Docking and berthing of spacecraft
The Apollo program depended on lunar orbit rendezvous to achieve its objective of landing men on the Moon.
Beginning with Salyut 6 in 1978, the Soviet Union began using the uncrewed Progress cargo spacecraft to resupply its space stations in low earth orbit, greatly extending the length of crew stays.
There are a total of four such docking ports available on the Russian Orbital Segment of ISS for visiting spacecraft; These are located on the Zvezda, Rassvet, Prichal and Poisk modules.
The Japanese ETS-VII mission (nicknamed Hikoboshi and Orihime) in 1997 was designed to test uncrewed rendezvous and docking, but launched as one spacecraft which separated to join back together.
Changes to the crewed aspect began in 2015, as a number of economically driven commercial dockings of uncrewed spacecraft were planned.
[41] Building off of the 2007 Orbital Express mission—a U.S. government-sponsored mission to test in-space satellite servicing with two vehicles designed from the ground up for on-orbit refueling and subsystem replacement—two companies announced plans for commercial satellite servicing missions that would require docking of two uncrewed vehicles.
SIS planned to utilize a ring attachment around the kick motor[45] while the Mission Extension Vehicle would use a somewhat more standard insert-a-probe-into-the-nozzle-of-the-kick-motor approach.
The SCM used was designed to be compatible to the NASA Docking System (NDS) interface to reserve the possibility of a servicing mission.
[49] Research and modeling work continues to support additional autonomous noncooperative capture missions in the coming years.
[50][51] Salyut 7, the tenth space station of any kind launched, and Soyuz T-13 were docked in what author David S. F. Portree describes as "one of the most impressive feats of in-space repairs in history".
[14] Solar tracking failed and due to a telemetry fault the station did not report the failure to mission control while flying autonomously.
Crew scheduling was interrupted to allow Soviet military commander Vladimir Dzhanibekov[52] and technical science flight engineer Viktor Savinykh[53] to make emergency repairs.
Prior to opening the hatch, Dzhanibekov and Savinykh sampled the condition of the station's atmosphere and found it satisfactory.
Within a week sufficient systems were brought back online to allow robot cargo ships to dock with the station.
[14] Non-cooperative rendezvous and capture techniques have been theorized, and one mission has successfully been performed with uncrewed spacecraft in orbit.
[54] NASA has identified automated and autonomous rendezvous and docking — the ability of two spacecraft to rendezvous and dock "operating independently from human controllers and without other back-up, [and which requires technology] advances in sensors, software, and realtime on-orbit positioning and flight control, among other challenges" — as a critical technology to the "ultimate success of capabilities such as in-orbit propellant storage and refueling," and also for complex operations in assembling mission components for interplanetary destinations.
[55] The Automated/Autonomous Rendezvous & Docking Vehicle (ARDV) is a proposed NASA Flagship Technology Demonstration (FTD) mission, for flight as early as 2014/2015.
An important NASA objective on the proposed mission is to advance the technology and demonstrate automated rendezvous and docking.
One mission element defined in the 2010 analysis was the development of a laser proximity operations sensor that could be used for non-cooperative vehicles at distances between 1 metre (3 ft 3 in) and 3 kilometers (2 mi).
[55] Grappling and connecting to non-cooperative space objects was identified as a top technical challenge in the 2010 NASA Robotics, tele-robotics and autonomous systems roadmap.
This assistance may come from a spacecraft, such as when the Space Shuttle used its robotic arm to push ISS modules into their permanent berths.
In a similar fashion the Poisk module was permanently berthed to a docking port after it was pushed into place by a modified Progress spacecraft which was then discarded.
