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Crew Gets Ready for Cargo Missions, Opens New Airlock

Two cargo rockets on opposite sides of the world are nearing their launch to resupply the Expedition 64 crew this month. A new science and cargo airlock installed late last year on the International Space Station is now open for business.

Russia’s Progress 76 (76P) cargo craft, packed with trash and discarded hardware, will depart the orbiting lab tonight completing a 201-day mission attached to the Pirs docking compartment. It will deorbit a few hours later for a fiery, but safe destruction over the South Pacific.

The 76P will be replaced after the Progress 77 (77P) cargo craft blasts off on Feb. 14 at 11:45 p.m. EST from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The 77P will dock to the vacant Pirs port a little more than two days later on Feb. 17 at 1:20 a.m. The launch and docking activities will be broadcast live on NASA TV.

The next cargo mission to resupply the station will be Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo ship lifting off atop an Antares rocket on Feb. 20 from Virginia. Cygnus will be delivering about 8,000 pounds of station hardware, science experiments, and crew supplies to replenish the orbiting lab on Feb. 22. It will be captured with the Canadarm2 robotic arm and installed to the Unity module‘s Earth-facing port.

Aboard the space station today, NASA astronauts Kate Rubins and Victor Glover configured and opened the NanoRacks Bishop airlock. Bishop was attached to the station’s Tranquility module on Dec. 19 two weeks after it was delivered inside the SpaceX Cargo Dragon spacecraft. Bishop will enable more commercial research, satellite deployments, and cargo operations outside in the vacuum of space.

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Mark Garcia

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Crew Looks to U.S. Space Record and Super Bowl Flyover

Most of the Expedition 64 crew started a three-day weekend today following a busy start to 2020 that saw two U.S. cargo ship departures and two spacewalks. The orbital residents aboard the International Space Station will fly over the Super Bowl on Sunday, and four of them will also break a U.S. space record from the ’70s.

Four SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts living aboard the International Space Station will surpass the U.S. record on Sunday for most days in space by a crew launched aboard a U.S. spacecraft. They will surpass the record of 84 days set by the Skylab 4 crew on Feb. 8, 1974.

Expedition 64 flight engineers Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi, docked the “Resilience” SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to the Harmony module’s international docking adapter on Nov. 16, 2020. The Skylab 4 crew, with NASA astronauts Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson and William Pogue,  docked their Apollo crew ship to the Skylab space station 47 years to the day when the crew of “Resilience” docked to the orbiting lab.

On the same day, the space station’s orbital path will take it over Tampa, Florida, at 7:15 p.m. EST, home of Super Bowl LV. The orbital flyover will be at the same time two NFL football teams will be competing to win the big game at Raymond James Stadium.

Four NASA astronauts and one JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut are relaxing today beginning a three-day weekend. The quintet were busy packing Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus space freighter and the SpaceX Cargo Dragon in January and monitoring their departures. Then they redirected their attention to a pair of spacewalks by Hopkins and Glover to upgrade communications and power systems. During that period microgravity research was running full speed ahead exploring everything from life science to space physics to advanced technology demonstrations.

Meanwhile in the Russian segment of the station, Commander Sergey Ryzhikov serviced exercise equipment and video communications gear. Flight Engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov set up and activated Earth observation hardware and assisted Ryzhikov with the upkeep of the Zvezda service module’s treadmill.

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Mark Garcia

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