wrote in
oups.com:

Glen Overby wrote:
I was looking for the ISS future assembly sequence, and got off track
looking at past missions. The Pirs assembly page at:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/st...ements/pirs.ht
ml

states:

The docking compartment's lifetime as part of the Station is
five years.

Since Pirs was docked to the space station on September 16, 2001 it
would appear that this lifetime has already expired.

I wonder why a module was designed with such a short lifetime? I've
seen nothing about it's life being extended, or it's disposal. So
what do the ISS experts on this group have to say about that?

I am no expert, but I do recall that the original plan was to discard
Pirs within 5 years, to be replaced by Docking Compartment 2.

That's right. Pirs docked to the Zvezda nadir docking port as an interim
airlock/docking module until the Universal Docking Module would have been
launched. Then Docking Compartment 2 would have docked to the UDM.

In the current assembly sequence, the Russians plan to relocate Pirs to
Zvezda zenith to serve as the base for a truncated Science Power Platform.
The UDM has been replaced with FGB-2.

--
JRF

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