Commercial Vehicle Promises More Frequent Return of ISS Experiments

摘要

A Houston startup established by a former NASA official is developing a small vehicle to return experiments from the international space station that could be ready for flight by late 2016. The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the nonprofit organization that manages the national laboratory portion of the ISS, announced Oct. 16 an agreement with Intuitive Machines LLC to support the company's development of its Terrestrial Return Vehicle (TRV). The TRV, company president Steve Altemus said in an Oct. 27 interview, came out of a desire to find ways to increase the utilization of the ISS. One barrier, he said, is the difficulty of returning samples from experiments on the station back to Earth. Today, only the Dragon spacecraft by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and the Russian Soyuz spacecraft can return items from the station, and the latter has limited cargo capability.