Day: August 16, 2023

SEATTLE — With the International Space Station (ISS) scheduled to retire in 2030, NASA is placing a huge emphasis on a seamless shift to future private space stations in low-Earth orbit. Many details of that transition are still being worked out, agency officials say.

“The reason this is so important is because we do believe that the impact of a gap will be disruptive,” said ISS director, Robyn Gatens, during a panel discussion at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference earlier this month.

A few key players who could be impacted by that “gap” include scientists looking to send research experiments to space as well as crew and cargo transportation providers. Given NASA’s expected two-year transition period, a commercial successor must be operating by 2028 to prevent any such complications.

To plan for a smooth shift of research and operations to private space stations by 2030, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a strategy in March of this year that outlines a plan of action. The policy’s overlying objective is for the U.S. to lead in “an emerging marketplace run by commercial and private enterprises engaged in LEO,” ultimately allowing NASA to maintain an “uninterrupted U.S. presence” in low-Earth orbit.

Related: NASA looks to private outposts to build on International Space Station’s legacy

“The reason we at the White House level released a policy on this topic this year is to prepare seven years in advance, so that we do not have to plan for a scenario where there’s a gap,” Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, an assistant director for space policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at the conference.

Because commercial space station services is still an unproven market, however, carrying out such a seamless transition will not be without its challenges. For instance, experts will need to worry about things like technical costs and scheduling risks in terms of design and development of the space station platforms, John Mulholland, the Boeing program manager for the ISS program, said at the conference. “They will get there but it will not be easy.”

Mulholland also underscored the need for increasing the budget for the United States Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), a spacecraft expected to dock on the ISS before performing a safe deorbit and re-entry sequence back to Earth. (NASA is expected to award the contract for the design and production of this vehicle in March 2024).

The new funds are also likely to be used for an upgrade that significantly improves the science capability of a physics instrument on the ISS that hunts for dark matter, cosmic rays and antimatter galaxies. The detector, known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), was installed as an external module on the ISS in 2011. Its upgrade is expected to take an entire cargo flight, which “deserves a plus-up in the budget ahead,” Mulholland said.

With a majority of the research on the ISS funded by the federal government, and the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 suspending the debt ceiling until the end of 2024, “we will be faced with difficult budget cycles in the near future,” he said.

Angela Hart, manager for NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations (CLD) program, said the space agency will pass on its expertise in technology to private space station providers, but such responsibility and involvement will decrease as the latter finds surer footing. Over the next year, NASA will focus on working with partners and the science community to avoid cost overruns and schedule issues, she explained during a talk on Aug. 3.

After the ISS retires in 2030, NASA is likely to operate a national laboratory that would support various commercial platforms. Although details are few, the LEO National Lab, which is still a working name referring to “low-Earth orbit,” is expected to represent all government-sponsored research to be carried out on a combination of available private space stations.

“The idea is that it would be platform agnostic. So it’s not a single place, it’s not a single laboratory,” said Gatens. “One really important tenet that we’re looking at is it needs to support but not compete with commercial platforms and service providers.”

Currently, ISS partners including Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency (ESA) have committed to support the ISS until its phased retirement operation planned for 2030. Russia has confirmed its support only until 2028, however, after which it will focus on building its own orbital space station, whose first module is expected to launch in 2027.

On Friday, the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco was briefly clogged with traffic after autonomous taxis froze at a busy intersection. The jam consisted of at least 10 driverless Chevy Bolts operated by Cruise, General Motors‘ self-driving car subsidiary. 

“One of them was stopped at the top of the hill for no apparent reason,” witness Valerie Jacobson told NBC Bay Area.

The mishap coincided with a music festival taking place in nearby Golden Gate Park. Cruise blamed the festival for interfering with network connections to the cars.

“A large festival posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles. We are actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again. We apologize to those who were impacted,” said a statement put out by Cruise on social media.

The cluster comes just a day after the state’s Public Utilities Commission ruled 3-1 in favor of letting Cruise and Waymo expand their driverless taxi operations. Waymo is owned by Alphabet, parent company of Google, and uses Jaguar I-Pace electric crossovers. The ruling allowed the companies to conduct robotaxi operations 24/7 throughout San Francisco.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin cautioned that “these things are not ready for prime time,” when speaking to NBC Bay Area. “[It’s] scary as heck if you think about the fact that moving these vehicles out of traffic requires cell service,” he added.

Peskin pointed out that cell service disruption could occur because of a natural disaster. In a situation like that the driverless cars could prevent emergency vehicles from getting through, or block evacuation routes. In an interview with ABC7 San Francisco, he drove the point home: “If there’s a power outage or if there’s a natural disaster like we just saw in Lahaina that these cars could congest our streets at the precise time when we would be needing to deploy emergency apparatus.”

Though the traffic jam cleared after about 20 minutes, this isn’t the first time robotaxis have caused confusion in situations that human drivers would have been able to figure out in seconds. When a robotaxi encounters a confusing situation, it seems to default to simply stopping.

In April, a Cruise robotaxi collided with a city bus, and another was unable to follow a police officer’s instructions to pull over. A similar Cruise traffic jam of eight vehicles blocked city streets for hours last summer, but the cause was never explained. Last December, NHTSA opened an investigation into Cruise for its vehicles’ greater-than-average rate of hard braking and immobilization.