How do supplies get to the iss

Even just getting a launch or landing date in the first place is difficult enough. Each site has its own set of constraints potentially preventing use. For example, Tanegashima Space Center in Japan can only be used for launch at certain times of year since, during fishing season, there are large numbers of ships offshore from the launch site which could be hit and damaged if a rocket exploded.

Elsewhere, a Soyuz landing in Kazakstan had to be rescheduled as there was a G8 summit nearby which, for security reasons, imposed airspace restrictions that prevented spacecraft search and rescue aircraft from flying. Even the angle of the sun relative to the ISS constrains when a spacecraft can dock. The other factor that can affect the supply chain is that rockets are imperfect.

There was even a nine-month stretch from to when three resupply missions failed. While the astronauts would never starve, running out of food or water could mean that they would have to return to earth early potentially leaving the ISS un-crewed and therefore wasting many millions or billions of dollars. When that third mission failed on June 28th, , the station had enough food to last them for about another fifty days. In this case, even with three failed missions, they had plenty of food to last them especially considering the next resupply mission, a Russian Progress spacecraft, was scheduled just a week after the failure and it was successful.

There have been close calls, though. After the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in , astronauts had to cut their daily caloric intake and supplies got as low as 7 to 14 days of food.

They were one resupply failure away from having to evacuate. Sometimes, in order to stretch the food supply, NASA will have to extend the certified shelf life of food onboard. For this purpose, they keep a sample of each batch of food they make on earth, packaged and stored in the exact same conditions as on the ISS, so they can test if food is still fit for consumption and safe. Once the spacecraft is near the ISS, the crew will spend almost a whole working day dealing with the docking process.

Typically right at the hatch is the crew care package. But, it gives you a rough idea of the timeframes involved. I suspect that other consumable margins are larger than this since there is always a Soyuz seat for each crew member.

This is especially true if you reduce the crew size to extend the supplies. I looked into this a while ago. It's easy to get bogged down in the details, because although the data is very public, there are so many parameters for every mission that I found it hard to get a straight answer.

I used these points to "dumb down" the question:. Someone involved might hem and haw due to a number of inadequacies with this. For example, the payload doesn't reach the station on the same orbit and maybe not even the same day of the launch. The Wikipedia pages on the list of space flights to the ISS is also quite concerned with the length of time that every spacecraft remains docked to the ISS.

There is some valid contention about how to handle return trips to Earth, because over some interval it may have received nothing from Earth but still sent something to Earth. I'm not interested in return trips because it doesn't supply the station with new resources , nor do I care about the time taken to reach the station because all I care about is how long people survive in orbit with resources already in orbit.

I find all of these details highly tangential to the straightforward query of how long have we had people up there without sending anything more up there. As I understand it, these extended intervals were connected to the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster , which happened on Feb 1, Now I could have potentially had a data processing error, but in a simplistic sense, these seem consistent with what you can read about those missions. The story is that the ISS was, indeed, sort of struggling during those time frames.

Because of that, these records should be within striking distance of the maximum time they could go without resupply. In space, there are no grocery stores or home improvements stores. Washers and dryers for clothing do not exist, and access to clean attire can take months. Much of the breathable air and drinkable water must be delivered. When supplies e. They call Mission Control and place their order, and then they wait. Moving astronauts and cosmonauts, science experiments, food, water, air, spare parts, and other supplies to and from the ISS is a highly choreographed international operation that must be executed with near perfection, every time.

Such an effort requires more than one spacecraft. This was never more evident than in an 8-month span between October and June when three different resupply missions were lost during or shortly after launch. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, where he currently resides.

Thanks for signing up! We get it: you like to have control of your own internet experience. But advertising revenue helps support our journalism. To read our full stories, please turn off your ad blocker. We'd really appreciate it. Click the AdBlock button on your browser and select Don't run on pages on this domain.