How much acceleration does the International Space Station experience during its orbital adjustment boosts? How much thrust and for how long? Bonus question: what is the highest acceleration that the ISS can have without breaking up?
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1The Russians made a mistake once and commanded too large of a burn. There is video of objects in the station swaying, etc. There was concern that the station had been damaged. I'll try to find a reference. – Organic Marble Mar 08 '19 at 13:25
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2This informative answer by @Innovine discusses the incident: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/20197/how-do-orbital-boosts-affect-the-structural-integrity-of-the-iss/20199?r=SearchResults&s=1|14.6203#20199 – Organic Marble Mar 08 '19 at 13:43
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4Possible duplicate of When the ISS moves, do the astronauts feel it? – Russell Borogove Mar 08 '19 at 15:47
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2@RussellBorogove I've just asked How fast is this astronaut “falling”? Distance from start to end point freefalling during boost? before I saw your answer. My question is different, but you may have some thoughts on it. – uhoh Mar 08 '19 at 16:03
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1Eh, there's an answer there that gives some of the info I want, but I don't know the rules here well enough to judge whether that counts as the question being the same, or how I should edit the question to make it more different. – Nelson Cunnington Mar 08 '19 at 18:50
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If you follow the link in this superb answer by @TildalWave to the NASA blogs, you can get info on every boost.
His example from the blogs is:
ISS Daily Summary Report – 05/06/15
ISS Reboost: This morning, the ISS performed a reboost using 58P thrusters to set up phasing requirements for 41S landing scheduled on May 13. Burn duration was 12 minutes, 17 seconds with a Delta-V of 1.34 meters/second.
And definitely worth reading the blog linked to in the comments there. @Uhoh pointed out two awesome YouTube clips linked from that blog demonstrating the effect of the boost burn on people and items inside the ISS:
Expedition 29 crew and Expedition 22 Commander and camera
I haven't yet found any maximum safe boost information, though.
Rory Alsop
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I've re-used these cool videos here: https://space.stackexchange.com/q/34702/12102 – uhoh Mar 08 '19 at 16:36
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5There's not really a "maximum safe boost" per se. Sure, there's an acceleration that will lead to immediate or imminent breakup, but things are far lower than that. What happens instead is that different boosts will set up structural vibrations that reduce the structural life of various components. That's the scenario that they analyze to, and there are far more variables than just the intensity of a particular burn. – Tristan Mar 08 '19 at 17:28
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1Wow, 12 minute burn for only 1.34 m/s? That's a very slow burn. I suppose the slower it is, the more precise you can make it... – corsiKa Mar 08 '19 at 19:48
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And the lower the stress on the ISS. Those two videos site just how gentle the boost burn is :-) – Rory Alsop Mar 08 '19 at 22:06
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