Well, I wonder how easily Atlantis would rise to the higher orbit. It'd be more sense if the reboosts were made after the last Shuttle mission.
He (Fossum) is trained to handle the prospective rendezvous and capture of NASA’s first Commercial Orbital Transportation System cargo mission prior to his return to Earth aboard the Soyuz 27S in mid-November.
The two companies plan to carry out their first station supply mission using the Dragon and Cygnus spacecraft before year’s end.“We’re cautiously optimistic they will make that,” says NASA’s Mike Suffredini, the ISS program manager. “But we’ll have about a year’s worth of margin if they get snagged along the way.”During a June 1 news briefing, NASA Associate Administrator for Space Operation Bill Gerstenmaier said the agency would decide by the end of this month on a launch strategy for the first commercial resupply mission using the SpaceX Dragon.NASA is leaning toward an initial test flight to demonstrate Dragon’s on-orbit operations, followed by a combining of the second and third of the previously planned SpaceX demonstration missions into a single cargo delivery flight. Dragon will rendezvous with the orbiting science laboratory, easing close enough for the station’s robot arm to grapple and berth the freighter.“We are heading in that direction,” Gerstenmaier said. “We were thinking around the October/November time frame — maybe September.” Fossum, assisted by Furukawa, is prepared for Dragon’s arrival.“It’s my job to reach out and grab it,” Fossum said in a pre-mission interview in March. “That’s a potentially very challenging task. I’ve trained hundreds of hours.”Cygnus could follow in December, according to Gerstenmaier.
Alexander Samokutiaev, flight engineer of the International Space Station’s expedition 28, informed about the planning for the upcoming Russian EVA in his blog in Roscosmos web. According to Russian cosmonaut, the EVA is slated for August, pending the launch oa the shuttle scheduled for July 8. Alexander will work outside the ISS with his colleague Sergey Volkov. The cosmonauts are to perform several ISS RS refurbishing tasks, as well as to launch small satellite Kedr. Russian cosmonauts onboard the International Space Station switched on small spacecraft Kedr on April 12, in order to commemorate the jubilee of Yury Gagarin’s mission. Small spacecraft Kedr developed under the RadioSkaf experiment bears the name adopted by Yu.A. Gagarin call sign in his historical flight, namely Kedr. The satellite’s signal will be transmitted at radio amateur frequency of 145.95 MHz. Kedr has radio amateur call sign RS1S.RadioSkaf is implemented in the framework of UNESCO’s student space education program. Kedr will transmit different signals, images, including the talks of famous Russian scientist Kostantin Tsiolkovsky, rocket Chief Designer Sergey Korolev conversation with the first cosmonaut during his 108-min historical mission, and famous Gagarin’s “Go!” (Poekhali!), of course.
Can I rely on the posted schedule of launches that I see on this site or need I go elsewhere to get better launch times?
Current schedule of ISS flight events2012February - spacewalk (ISS Russian EVA-30) from Pirs airlock
In August 2011, the Director General of GKNPTs Khrunichev, Vladimir Nesterov, said that a prototype of the MLM module designed for electrical tests would be delivered to RKK Energia before the end of the month, despite technical issues associated with changes in design documentation.
I don't understand why they still need Progress-assisted reboosts at this high altitude.
