The Stars My Destination: Panic in the Sky

Last week, the Crew-2 astronauts—Shane Kimbrough (N.A.S.A.), Megan MacArthur (N.A.S.A.), Akihiko Hoshide (J.A.X.A.), & Thomas Pesquet (E.S.A.) donned their spacesuits & boarded the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour to transfer from one docking port on the International Space Station's (I.S.S.) Harmony module (forward) to another (zenith). This was done to facilitate an as-yet-unnamed Boeing Starliner's docking with the I.S.S. during the upcoming uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 (O.F.T.-2), scheduled for launch tomorrow, 30 July.

This morning, 29 July, the long-delayed Russian Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module docked with the I.S.S., the most significant expansion of the station in a decade. The Nauka was originally targeted for a 2007 launch, fourteen years hence. In preparation for the Multipurpose Laboratory Module's arrival, the Pirs docking module was disconnected from the I.S.S. by an uncrewed Progress cargo spacecraft & destructively deorbited on 26 July.

Three hours after docking, the Nauka's thrusters began an uncommanded firing, & the I.S.S. lost attitude control before the thrust was countered & corrected by thrusters on the Zvezda Service Module. A space emergency was declared & the Nauka's thrusters changed the space station's attitude by as much as 45º! N.A.S.A. & Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, claim not to know why Nauka's thrusters fired uncommanded, yet also claim that they have issued commands to make sure that cannot happen again. Guys, if you don't know what caused the original malfunction, how can you claim to have corrected that malfunction? That's self-contradictory, A.K.A. a damned, dirty lie.

In light of the ongoing peril that the misbegotten Multipurpose Laboratory Module poses to the cosmonauts & astronauts aboard the International Space Station, as well as to the station itself, the Starliner's O.F.T.-2. has been delayed indefinitely. The next launch window is on 3 August, but given that the cause of the Nauka's malfunction—& the space station's lose of attitude control—is yet unknown, I am extremely dubious that O.F.T.-2 will launch anytime soon.