NASA Considers Abandoning ISS

mbstone writes "MSNBC is reporting that NASA is threatening to mothball the International Space Station unless Russia coughs up its share of the money for maintenance and support missions. NASA is now making "contingency plans" to leave the station unoccupied for as long as a year. What I want to know is, why a contingency plan? Didn't NASA already have a plan in place? Are U.S. taxpayers going to pay millions extra to develop new mothballing equipment and procedures that could have been designed-in at far less cost?? Also, I would be glad to house-sit, I use very little oxygen."

Comments

commercialism

[rppp01]

Wouldn't this be a good time to allow the private sector in on this? Why should the governments get all the fun up there? I can't help but think tourism and a private sector push into space will do for space industries and the like what the governments of the worlds could not: enable living in space- make it a reality.

First hand experience

[Alomex]

I attended a meeting of one of the ISS partner nations. In exchange for their contribution they are allotted space in "lockers" to run their experiments. They had a hard time finding any research institution or private interest who wanted to use the locker (the price was around $10,000 per pound). Apparently there is not much current scientific need for a zero gravity environment.

They were willing to let you fly merchandise if you wanted to, so you could buy a space pen, or perhaps fly your uncle's ashes to outer space.

I left the meeting thinking that the ISS should never have been built, and this comes from somebody who is enthralled about space exploration.

Re:First hand experience

[Chris Y Taylor]

"I left the meeting thinking that the ISS should never have been built, and this comes from somebody who is enthralled about space exploration."

The problem with not building the ISS is, that we would have had to come up with some other gov't project to keep all those former Soviet rocket scientists busy. There isn't enough commercial work for them all, and we couldn't very well have them being unemployed. A large number of starving weapons researchers let loose in a multipolar world is just a Dr. Evil-style disaster waiting to happen.

I would have preferred a moonbase, but I can also think of worse make-work projects that could have been chosen instead.

Re:First hand experience

[prisoner-of-enigma]

One has to consider what we'd have if all the money spent on the ISS had instead been spent on a moonbase. In LEO, you have to drag everything of value up with you, but on the moon there's plenty of materials available to make life much cheaper to maintain.

You can extract oxygen from moon dust. Mix with a little hydrogen in a fuel cell and you get electricity, heat, and water, all necessary for a moonbase. Then crack the water back apart via electrolysis using solar cells (or a small thermoelectric nuclear) and you've got breathing oxygen and hydrogen to use all over again.

Experiments on moon dust from the Apollo missions even showed that if you mixed water with moon dust and a few other things you could get pretty good cement out of it, and protection from micrometeorites and cosmic rays to boot. Silicon, aluminum, and even titanium are present in moon dust and could be refined along with other elements to make some inefficient but cheap solar cells to put all over the lunar surface. Who cares if they're inefficient when you can have a few square miles of them with no atmospheric attenuation to worry about?

We have wasted more than just money on the ISS, we've wasted time and we've wasted the legacy and inertia of Apollo. What a shame it would be if the last to set foot on the moon should die of old age before the next visitor should go there. Sad, and pitiful.

Re:Russia

[simong_oz]

Yeh, of course it was Russia that cancelled the module which would have allowed 6 astronauts to be up there conducting experiments 24/7 ... which was one of the main reasons to build a low orbit space station.