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posted by n1 on Sunday August 21 2016, @05:09AM   Printer-friendly

With more private spaceship traffic expected at the International Space Station in the coming years, two US astronauts are set to embark on a spacewalk Friday to install a special parking spot for them.

Americans Jeff Williams and Kate Rubins will step outside the orbiting laboratory to attach an international docking adaptor launched aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo ship last month.

[...] Built by Boeing, the circular adaptor measures around 42 inches (one meter) tall and about 63 inches (1.6 meters) wide.

The adaptors will work with Boeing's CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon, two spaceships under construction that are planned to ferry astronauts to the space station.

The docking adaptor is more sophisticated than past equipment because it will allow automatic parking instead of the current grapple and berthing process managed by astronauts.

It also has fittings that will enable the space station to share power and data with the spacecraft.


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  • (Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:05AM

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:05AM (#390953) Journal

    I think it's worse than that. The English-speaking world seems to have become a Neo-Fascist/Neo-Nazi factory in recent years. I gather things are pretty bad in Australia too at the moment, All we can do it hate and blame. Here in Blighty we recently voted to put a stake through the heart of our financial services industry. We don't do much manufacturing or engineering, but what we do have is often in collaboration with foreign companies, which is good (because overall we are bigger than the sum of the parts), but we just voted to show them two fingers as well.

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