![]() This module would later land with the main vehicle. Under the basic design, passengers would ride in a capsule-like crew module at the top of the main SERV vehicle. In a phone interview from his home outside Toronto, Drye said the Chrysler SERV was an extremely unconventional spacecraft and probably more advanced than the space shuttle that came to be. Space historian Drye considered that possibility and published a detailed analysis of Chrysler's spaceship in his blog "False Steps: The Space Race as it might have been." Would Chrysler's spacecraft have been better than the space shuttle? Today the only way that NASA astronauts can reach the International Space Station is by buying seats on Soyuz spacecraft. In the end, the shuttles made only three to eight flights per year at a high cost of about $775 million per trip. Two shuttles and their crews were lost to accidents by the time the program stopped in 2011. The shuttle's first flight was repeatedly delayed until 1981 and the fleet never achieved early projections of as many as 50 space trips per year. Missed opportunity?Īlthough the space shuttle bested Chrysler's proposed spacecraft in design competition, the shuttle failed to achieve its original goals of providing frequent and inexpensive access to space. After a second crisis and bailout in 2009, the company is now Fiat Chrysler, or FCA. The automaker went on to end the decade with a federal bailout for its then-struggling car business. In the years after that final 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, the Chrysler Space Division dissolved. Those were different rockets than the more powerful Saturn Vs used for moon missions. The space agency may well decide that, with newer tech in place and future exploration planned, Hubble's days are coming to an end.Chrysler produced the Saturn 1B rockets at its Michoud Operations Plant in New Orleans, a facility now owned by NASA. Neither that study nor the RFI guarantee that NASA will carry out a Hubble servicing mission, however. ![]() Last year, NASA agreed to study the technical feasibility of boosting Hubble with SpaceX's Dragon capsule, and began collecting data. It's not known what other companies, if any, also responded to NASA's RFI, since the space agency promised to keep the information confidential. "Even at 33, Hubble is fully capable of continuing its mission where it is aging is in its orbital stability." "Leveraging Momentus's flight heritage with three orbital service vehicles on-orbit today and Astroscale's expertise in RPOD (rendezvous, proximity operations and docking), we found our product suites to be synergistic in support of a major NASA mission," said John Rood, Momentus CEO. ![]() The vehicle would then fire its thrusters and boost Hubble to an orbit 50 kilometers higher, and then clear any litter found in its new environment. Instead of sending astronauts the potential fixers want to launch an orbital service vehicle – built by Momentus and containing components from Astroscale – that can rendezvous with and capture spacecraft.
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