Trump's lunar program, Robot Fedor and private "shuttles". Cosmic results of 2019

Arab cuisine for astronauts, robot Fedor in orbit, bad luck Boeing and luck Ilon Mask - Taiga.info sums up the results of 2019 in the astronautics.

Problems of private traders

Since July 2011, American and European astronauts have been sent to the ISS only on Russian Ships Soyuz. All this time, the United States is developing commercial manned ships Crew Dragon (it is engaged in Ilona Mask SpaceX and CST-100 Starliner (Boeing is responsible for it).

On March 2, 2019, the first Crew Dragon test flight took place. It was not a man in the pilot’s chair, but the mannequin Ellen Ripley, the main character of the films about “Alien”. The plush toy "Little Earth" (Little Earth) served as an indicator of weightlessness. The Dragon successfully completed the program: on March 3, in automatic mode, it was cooked with the American ISS segment, and on March 8 it was plowed from it. True, on April 21, during qualification tests of the Dragon emergency salvation system, it was destroyed.

Boeing was also unlucky-during the tests of the CST-100 ship, on December 20, the flight time calculation system failed, which entailed extra fuel. In order not to risk the safety of the ISS, Starliner was returned to Earth-on December 22, he landed at a landfill in New Mexico.

The Dragon test flight with the crew was scheduled for the spring of 2020, and Starliner, apparently, will have to repeat the launch of the ship without a crew to the ISS. So the beginning of the full operation of private spaceships is postponed.

Robot Fedor on the ISS

On August 27, the “MS-14” Union with the first Russian humanoid robot “Fedor” (Skybotf-850) was attached to the ISS. The astronauts who worked at the station Alexei Ovchinin and Alexander Skvortsov checked the robot management in zero gravity. The unfortunate android was forced to connect and disconnect the plugs, work with a screwdriver, an imitation of the gateway procedure, and so on.

In autonomous mode, the Chat-Bot system of the robot was tested, which coped with the issues of astronauts. In the future, experts plan to manage the modified version of Fedor from the Central Department Store Moscow Region and try it as an assistant to astronauts while working in outer space.

Nine astronauts, including Arabic

On September 25, the “Union MS-15” with the space tourist Khazza al-Mansuri on board was “moored” to the ISS “moored”-the first Cosmonaut of the UAE. With the arrival of MS-15 in orbit, nine people were simultaneously. The last time such a large team gathered in space in September 2015.

On September 29, during the solemn dinner, Khazzaa treated the international crew with Arabic cuisine. In addition to the implementation of several experiments, Al-Mansuri photographed his native Arab Emirates, as well as the Persian Bay and the Mediterranean Sea. On October 3, the Union MS-12 was stripped of the station, landed after 3.5 hours, and the first cosmic flight of a citizen of the UAE ended.

Women overboard

On October 18, Christina Cook and Jessica Meir made a historical exit to outer space: for the first time, two women worked simultaneously along the space station. NASA astronauts replaced the failed power supply unit on the American segment of the station. Interestingly, the “historical” output planned for March had to be postponed: then there was no pair of suitable size spacesuits for the ISS.

Return to the moon

On March 26, US President Donald Trump announced that America is beginning to prepare for the landing of a person (including the first woman) on the moon until the end of 2024.

On May 14, NASA announced the start of the program to return people to the moon called Artemis (“Artemis”) and consisting of two stages: the piloted flying of the moon with landing on the Earth’s satellite and the start of the construction of the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (Lop-G) international near moon station. At the second stage, plantings will continue on the lunar surface to create an infrastructure of the constantly inhabited base since 2028. In addition to the United States, Canada and Japan are already involved in this project. Russia has been missing the next holiday of space cooperation.

Earlier, Taiga.info summed up the results of 2018 in space and spoke about space plans for 2019.

Text: Evgeny Ryzhkov, especially for taiga.info

Editor: Ilya Kabanov, Scientific observer Taiga.info