SpaceX fans quickly began calling for a rescue mission.
I don’t see anyone of relevance here calling for this. If China asked, then sure. But China is very unlikely to do so, since they have more spacecraft available that are already designed to do this. If there were some sort of design problem with Chinese spacecraft that made them unsafe to use, if they were “grounded”, then maybe China would do that. But as far as I understand, it’s believed that the problem is from debris. So they don’t really have any reason not to just use their own spacecraft. And I’d guess that even aside from dealing with any spacecraft linkage challenges, they’d probably rather not have SpaceX do a rescue mission unnecessarily for prestige reasons.
The incident, which comes less than a year after SpaceX’s “rescue” of the Boeing crew, underscores two increasingly critical issues: spaceflight systems need to be standardized to enable cross-nation rescues, and space debris is becoming impossible to ignore.
The irony wouldn’t be lost on Reg readers if the debris that - possibly - struck Shenzhou-20 originated from a Chinese anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) test years ago.
I don’t see anyone of relevance here calling for this. If China asked, then sure. But China is very unlikely to do so, since they have more spacecraft available that are already designed to do this. If there were some sort of design problem with Chinese spacecraft that made them unsafe to use, if they were “grounded”, then maybe China would do that. But as far as I understand, it’s believed that the problem is from debris. So they don’t really have any reason not to just use their own spacecraft. And I’d guess that even aside from dealing with any spacecraft linkage challenges, they’d probably rather not have SpaceX do a rescue mission unnecessarily for prestige reasons.
its worse than just that, read the last 2 paragraphs…
Oopsie daisy!