NASA Mulls ‘What-Ifs’ of Unmanned Space Station

An article publishe in space-travel.com highlights some of the scenario in case the ISS was abandoned in November, as a consequence of the 24 August Soyuz rocket failure during delivery of Progres M12-M. Charles Bolden, NASA Adminstrator, has recently released an ISS status update.

Excerpt

NASA is considering de-crewing the International Space Station in November (Source: NASA).

NASA mission managers in Houston are hard at work on contingency plans after both Russia and the United States admitted that abandoning the research outpost, at least temporarily, is a possibility.

“It is possible that we will have a station without people on it for hopefully a short period of time,” said Fossum.

“We haven’t started anything specific up here pertaining to that except for maybe documenting some of the things that we do on video so we that can use video products for part of the training for the next crew,” he added.

“The space station does require some care and feeding so it is important for us to be here if we possibly can,” said Fossum.

“A short gap is not a big deal but… as that short gap turns into many months then your probability starts to stack up against you and it leads to a greater possibility that we would have a problem up here that (would become) very significant with nobody to take action,” said Fossum.

Read the original article at space-travel.com.