It should be well away from anything important.
Apollo 1 was a disaster in that pressure made the hatch impossible to open up.

You get that on space station windows.

Capsule windows are more troubling because they cycle.

That as much as BOAC’s Comet having squarer windows can make for problems.

Now if you want ,or absolutely have too, use a port to photograph from, you could just use one of the capsules. They all need windows as a last backup for docking. And since they are reused or only used once they would have perfect undamaged windows. Unlike the windows on the ISS.

As for the ISS having to keep a facing to the planet all of those problems could be fixed. use a few space walks to turn the communications dishes to the earth. Then we would never have to use the damaged Russian module again.

1. Much stuff like the viewing port and instruments are oriented permanently “up” or “down”.
2. Solar arrays may not be able to follow Sun when 180 degrees off current alignment. Note solar arrays track the Sun, while the ISS main body is rotated to keep Earth “down”.

Reminds me of when I had my telescope on an equatorial pier, and a visiting family was looking at it. Somebody said how amazing it was that mount moved to track the sky.

I said “Actually, the telescope and the sky are all standing still. The ground and us are the ones moving!”

The Russians have proven the station can be turned around or even flipped over.

That said, I grok your point about the risks of using the Zvezda aft port *at all*. But none of us have enough data to evaluate those risks.

Richard M: Your point is excellent. However, doing more dockings to Zvezda just to do a reboost is a bad approach. Instead, why can’t Russia do what the U.S. is doing? Dock Progress to Prichal, and when a reboost burn is required rotate the station so that the Progress is in the right position.

There may be engineering issues preventing this, but if so it would be nice to know. NASA has now demonstrated successfully that both Dragon and Cygnus capsules can do this from the American ports. Russia should improvise similarly.

“According to Wikipedia, four of these ports have yet to be used for a docking operationally. The nadir port on Prichal is the only one which has been used so far — four times for a Soyuz, once for a Progress-M propulsion compartment. “

(According to Wikipedia, four of these ports have yet to be used for a docking operationally — four times for a Soyuz, once for a Progress-M propulsion compartment. The nadir port on Prichal is the only one which has been used so far.)

The best answer I can come up with is that Progress is used for station reboosts, and this is really only possible when docked to the aft end of Zevzda. But if the leak is becoming that serious of a concern, it needs to be rethought, and NASA and the other international partners should insist that Roscosmos reconsider the Prichal option. I don’t see why it would be impossible to undock a Progress after it has been fully unloaded of its supplies and redocked to Zvezda for the sole purpose of station reboost.