If Apple were involved in this, the connector would have been completely different every 18 months, and each spacecraft would now come with a stack of dongles.7. With this standard can anyone now dock to the ISS?
Building to this docking standard ensures compatibility and enables a spacecraft using it to dock to the planned ISS compatible docking ports. A non-ISS partner space agency would need approval of the ISS Multilateral Coordination Board before docking to the ISS and the appropriate international agreements would also need to be put in place prior to the aforementioned docking.
"Life support is not supported with this accessory. Please contact your manufacturer."
The IDA on the ISS is actually a dongle. It connects to the space shuttle docking adapter on one end and presents the IDA standard on the other.
Also there wouldn't be an airlock on some ships, but instead a holographic projection system that would let you do whatever you needed to on the ISS without leaving your ship. Well, except for interact with physical objects, but no one really needs to do that.
was reading about unimogs and came across this:
Blame Canada!
I think the collective noun for a "stack" of dongles is actually a pile.
nope. it's a centipede.
Never mind Apple; if Apache were involved, the ISS would be burning up in the atmosphere somewhere over the Pacific right about now while someone Very Smart™ tried to 'splain that, well, it is a docking mechanism and it doesn't say anywhere explicitly that it is its job to keep the station pressurised while the docking takes place, that's on you...
I drew the natural end result of this a couple years back:
