For those wondering “Can we stop the attempted fascist takeover of America? Can we really set up the New Bretton Woods along with its necessary World Landbridge? Can we really immunize the world against Covid-19?” For those suffering in these times of tension and induced doubt, you may now rejoice that a group of young people, a few old-timers, and a relatively small amount of federal investment, succeeded in closing a gap which had been set up as a trap for near certain failure. When President Obama shut down NASA’s Space Shuttle program, along with NASA’s Constellation Project for renewed human operations on the Moon, the prospect that the International Space Station (ISS) would be left useless in space without a crew to maintain it and make use of its research opportunities was very real. It might have become a beautiful place, like the Central African Republic, with no way to get there.
Yet the gap was successfully closed today by the arrival at the ISS of a crew of four astronauts aboard the SpaceX/NASA Dragon spacecraft Resilience, who joined the three already working aboard the ISS. Since the last Shuttle flight in 2011, Roscosmos’s reliable Soyuz system had successfully maintained a crew of six on the ISS most of the time. (As the President always says, “Getting along with Russia is a good thing!”) However, this year, during the transition to the introduction of the SpaceX Crew Dragon service to the ISS, there have been months aboard the ISS with severely reduced crews of only three, or for two months this summer five, astronauts and cosmonauts.
