Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who are in their fourth month aboard the International Space Station (ISS), will have to stay there for a few more months because NASA has decided they cannot return to the International Space Station in the Boeing Starliner, the spacecraft that got them there.
The unexpected change was due to problems with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft – engineers did not want to risk the safety of the astronauts, so this capsule returned to Earth without a crew on September 7. It has been decided that the Crew Dragon spacecraft of the SpaceX company founded by Elon Musk will “take” the stranded astronauts back to Earth in February next year.
The US presidential election will be held in November, and the two astronauts will be approximately 200 miles from the nearest polling place on election day, according to CNN. Can astronauts expect to vote in them?
It turns out, yes. Problems happen all the time in spaceflight, so NASA has a procedure to ensure Williams and Wilmore can cast their vote. The organization is also legally obliged to do this – a special law passed in Texas states that even when in space and on Earth without providing an advance voting ballot, it is necessary to provide the opportunity to vote.
American astronauts from space have been able to vote since 1997, when Texas lawmakers expanded the Texas Election Code to include “a person who qualifies as a voter <...> but will participate in a space flight during the early voting period and on election day.”
That same year, astronaut David Wolf became the first US astronaut to do so, a practice known as “vote while you float”. By the way, at that time this astronaut was on the Russian MIR space station.
Scanpix/AP Photo/Donald Trump and Kamala Harris
Although there is nothing “simple” about space, space bulletins are sent in a fairly standard way, as is much of the data from the ISS to Mission Control. Encrypted data is sent using NASA’s Near Space Network. Near Space Network) satellites.
“Basically, an encrypted document will be sent to their email address. email addresses and they will be able to open the document with their password,” former astronaut Leroy Chiao, who himself voted this way in 2004, told CNN.
According to NASA, when Wilmore and Williams complete their electronic ballots, they will be “encrypted and uploaded to a computer system on the space station.” From there, the ballots will be sent via satellite to a ground antenna located in the state of New Mexico. The space agency will then forward the ballot to mission control in Houston and then to the county official responsible for managing the ballots.
“Before ballots are sent to astronauts, a test ballot with a unique password is first sent. Crew credentials give astronauts access to a secure ballot. After a successful test, a secure ballot is sent as a document that astronauts can fill out, save their choices, and send back. When the astronauts vote, the ballot is downloaded, printed and processed along with the other ballots,” Harris County Clerk’s spokesman Rosio Torres-Segura told CNN.
Stayed longer than expected
However, voting procedures in space are far from the biggest challenge of the mission in which S.Williams and B.Wilmore participate.
As mentioned, they had an unscheduled stay on the space station. NASA predicts that these two astronauts will return home in 2025. in February in another US company’s SpaceX capsule, according to NASA.
It was scheduled to launch on September 24th, but has now been pushed back to September 26th. Although “Crew Dragon” can accommodate four people, only two will take off this time – NASA astronaut and US Space Force commander Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut and mission specialist Alexander Gorbunov. The remaining two seats are reserved for Starliner astronauts returning to Earth.
The Boeing Starliner docked with the ISS on June 3, but problems were already noticed during the flight, with several of the Starliner’s engines failing even before it took off in June. the capsule with the astronauts docked at the space station.
NASA photo/Boeing Starliner capsule’s successful landing after a failed mission
NASA-funded companies Boeing and SpaceX began developing their capsules at a similar time in 2014 as part of a program to restore astronaut flights to the ISS in US-made spacecraft. After the 2011 the iconic NASA Space Shuttle program was terminated, and for nearly a decade only Russian Soyuz capsules flew to the ISS.
Boeing received 4.2 billion for this purpose. US dollars, but the development of the Starliner has repeatedly been plagued by technical flaws, including malfunctioning software, stuck valves and insufficiently strong parachute systems.
SpaceX already in 2020 successfully tested its Dragon Crew capsule, which is more capacious and much more modern than the Soyuz. This spacecraft has already made 13 successful flights to the ISS over several years – both under NASA contracts and privately.
Meanwhile, the Boeing Starliner’s first manned flight to the ISS took place only this summer, and as can be seen, the company will have to invest financial and human resources in order to solve the problems encountered.
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2024-09-25 14:28:52