The space station is feeling like a lot of us in the wake of Thanksgiving \u2014 very, very full.<\/p>\n
All eight docking ports for spacecraft on the current configuration of the International Space Station<\/a> (ISS) are fully occupied for the first time in the complex’s history, NASA officials said in a statement<\/a> on Monday (Dec. 1). (Construction of the ISS began in 1998, but the complex didn’t have that many ports in the beginning.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The ISS is so full up that controllers had to temporarily move aside a robotic spacecraft to make room for an astronaut taxi last week. NASA<\/a> astronaut Chris Williams and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos<\/a> arrived aboard Russia’s Soyuz<\/a> MS-28 spacecraft, which docked at the Russian Rassvet module on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 28), for an expected eight-month mission.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Before the Soyuz crew got there, Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center<\/a> in Houston used the ISS’ robotic Canadarm2 to move Northrop Grumman<\/a>‘s Cygnus-23 cargo spacecraft, “to provide appropriate clearance” for the incoming crewed spacecraft, NASA officials stated. Cygnus-23 was then reinstalled at the Earth-facing port of the station’s Unity module. (That’s spacecraft No. 2 of eight, for those of you keeping track.)<\/p>\n There’s another Soyuz vehicle at the ISS as well \u2014 Soyuz MS-27, which is installed at the Russian Prichal module. But its orbital stay is coming to and end: Soyuz MS-27 is scheduled to depart the ISS with NASA’s Jonny Kim and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky on Dec. 8, for a landing soon thereafter in Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n The remaining five spacecraft at the ISS are the Russian Progress-92 and Progress-93 robotic cargo spacecraft, which reside at the Russian Poisk and Zvezda modules, respectively; the Japanese HTV-X1 cargo craft<\/a>, berthed at the nadir port of the station’s Harmony Node 2; and two SpaceX<\/a> Dragon capsules.<\/p>\n These Dragons<\/a> are at the two other ports on Harmony used for visiting spacecraft. One is the Commercial Resupply Services-33 (CRS-33) robotic cargo capsule, at the Harmony Node 2 forward port. The other is the Crew-11 Dragon, on Harmony’s space-facing port. (Harmony in fact has six ports, but three serve as attachments to the Destiny, Columbus and Kibo ISS modules.)<\/p>\n As its name makes clear, Crew-11<\/a> is an astronaut mission. Its crewmembers make up the remainder of the Expedition 73 long-duration astronauts on the ISS: NASA’s Zena Cardman and Michael Fincke, Kimiya Yui from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA<\/a>), and Oleg Platonov from Roscosmos. The quartet will return to Earth sometime in 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The space station is feeling like a lot of us in the wake of Thanksgiving \u2014 very, very…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":323658,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-323657","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/323658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}