaw support, and maybe not even altitude reboost. I am willing to bet that software is being written right now, though.
- wumpus 5y agoDragon is not so good for reboost, but Cygnus is now qualified to do it.
- sephamorr 5y agoGenerally, capsules that burn up in the atmosphere rather than landing are useful for boosting, but if you have to have a heat shield on the bottom of your spacecraft (and the docking port generally on the top), you can't have thrusters that point along the center of mass line of the station. Dragon's thrusters aren't quite so well pointed due to this problem, so boosting with dragon would be very inefficient.
- breput 5y agoYou're probably not wrong but there are Draco/Super Draco engines all around the Dragon capsule and some combination of those could probably be used to for any thrust vector.
- wumpus 5y agoStarliner has a heat shield and a thruster that points in the correct direction... in the service module, which is dropped before landing. Dragon has a very minimal trunk with no thrusters. As a result, the best thrusters it has are 30 degrees off.