/snort damn you...
Posted on 03/16/2021 9:50:35 AM PDT by BenLurkin
It wasn’t the original plan for the pallet to be discarded like this. The failed launch of a Soyuz rocket in 2018, in which NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were forced to make an emergency landing in the Kazakh steppe, caused a disruption to the spacewalking schedule, leading to the leftover pallet.
NASA’s spacewalk on February 1, 2021, involving astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover, was notable in that it concluded a four-year effort to upgrade the space station’s batteries. These batteries store energy collected by solar arrays, but in 2011 NASA decided to make the switch from nickel-hydrogen batteries to lithium-ion batteries. Production of these batteries started in 2014, and the process of swapping them out began in 2016.
Normally, the old batteries would be placed inside an HTV and jettisoned from the ISS, and the items would mostly burn up on re-entry. But the [2018] Soyuz launch failure disrupted the pattern of spacewalks and the intended schedule such that, in late 2018, an HTV cargo freighter left the station without a battery pallet, according to SpaceFlightNow. The battery-replacement mission continued, and HTVs continued to depart the station with pallets, but now with an extra one perpetually attached to the station. With the mission done and no more HTVs coming (at least none of the old design—they’re being replaced by the HTV-X cargo spacecraft), mission planners had to jettison the pallet on its own.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
But they still have a fit if you throw them away in your trash.
Litterbugs.....................
They should try a really, really long USB cable...
INCOMING!
Somehow they will find their way to Elon Musk’s Tesla.
At only 265 miles up it’s interesting that it will take 2-4 years to get to the atmosphere though. I’m surprised they couldn’t get it moving a little faster, I know 2.9 tons but still even at .125 mph it would only take maybe 90 days or so.
So it appears that the next round will be Lithium Dirty bombs.
Chemtrails Confirmed!
Lithium batteries explode when they get hot.
Reentry should be a hoot.
/snort damn you...
Somehow they will find their way to Elon Musk’s Tesla.
Who knows. He may figure out a way to land them safely.
Incoming!
I would think that a spare air bottle and some duct tape would provide enough a nudge to speed things up a little...
Be nice to know when it would actually get low enough to start generating friction. There is potential for a quick yet nice little light show.
These are nickel-hydrogen batteries. Their replacements are lithium. You’ll have a little while longer to wait.
What do they care. It’s not their money.
They are really green sobs...
Hazardous waste in space?
Problem is, if they pushed on the batteries to make them go faster, it would equally push back on the space station and send it flying in the opposite direction.
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