What is the capacity of these tanks? Will they be transported inside Dragon, or inside the trunk?
Endeavour's water tanks can hold a total of 300 liters, enough for about 75 to 80 days.How and when the new water storage system will be flown to the space station was not specified.
As long as Discovery is left intact, I have no problem with this. A smart move to (hopefully) save money.
Are these areas available for public viewing?
The pavilion will remain open to science center visitors as the work completed, which is expected by Friday.
I appreciate how nice it is to see shuttle hardware flying again. But this feels to me like an indicator of how bad things have gotten in American spaceflight. Scavenging 25 year old water tanks from a museum piece to expand capacity on the ISS? Please tell me we're not that hard up for cash in the US manned space effort. This feels like the dark days of Shuttle, right before Challenger, when crews were regularly borrowing parts from one orbiter to get another one ready for flight. If we can't afford to produce a set of new water tanks for ISS, we really ought to re-think what we're doing.
These were my thoughts exactly. What's next -- salvaging the LH and LOX tank structures from the remaining S-IVB stages on display for the SLS upper stages?
The swap began in 1984. That year, when the U.S. Air Force called Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory looking for a spare satellite to launch into polar orbit, APL program manager David Grant knew just where the service could find one: hanging from the ceiling of the National Air and Space Museum. Grant had recently taken his children for a visit, and remembered seeing an Oscar 17 satellite on display.
Quote from: jmcgauley on 08/17/2015 05:54 pmI appreciate how nice it is to see shuttle hardware flying again. But this feels to me like an indicator of how bad things have gotten in American spaceflight. Scavenging 25 year old water tanks from a museum piece to expand capacity on the ISS? Please tell me we're not that hard up for cash in the US manned space effort. This feels like the dark days of Shuttle, right before Challenger, when crews were regularly borrowing parts from one orbiter to get another one ready for flight. If we can't afford to produce a set of new water tanks for ISS, we really ought to re-think what we're doing.More interested in the reasons why after all these years of ISS operation the need is there "to expand capacity on the ISS"? It's the "Why" the sudden need?