Slashdot Mirror
A Brief History of the Space Station
HyperbolicParabaloid writes "A story about the history of the International Space Station, and its utility or non-utility for space exploration. One interesting insight: after the Challenger explosion it became obvious that we would never refuel a rocket with volatile fuel at a space station because the threat to the station would be so great. And did you know that to accomodate the Russians, the space station is in an orbit that makes it almost useless as a jumping off point to anywhere?"
There is no such thing as volatile fuel in an atmosphere-less environment.
...
Ummm... rubbish. Volatile fuel is its own atmosphere.
What you mean is, if we keep the two reactive agents which constitute most modern fuel system designs -away- from each other, then we should be able to safely store this material in space.
Still, I don't see why, with all that wiiiiiide empty space out there, we have to bunch it all together in the same x/y/z
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
To escape the Earth's gravity and not be forcibly pulled back, you would have to leave at about 25,000 MPH, or about 7 mi/sec. That's a lot of energy to move a moon shuttle from Earth orbit. Note that it took the entire, very large third stage of the Saturn V rocket just to move the LM and CSM to the moon. If you have small payloads, like space probes, it's not so bad. But economically, there's a way to spread things around.
A space station still works great as a waypoint. It just wouldn't be practical to start your adventure to anywhere except the Moon from there. So, create a new shuttle that can better move men and supplies with much greater abort options (hint: Fly the shuttle by a new next-gen plane to near-space [62 mi) then pop the bastard from there with far less needed fuel and still keep an abort option as both orbiter and booster plane are glideable or have powered-flight capacity).
Such a station would indeed have at least two (backups, remember?) moon shuttles, flyable only in space. What? Fuel? Who says you need to use liquid fuels? Try solids that can be lit and relit in space. The fuel cores could be sent on shuttles without as much worry about volatility than liquids. There is one way to stop a burn in space--stop the oxidizer (you're in vacuum, figure it out). Hypogolic fuels (ones that dont need an igniter--they burn when two substances touch) are still a nice bet as well, and may be safer to upload in separate trips.
Let the moon itself be the fuel depot, optionally--there is probably a way to produce what is needed there.
From the moon, with its puny 1.47 mi/sec escape velocity, trips to anywhere work great and require less energy to achieve. Most importantly, astronauts would have TWO in-space safe-haven return locales in case things get ratty somewhere along the Earth-Moon transits.
Once you're in route to Mars, however, you better be able to make oxygen from a can of Spam, because rescue options would be pretty sparse.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Okay, Mir was, towards the end, practically falling apart. But... it worked. It had guidance systems, attitude control, life support, power systems, everything you need for a long-term space vehicle. It also had mould, dents, leaks and a shredded solar panel, but we're not that bothered about that.
Start building the ISS as a set of add-on modules to Mir. Take advantage of Mir's facilities until you get the chance to replace them: run off the existing power bus until you get the replacement solar panels sent up (or, preferably, some RTGs). Use Mir's life support until the air recycler is installed. etc.
Eventually the new modules will be supplying all the functionality and the old parts of Mir will be unused. At which stage, you can either use them as living space, or depressurise them and mothball them. Maybe one day you can recycle the raw materials; even as scrap, Mir was ludicrously valuable.
But no, Mir went down in flames and the ISS went down in budget. All for annoying political reasons. IMO it's highly unlikely that the ISS will ever do anything useful. By the time it gets large enough, the commercial stations will be eclipsing it.
Click
:-(
ISS was never intended to be a "jumping off point" to anywhere. The move to 51.6 to accomodate the russians was a political move. Thank Clinton, it was his bright idea to bring in the russians as full partners in the hope their missle techs wouldn't go somewhere else...like say Iran. Given ISS' mission (microgravity research, NOT a spacedock quit watching star trek) any orbit will do, but KSC's due east 28 degrees would be best case in terms of payload.
I actually turned down a chance to tour ISS elements in the processing facility.
Amusing ISS historical anecdote: While preparing to close the payload bay doors for the launch of Destiny (the US lab), it was discovered the camera on the elbow of the shuttle's robot arm came within an *inch* of the labs hull. Much hemming and hawwing, and I forget what the final solution was, but I think it's a little amusing that after all the billions had been spent, all the test had been done, they got an "awwwwwwcrap" at literally the 11th hour.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
MORE unless you somehow make the fuel on the moon, since otherwise you're paying the cost of lifting fuel off of earth and then using more to lift off of the moon later.
No if you can setup an industrial base on the moon which can use the raw materials available to generate fuel and other supplies then a moon launch would be better, but getting a fully functioning fairly substantial base setup is a major proposition when we can't even do an orbiting station properly.
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
And the US paid them to do all of that. One of the reasons for Russian participation in ISS was to give their rocket scientists something to do besides sell themselves to nations that might be trying to build ICBMs (such as N Korea). It would have been cheaper and faster to build the Russian contributions ourselves.
The trouble with ISS is that it has no real mission. If we really needed an experimental platform in LEO, why did we let Skylab fall? Turns out using unmanned vehicles lets you do safer and cheaper research on anything except the effect of space flight on humans. But NASA keeps marketing manned flight because they know that it sells well enough to keep their budget flowing. They push manned flight even when it kills real science.
I was working on the Earth Observing System (EOS) (also known as Mission to Planet Earth) when the ISS was given the go-ahead. ISS ate the EOS budget. It went from $15 billion, to 11, to 7, to (ISTR) 4 before I left. So we don't have the really good data that EOS would have given us on issues like global warming. Instead we have a missionless kludge that resulted from 4 (I think) down-designs.
NASA used to have visionaries and great engineers. Most of them left (or lost heart) after the end of Apollo and the end of Skylab. Now they are salesmen and bureaucrats
Not quite - we paid for one of their modules, the other they paid for. Of course, with their economy being a shambles they had trouble getting the money on time, so there were delays. But remember, we had delays too, and money was no excuse. Boeing did some pretty wacky shit, including inadvertently throwing away a $50 million O2 tank that they had to go rooting through a garbage dump for...
It would have been cheaper and faster to build the Russian contributions ourselves.
That is simply not true. 1) we had no design heritage or operational experience with station hardware that had actually flown (Skylab was a one-shot deal so there was no regenerative life support, for instance). They had 30 years of it. 2) Experience with the hardware we actually did build shows that it would have been ridiculously expensive, and likely late. The U.S. Node 1 cost $700 million and was late; and it doesn't actually contain anything. The Russian service module is a self-contained space station, and it cost $200 million.
The trouble with ISS is that it has no real mission. If we really needed an experimental platform in LEO, why did we let Skylab fall?
Its mission is that it's necessary for a sustained human presence in space - both for research and as an assembly point/stepping stone for further missions. If you reject the idea of human space flight, then yes, it doesn't have a mission. Skylab fell for the reason I've been lamenting: Congress and the people just never really cared enough to actually fund space at the required level.
They push manned flight even when it kills real science.
What do you mean by "real" science? The kind of science you happen to do, right? Look, ISS shouldn't take all the blame for the death of MTPE. Congress could and should have funded both at a reasonable level... Besides, in case you havene't noticed, the current Prez has gutted MTPE /EOS/SEC as well as the Station. I doubt he likes research into global warming...
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?