Earth Has Two Occupied Space Stations Again
Shenzhou-11 Docks With Tiangong-2, SpaceRef
“China’s Shenzhou-11 has docked with the Tiangong-2 Space Station. After completing a series of systems checks astronauts, Jing Haipeng and Chen Dong will enter Tiangong-2 to begin their one month mission. Next spring an automated cargo vehicle will resupply Tiangong-2 in advance of future astronaut visits.”
Hooray!
Go China!!
Are they space STATIONS? Not really. Space stations were conceived as way stations to other destinations to be serviced by shuttles to & from the Earth’s surface as well as orbital transfer vehicles (sometimes dubbed ‘space tugs’) that could ferry cargo & crews to points beyond low Earth orbit.
All realized space ‘stations’ thus far, going back to Salyut 1, have actually been earth-orbiting facilities that served as remote laboratories, temporary ones at that. One can play games with semantics and assign the term ‘station’ to them as bases in remote locations are sometimes called stations (but so is a workplace on an assembly line), but doing so misrepresents the original history of the term ‘space station’.
Yes, some of the space ‘stations’ have launched small sub-satellites…but that’s stretching things a bit much.
We have stations in Antarctica.
Which often serve as a base or way-station for those doing research in other locations, deeper into the continent. Which goes along with Bob’s point.
(That said, his implication that this is what “station” means is wrong. The word station means a stop. Originally it meant “to stand still”, hence stationary. For eg, “train stations” are the points where the trains come to a stop.)
Not ‘station’. Space station. See Hermann Oberth’s writing and that of those who followed in his wake.
I think this is descending into semantics. I’m not sure who first used the actual words “space station.” Oberth probably didn’t, since he mostly wrote in German. So arguing about whether Clarke or Tsiolkovsky used that exact phrase seems pointless.
Concepts for a human-occupied, orbital structure where not uncommon in the first half of the twentieth century, and the concepts did not exclusively involve a transportation hub. Clarke, for example, suggested people working on geostationary communication satellites. He assumed, based on the technology of the late 1940s, that a maintenance staff would be required to replace burned-out vacuum tubes. So there is a case for early concepts of a space station, where the purpose was to work at the station’s location, not as a waypoint to another destination.
This discussion began by precisely addressing semantics. Oberth’s original 1923 term was Raumstation which translates as space station; he is widely credited with coining the term. Others (including Clarke) adopted said term for varying applications, but the vast majority of proposals for ‘space stations’ described crewed facilities in orbit that served (among other functions) as way stations (like train stations) to further destinations.
I of course cannot deny that folks have attached the term to orbiting facilities that did not serve as transportation hubs; I can only regret that in so doing they have, however slightly, diminished the inspirational scope of a vision that embodies a much grander perspective. Such is, far too often, the nature of language. Words have power.
To be fair, TG-2 is a prototype of a future station, and i dont think the plans of what purposes that future station might exactly serve aren’t disclosed in much detail.
Could very well be that it’s conceived as a staging post for journeys deeper into space. It is slightly more favorably positioned than ISS for this
Right. Equatorial for interplanetary waypoint, or better yet maybe GSO or GST. Would a Lagrange Point station be useful for that, or are they too hard to hit?
You would rather call them “Orbital Research Facility”? So ISS becomes…IORF!
I’ll refrain from adding “Unified System” at end of that. It would just be wrong. 😉
As CC may not get to ISS before Soyuz seats run out, I wish that the original idea of modifying Dragon 1 had been done. Sure NASA and SpaceX wanted a Mars ship in Dragon 2. Seems so simple to have a backup in Dragon 1. An escape rocket, nose or trunk, seats, a few laptops and environmental. Too expensive and everything will be on time. Right. Slip, slip. No transport to ISS. Just 2 Russians on board. Thanks Pres. Obama. Only person that could have made a difference. Maybe Bolden.
Nice.
Go China!