{"id":121587,"date":"2021-04-15T17:22:39","date_gmt":"2021-04-16T00:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/crew-dragons-short-hop-begins-the-era-of-valet-parking-at-the-iss"},"modified":"2021-04-15T17:22:39","modified_gmt":"2021-04-16T00:22:39","slug":"crew-dragons-short-hop-begins-the-era-of-valet-parking-at-the-iss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/crew-dragons-short-hop-begins-the-era-of-valet-parking-at-the-iss","title":{"rendered":"Crew Dragon\u2019s Short Hop Begins The Era Of Valet Parking At The ISS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/crew-dragons-short-hop-begins-the-era-of-valet-parking-at-the-iss2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>They weren\u2019t scheduled to return to Earth until April 28th at the earliest, so why did NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, suit up and climb aboard the Crew Dragon <em>Resilience<\/em> on April 5th? Because a previously untested maneuver meant that after they closed the hatch between their spacecraft and the International Space Station, there was a chance they weren\u2019t going to be coming back.<\/p>\n<p>On paper, moving a capsule between docking ports seems simple enough. All <em>Resilience<\/em> had to do was undock from the International Docking Adapter 2 (IDA-2) located on the front of the <em>Harmony<\/em> module, itself attached to the Pressurized Mating Adapter 2 (PMA-2) that was once the orbital parking spot for the Space Shuttle, and move over to the PMA-3\/IDA-3 on top of <em>Harmony<\/em>. It was a short trip through open space, and when the crew exited their craft and reentered the Station at the end of it, they\u2019d only be a few meters from where they started out approximately 45 minutes prior.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/issrelocation_harmony.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" data-attachment-id=\"471090\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2021\/04\/15\/crew-dragons-short-hop-begins-the-era-of-valet-parking-at-the-iss\/issrelocation_harmony\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/issrelocation_harmony.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"728515\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{\u201caperture\u201d:\u201d0\u201d,\u201d credit\u201d:\u201d\u201c,\u201d camera\u201d:\u201d\u201c,\u201d caption\u201d:\u201d\u201c,\u201d created_timestamp\u201d:\u201d0\u201d,\u201d copyright\u201d:\u201d\u201c,\u201d focal_length\u201d:\u201d0\u201d,\u201d iso\u201d:\u201d0\u201d,\u201d shutter_speed\u201d:\u201d0\u201d,\u201d title\u201d:\u201d\u201c,\u201d orientation\u201d:\u201d0\u201d}\" data-image-title=\"issrelocation_harmony\" data-image-description=\"\" data-medium-file=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/crew-dragons-short-hop-begins-the-era-of-valet-parking-at-the-iss3.jpg\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/issrelocation_harmony.jpg?w=728\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/crew-dragons-short-hop-begins-the-era-of-valet-parking-at-the-iss3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"283\" \/><\/a>\n<\/p>\n<p>The maneuver was designed to be performed autonomously, so technically the crew didn\u2019t need to be on <em>Resilience<\/em> when it switched docking ports. But allowing the astronauts to stay aboard the station while their only ride home undocked and flew away without them was a risk NASA wasn\u2019t willing to take.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They weren\u2019t scheduled to return to Earth until April 28th at the earliest, so why did NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, suit up and climb aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience on April 5th? Because a previously untested maneuver meant that after [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-habitats","category-robotics-ai","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}