Space Station Turning Into a Trash Heap

quintin3265 writes "Apparently, the International Space Station is becoming overloaded with junk, stored among other places in a now unused airlock. Since shuttles aren't visiting the station, the station's occupants can't return broken machines to Earth. Furthermore, the only way they can dispose of trash and human waste is by loading these items in Russian cargo ships that burn up in the atmosphere."

Comments

what??

[trick-knee]

sure they can return the stuff. just open the hatch and shove it out! let gravity do the rest.

Re:what??

[AKAImBatman]

They're at orbital velocity. It isn't going to fall, it's just going to sit near the station. And if any of it collides with micro-meteorites or space debris, it could come back and hit the station.

Not to mention that they'd create a minefield for resupply missions.

Re:what??

[MikeMacK]

Not a good idea, there is already way too much stuff up there floating around, a good way to take out future shuttles and satellites.

Re:what??

[Anonymous Coward]

They used to do that with Mir. They stopped because they don't want a bunch of space debris floating around in orbit, waiting to smash into a satellite or something. There's enough junk in orbit already; no need to add to it.

Re:what??

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Have to launch it and send it in the opposite direction of orbit for it to fall; but damn, in microgravity it shouldn't be that hard to come up with a spring loaded trash disposal system.....

Re:what??

[armyofone]

Good point but, seems to me that a small, disposable propulsion rocket would take care of that. One small push and voila! Instant meteor shower for us surface-dwellers.

Re:what??

[gnuman99]

Good point but, seems to me that a small, disposable propulsion rocket would take care of that. One small push and voila! Instant meteor shower for us surface-dwellers.

This is what Progress supply rockets did for Mir, BTW. Supplied fuel, food, air, water, etc.. to the station and took garbage back and burned up in the atmosphere. Cheap and effective.

Re:what??

[ravenspear]

I don't think they have portable rockets on the station, and there wouldn't be room in the russian supply ships for such bulky items.

Re:what??

[Trespass]

A problem with such a system might be the tendency for ejected material to hit the outer atmosphere and skip like a stone, bouncing back out into orbit, and into trouble.

Re:what??

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Depends on the direction- launch it in the same orbital plane, but forward, adds momentum and it moves into a higher orbit. Launch it BACKWARDS in the same orbital plane and it would simply spiral in, and be going slow enough not to skip off the outer atmosphere.

Re:what??

[iendedi]

You would have to launch an equal mass at the earth and in the opposite direction (deep space?) in order to counter the orbit shifting effect of lobbing mass off of a space station (remember Newton's laws?).

Re:what??

[dealsites]

If they have the cargo space to haul all that stuff up there in the first place, you'd think they would have some room to bring the trash back with them for disposal here on Earth.

--
Always current promotions at Circuit City.

Re:what??

[Marxist Hacker 42]

True enough- but you've got plenty of garbage. Yep- shove it forward and it will move to a higher orbit, due to centripetal force working against the gravity of the earth..

Re:what??

[dealsites]

I meant that they should have thought about it in the first place, and brought back unneeded stuff during each trip at the time, rather than letting junk build up.

Re:what??

[RealAlaskan]

Have to launch it and send it in the opposite direction of orbit for it to fall; but damn, in microgravity it shouldn't be that hard to come up with a spring loaded trash disposal system.....

For evey action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you change the orbit of the excrement, you also slightly change the orbit of the space station. Since there's a bit of atmospheric drag in that low orbit, that might be a good thing. De-orbiting the trash will tend to counter the drag which is slowing the space station.

So, we change orbits by flinging poo. We'll call it the monkey drive.

Re:what??

[delibes]

It will fall eventually, same as the ISS is slowly falling all the time due the ever so slight effects of air resistance slowing it down.

Some of the junk could be thrown 'out the back' of the ISS to try and help maintain the station's orbit, but the effects would be minimal. Unless it's a really large amount of poo at very high speed.

Re:what??

[|<amikaze]

That probably was the plan... Problem is, there are no shuttles coming up anymore.

Re:what??

[Anonymous Coward]

why not use rubber bands for propulsion?

Re:what??

[AeroIllini]

Some of the junk could be thrown 'out the back' of the ISS to try and help maintain the station's orbit, but the effects would be minimal. Unless it's a really large amount of poo at very high speed.

Or I suppose the next Progress resupply could bring up a giant poo cannon...

Re:what??

[Doc Ruby]

OK, they don't shove it "down", they just shove it. At least some fraction of that force vector will be opposed to the tangent to orbit, so its velocity will decrease in that direction, below orbital velocity. Its orbit should decay, and burn it on reentry, however slow.

BTW, this is one of the more useful lessons of space exploration: there is no "away" in "throwing away" - it always comes back to haunt you. It's just that in space, no one can hide your scrap.

Re:what??

[Jason1729]

The cargo ships don't return to earth in one piece. They're allowed to burn up on re-entry. On the manned modules return and they don't have the space for the garbage.

The shuttles had more room for garbage but they aren't flying now.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Re:what??

[ravenspear]

The cargo ships don't return to earth in one piece. They're allowed to burn up on re-entry.

Why not just fill them with garbage anyway then? If the heat of reentry is enough to burn up the ship, surely it could incinerate some trash that's carried along with it.

Re:what??

[Audacious]

So you make two systems. One for deep space and one for earth burn-up. You use really heavy duty trash bags (like the contractor bags), stuff them full of trash, take them out, and fire them off at the same time. (Actually, since the Space Station has to, every once in a while, fire its jets to maintain its orbit, some times you will only need one of the two systems.)

I can see it now: Centuries from now, The U.S.S. Enterprise is going along when suddenly - SLAM! One of these bags hits it. Kirk and Spock investigate it and Spock says "Jim! This is a new kind of energy! Trash velocity! It uses a solid perpellant, old clothes, and a corn beef sandwich."

Man! That's what I really call taking out the garbage!

Re:what??

[timeOday]

Since fuel must normally be expended to re-boost the space station, you're just pointing out an added benefit of shooting the garbage back at earth.

Re:what??

[TerminalInsanity]

too bad carmack dident win... BFG woulda taken care of all that mess quite fast

Re:what??

[mdrn28]

Why not just open the airlock and give it a good kick?

Re:what??

[Xaoswolf]

and if it is thrown "down" towards earth? What then?

Re:what??

[SurgeonGeneral]

they should have thought about it in the first place, and brought back unneeded stuff during each trip at the time, rather than letting junk build up.

This is indicative of the general situation about space travel. As the populous of nations that make journeys to space, we should be embarrassed and distraught. The last 40 years of space travel have been stale and unproductive, despite huge rises in government expenditure and GNP.

The failure of the International Space Station is an embarressment for humankind in general. Not only does it show that we cant work together as a species in one of the most important areas with one of the highest productive scientific potentials ever, but it shows that people in general (Especially politicians) care only about themselves. Knowledge and progress mean nothing to politicians and the general population. Instead we spend trillions incarcerating each other, giving corporations tax breaks and polluting the environment. It is perhaps ironic that the fruits of space travel would solve many of our problems, most importantly THE ENVIRONMENT (the single most important thing that ANYONE should care about) and creation of jobs (of almost equal important)

Space travel used to be a matter of national pride. As self esteem and pride goes down the toilet, and as politicians fight wars against drugs and "terror" (Is anyone REALLY terrified?) no one seems to care anymore.

Re:what??

[AKAImBatman]

It doesn't go down like you think. Instead its orbit flattens and it might come back and smack you when you least expect it. (Draw a circle and an elipse around a point. See where they cross? That's the problem.)

Re:what??

[Moofie]

OK, did you read what they were talking about?

Their plan (send stuff back on Shuttle) is now non-viable because there are no Shuttle missions.

Now, ISS and Shuttle are both stupid boondoggles, but this particular facet of the system is not as stupid as you make out.

Re:what??

[Moofie]

Actually, you'd slightly decrease the need for boost burns to keep the ISS up in the sky. The mass fraction of trash is pretty small...

Re:what??

[Ernesto Alvarez]

Hey, that's not a bad idea.....

What about using the trash as reaction mass?

I mean, you push the trash somehow (say, a cannon) backwards. The trash decelerates and deorbits, while the station gains speed, so you can keep it orbiting a little longer without having to push it with a rocket.

I'm probably missing something (such as the station being too massive for that to be effective), but maybe it would be worth analysing.

(Could work with things to be recovered, provided they use some sort recovery capsule with a heat shield)

Re:what??

[ElectricRook]

What trespass is saying is that you'd need a guidance system to get the trash into a decay orbit, or you might meet your trash in it's rebounding orbit.

Anything you meet in space is traveling very very fast.

Ever seen someone flick a cigarette butt out the window of his truck, and have it land in his load of firewood in the back? Oops is a word you don't want to hear in space.

Re:what??

[eingram]

Yeah, that was the plan. The shuttle would go up with the MPLM (Multi Purpose Logistics Module) with supplies in it. After the supplies are loaded and the MPLM is empty, it's loaded with trash, put back on the shuttle, and taken back down to Earth.

Re:what??

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, apparently the space shuttle doesn't return to earth in one piece either. Load up the garbage and let it burn I say. (Lets put Bush in there too)

Re:what??

[merlin_jim]

You don't even need a micro meteorite. In exactly one orbital period, the two objects (in the case, ISS and human fecal matter) will be in the exact same position relative to each other. Basic orbital mechanics; Newton's 2nd law and Kepler's laws of planetary motion are all you need to derive this solution, for any two objects regardless of their respective mass, and for any moment of inertia less than escape velocity.

Re:what??

[emotionus]

I think the problem arises from the fact that the US fleet, the one usually doing these things, is grounded.

Re:what??

[trick-knee]

> and give it a good kick?

yah! that was my idea in the first place. just give it a shove!

in the right direction, of course, which I think is backwards.

" just open the hatch and shove it out! let gravity do the rest."

Re:what??

[Anonymous Coward]

The space shuttle was always used to bring back trash when it was there for assembly missions etc.

The soyuz spacecraft is replaced every 6 months when the ISS crew members have a crew changeout. However, because it's carrying the crew back to earth, the soyuz capsule has a very very limited downmass.

The progress is filled with garbage before it departs and burns up in the atmosphere before the arrival of the next progress resupply ship.

Re:what??

[apostrophesemicolon]

uh.. afaik, there is still some amount of gravity force acting upon the ISS, which is why they have to periodically thrust it back to its orbital position.. stuff thrown out of the ISS should eventually drop down to earth..

Re:what??

[Anonymous Coward]

the progress resupply capsules that get sent up to resupply the ISS ~every 3 months are filled with trash before they perform a retrograde burn and burn up in the atmosphere.

you can only put so much stuff in there. trash disposal is almost a science up there.

Re:what??

[Anonymous Coward]

So does that mean that when astronauts go on space walks that they can't apply any force against the hull of the ship?

Re:what??

[The Snowman]

afaik, there is still some amount of gravity force acting upon the ISS, which is why they have to periodically thrust it back to its orbital position.. stuff thrown out of the ISS should eventually drop down to earth.

I hope there is "gravity force" affecting the ISS. After all, we know Earth's gravity is powerful enough to keep the Moon in orbit ;-)

Anyway, most satellites in low orbit, around 250 miles, still have some bits and pieces of atmosphere to contend with. Granted the particles are so few and far between that it is essentially a vacuum and temperatures plunge to well below freezing, but there are still atmospheric particles. Over time, these drag on the ISS and other satellites in similar orbits, decaying their orbits. The space shuttle is up for such a short amount of time and has its own thrusters anyway so it is not an issue, but the ISS needs a boost every year or so. Technically it can go a lot longer than a year, but to be safe, NASA usually boosts it more often. After all it has gone two years without a lift (Columbia may have been the last shuttle flight but it was a launch or two before that when a shuttle lifted the ISS).

Satellites in higher orbits, such as geosynchronis, are so high up that there is no atmosphere at all. Even some of the higher low Earth orbits have much less drag, unfortunately, NASA and the ESA decided on a lower orbit. Oh well. At least it is still in one piece...

Re:what??

[usrusr]

since we are talking about space garbage coming back at you:

Prof.: Geez, oh man! Remarkable ... a stench so foul it's right off the funkometer. I dare say Fry may have discovered the smelliest object in the known universe.

Bender: [excited] Ooh, ooh, name it after me!

Re:what??

[Dirtside]

Oops is a word you don't want to hear in space.

In space, no one can hear you say "Oops."

Re:what??

[LittleBigLui]

Oops is a word you don't want to hear in space.

In space, no one hears you say "oops". ;)

Re:what??

[Have Blue]

It would be (relatively) trivial to give the station a thruster system (if it doesn't have one already), and use that to counter the poo impulse.

Re:what??

[Gentlewhisper]

Well, apparently the space shuttle doesn't return to earth in one piece either. Load up the garbage and let it burn I say. (Lets put Bush in there too)

You are being awfully redundant. Bush is already garbage to start with.

Re:what??

[jshaw]

but damn, in microgravity it shouldn't be that hard to come up with a spring loaded trash disposal system.....

Gravity (or the lack thereof) has nothing to do with shoving trash out the back. An object's mass is constant. 500 Kg of trash takes a lot of effort to move regardless of whether it weighs 0 lbs or 1102 lbs.

Re:what??

[Anonymous Coward]

"One small push"

It will take more than that. It will take one big push or a long small push.

Re:what??

[d99-sbr]

Additionally, if the kick is good enough this will solve the problem with the ISS slowly sliding towards the center of the earth.

Re:what??

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, apparently the space shuttle doesn't return to earth in one piece either. Load up the garbage and let it burn I say. (Lets put Bush in there too)

Wouldn't the latter violate treaties about not having WMDs in space. Think of the lawsuits which could result it anyone was hit by a bit of US President.

Re:what??

[AGMW]

Or I suppose the next Progress resupply could bring up a giant poo cannon...

Good point, but of course with the ISS being staffed almost entirely by normal sized people, where oh where is one going to source the Giant Poo?

Perhaps a very large cannon for normal sized poo would be more use, in hindsight.

Re:what??

[Squapper]

In fact, it IS going to fall. The ISS is falling slowly as we speak...there is tiny air-resistance that slows the space-station down, and will make it fall ultimately unless it gets pushed back into orbit regulary by a spacecraft.

Couldn't they use muscle-power to help keeping the space station in orbit though? Throwing trash in the direction of the earth during spacewalks would give the station a slight upwards push...and the thrash would fall and burn in the atmosphere (would take a while though, and the the pushes would'nt be enough).

Another optoin would be to arrange the junk as a shield around the station, protecting it from debris...:)

Re:what??

[hackstraw]

Anyway, most satellites in low orbit, around 250 miles ... Satellites in higher orbits, such as geosynchronis

FWIW, geostationary satellites, a subset of geosynchronous orbits, are a little over 22 miles above the equator.

http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Dictionary /GEO_ORBIT/DI146.htm

Re:what??

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what Progress supply rockets did for Mir, BTW. Supplied fuel, food, air, water, etc.. to the station and took garbage back and burned up in the atmosphere. Cheap and effective.

That is why the European ATV will do the same when it's ready. Which originally was planned for ... fall 2004, I believe.

Re:what??

[NickRuisi]

Hmmm.. plus I think the action of a spring loaded, retrograde pointing trash removal system will actually add prograde momentum, thus boosting the orbit.

Re:what??

[NickRuisi]

Just give it a good heave retrograde (backwards with respect to the direction of orbit).. however I think the delta V required to fall into the atmosphere in less than 1 orbit at LEO might be on the order 1000's of m/s.. you'd have to have a pretty good arm.

Re:what??

[leakingmemory]

Just blow a screw at an insane speed forward, and throw the garbage backwards. Oh wait.. and, don't use a too big screw.. or .. OOOPS!

Re:what??

[Enigma_Man]

22,000 miles. Just so nobody gets confused.

-Jesse

Re:what??

[Doc Ruby]

Just be sure to push it, if more slowly, a bit to the side, so the several decaying orbital loops bring it past the side of the craft, rather than smack into it as it returns.

Re:what??

[hesiod]

> Knowledge and progress mean nothing to politicians and the general population

That's a bit one-sided... I believe those things are important to the majority. The difference is that the majority does not believe space travel will bring knowledge & progress, so it isn't worth their money at the moment. I disagree with that opinion, but there it is.

Re:what??

[Yo_mama]

THE ENVIRONMENT (the single most important thing that ANYONE should care about) and creation of jobs (of almost equal important)

Sez you. We got MILLIONS of people who're more concerned with their NEXT MEAL than what the environment is going to be like in a couple of years.

Life on earth evolved with a strong sense of self-preservation and self-interest. You can't perpetuate the species if you don't survive yourself, and then take care of your own. This is not a behavior that is limited to specific cultures. Name one culture where the leaders consistantly hobble their children in the name of equality.

We have advanced to where we are now because of competition. Early pride in space flight was as much about CONQUEST as anything. So, we've conquered space and it's boring... no one cares until we start conquering it again (X-prize and civilian spacecraft).

Sometimes it is advantageous for us to work with others, but at our core we're selfish. So the ISS is amazing in what we've done, even if you poo-poo it as a failure.

Re:what??

[jovlinger]

how fast would you need to shoot it downwards in order for it to be caught by the atmosphere before it goes into an elliptical orbit?

There must be some critical altitude below which you cannot orbit, regardless of orbital velocity, due to air resistance: all you need to do is get the payload below that.

Re:what??

[AKAImBatman]

It would probably bounce off the atmosphere then. Remember that you are not sending the object down, you're skewing its path. Thus the object's trajectory would look a lot like a stone thrown outward toward the water. Gravity pulls the stone down, but that only serves to skew its trajectory. The result is that the stone skims the surface and bounces before it can lose enough velocity.

Remember, LEO orbital velocity is at least 9.7 kilometers per second. If your car was traveling that fast, you'd be burnt to a crisp within seconds.

Re:what??

[Fenris Ulf]

Don't you know your orbital mechanics?

Down takes you Spinward,
Up takes you Anti-spinward,
Spinward takes you Up,
Anti-spinward takes you Down.

You'll have to throw it behind yourself to send it down.

Re:what??

[n0tWorthy]

Well, we could do with about 20 years of no procreating and instead concentrating on how to restore some balance to the environment. THEN we might have some long term survival potential!

Re:what??

[ducman]

How about this: astronauts need excersize anyway. So hook the stationary bike to a gear train that compresses a really big spring. After a few days of cranking, you've got lots of tension in the spring. Use that spring to kick the garbage out the "back" of the space station (180 degrees to the orbit). That effective slows the garbage down a lot, relative to the space station, and should cause it to fall out of orbit, while at the same time giving a useful nudge up to the station

Re:what??

[stupidsocialscientis]

yes - but the explosions on spaceships make great, fearful noises. while lasers make that cool "pew-pew" noise. duh, everyone knows that. ur stoopid.

Are you talking to me ?

[CmdrGravy]

I say they just chuck the stuff out if it's junk. There's only a limited amount of space on those space stations.

Re:Are you talking to me ?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's only a limited amount of space on those space stations

there's also only a limited amount of space in space

well... orbit anyway

That explains....

[jmcmunn]

That explains the numerous meteor showers lately...they're just cleaning house or flushing the space toilet.

Really though, won't most of the stuff they have there just burn up quickly upon reentry? can't they just get some big nets and laso all of the garbage together for a day or two and then give it a push towards Earth?

Re:That explains....

[orangesquid]

But, if you get the angle wrong, the stuff *could* re-enter the atmosphere (although, most of it would fry on the way down, but, what if some large chunk of metal manages to make it mostly intact? it would be moving pretty fast...); or, it might bounce off of the atmosphere, and fly off into space or enter some sort of bizarre orbit that may one day bring it into a crash path with other satellites.

Re:That explains....

[smharr4]

I won't burn up if it stays in orbit with them, it'll just turn into another piece of space junk that the ISS (and other vehicles) have to avoid.

Eventually of course, everything in orbit will re-enter the atmosphere, but the objects in higher or more stable orbits may take years to do so.

Re:That explains....

[imsabbel]

The problem is that even if they "throw it down" towards earth, the orbital velocity will still be dominating. The initial push will just make the orbit a little more eliptic. Just think about it. they circle the earth in less then 2 hours. thats 20 000 km/h+. If they give it 100 or 200 kh/h boost, that wont even be noticable.
And the last thing we need is literaly crap punshing holes in space shuttles ...

Re:That explains....

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Correct Angle= 180 degrees to direction of travel. Gravity does the rest as the garbage spirals in. Pretty easy to use the weight of the space station and a simple spring-launch mechanism for reaction mass to the garbage.

Re:That explains....

[AKAImBatman]

Eventually of course, everything in orbit will re-enter the atmosphere

Duck! The sky... err... moon is falling!

Not.

Things must fall out of Low Earth Orbit because there's friction from thin atmosphere that slows them down. In higher orbital planes, there's very little to cause a satellite (artificial or natural) to slow down.

Re:That explains....

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is, that would make the station lighter, so it would go further up. They can only get rid of the trash when they get resupplied at the same time.

Re:That explains....

[kfg]

can't they just get some big nets and laso all of the garbage together for a day or two and then give it a push towards Earth?

Please bear in mind that the stuff is already traveling at orbital velocity. If you want it to fall first you have to knock about 4 miles per second off its velocity vector along the tangent to the orbital curve.

It's not like dropping a ball off the top of a ladder because it's moving 'sideways' at nearly 5 mps.

KFG

Re:That explains....

[Anonymous Coward]

Small nitpick - there would be no reason at all for it to spiral.

Think forces, man! Forces!

Re:That explains....

[AzathothHP]

There's already a lot of garbage in low earth orbit. While the orbits eventually decay and the junk either burn ups or falls to earth, new stuff is accumulating faster than the old stuff is going away. At the moment it poses a potential hazard for both spacecraft and satellites.

Maybe they can refit the space shuttle with a nice big bulldozer blade...

Re:That explains....

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Slowing down in orbit=moving into lower orbit. There is no such thing as an absolutely perfect orbit for small masses- eventually gravity means it will indeed sprial in from losing momentum to the space station. Do this enough, the space station (a much larger mass, but still small in this equation) will move to a higher orbit though...and start spiraling out.

Re:That explains....

[nizo]

Maybe they should send a few major league pitchers up to throw the trash really hard?

Re:That explains....

[lawngnome]

You mean that crazy old guy with the sign was right? Crap!!!

Re:That explains....

[spectre_240sx]

Hey, I think there might be a market for this. Man-made meteor showers could replace fireworks for the 4th of july!

Re:That explains....

[Jaywalk]

Maybe they should send a few major league pitchers up to throw the trash really hard?

Why not? But toward the sun rather than toward earth. The grandparent mentions the orbital velocity. I'd think there would be some point in the station's orbit where a good push -- or maybe some kind of "junk gun" -- would send the stuff falling into the sun.

Re:That explains....

[Gnascher]

...to continue the thought experiment

It is a fact that the ISS's orbit does continually degrade. This is why it keeps a store of fuel ... and sometimes the shuttle itself is (was) used to push it into a higher orbit.

I'd recon that the mass of the ISS far outweighs the mass of any garbage ejected. Therefore for the force applied to the ejected garbage would impart far greater a velocity change on the garbage than it would on the ISS. True ... using some kind of spring contraption to 'de orbit' thier garbage would impart some velocity into the ISS. However, the net effect would be to counteract to some degree the fact that the orbit is already constantly degrading. But even that ... i'd imagine the amount would be negligable.

Now ... why don't they have a garbage ejector? Probably because such a device would be heavy, bulky and probably never work right anyway. It'd be a real pain in the butt to have to calculate orbital vectors every time you wanted to take out the trash. Also, I'd imagine that much of the 'junk' that needs to be taken out they don't WANT to burn up. It is probably expensive broken equipment that could be reconditioned and put back in service.

Re:That explains....

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Latest image

Re:That explains....

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Another angle!

Re:That explains....

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of the peesicle they told us about at space camp... Oddly enough it doesn't bring up very many hits on google.

But neither does 'Alan Shepard wetback'

Re:That explains....

[merlin_jim]

It's even worse than that.

In one orbital period (maybe half depending on which direction you push it) the two objects will be in the exact same position with the exact opposite relative velocity. In other words it'll be coming straight at your airlock door just as hard as you threw it. ugh what a mess!!!

Re:That explains....

[forkazoo]

Dood, you are so fucking wrong, you don't even know what's up. All the probes we sent to Venus are headed back *right now,* and the Martian Defense Force is planning on returning Beagle in the next few years as well. IT ALL COMES BACK! IT IS TEH SUXXORS. No, seriously, I mean it.

Re:That explains....

[mindstrm]

Well, for one, we'd need even more energy to keep the station in orbit... equal forces and all. A recoilless rocket system would work.

That's ignoring the astronomical amount of energy needed to de-orbit something into the sun.

Re:That explains....

[peterhoeg]

Asking out of curiousity here - does any of you guys know what would happen if the mentioned human waste jettisoned into space was to hit another space shuttle. Would it break the shuttle or simply create an even spread across the windshield?

Re:That explains....

[hackstraw]

It'd be a real pain in the butt to have to calculate orbital vectors every time you wanted to take out the trash.

Sarah Synthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take The Garbage Out ...

Re:That explains....

[imsabbel]

Depents on the impact speed. Remember, it will be frozen, so it would be rather hard...
If the delta_v is slow enough(100 or 200km/h, like when a shuttle would be on docking approach), it will only bounce off.
If the shuttle crossed patch with such a bit of waste while on its way to another orbit, the differential velocity will be a few 1000 km/h. Thats faster than amour piercing sabot rounds from tanks. At that speed, it isnt important if its frozen waste or thungsten when the target it only light metal alloy and heat shield ceramics....
It would punch right through the shuttle... it wouldnt "break" it, but put a neat little hole into it.

Re:That explains....

[sootman]

"It'd be a real pain in the butt to have to calculate orbital vectors every time you wanted to take out the trash."

Yeah. NASA hates that kind of work.

;-)

Re:That explains....

[phobonetik]

I thought the gravitational pull, over time, degraded all orbits - if I remember correctly, in a number of million years time, the earth would theoretically finally come to hit earth, and the earth hit sol, however it was anticipated our sun would have come to the deterimental part of its life and swallow us up well before then.

snow

[mothz]

the only way they can dispose of trash and human waste is by loading these items in Russian cargo ships that burn up in the atmosphere.

So even if the snow doesn't look yellow, it's probably not good to eat.

the only problem is

[ginotech]

if they don't get it going at a good pace towards earth, or it takes too long to get there, watch one of our satellites slam into the stuff.

And to think...

[datastalker]

...that I was upset with broken machines piling up in the cage in the datacenter... at least I don't live there! (Well, ok, not entirely.) Plus, I can go outside to escape looking at it, which is unfortunately not an option for the cosmo/astro-nauts.

Re:And to think...

[khrtt]

And you don't have to poop on top of the same heap either:-)

Re:And to think...

[MikeBabcock]

"Wow, its nice being out here, all this empty room. Nice being able to move around freely ... not necessarily where I want to go of course ... wish I had that jetpack they promised me. I wonder if I'll run out of air or drift into flying space poop first? Gee, the inside of that cramped space module sucked, but at least it had air."

To the sun!

[Anonymous Coward]

Send them in the direction of THE SUN!

Homer: The sun? That's the hottest place on Earth!

Re:To the sun!

[Performaman]

Hermes: "Like my grandmother always said: 'If you want a box pushed into the sun right, you've gotta do it yourself'"

Re:To the sun!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sun: Long a source of amusement....

Obligatory One Liners

[Anonymous Coward]

Space stations are responsible for all the crap in the atmosphere?

An unused airlock is where redneck america of the future will store all their unused junk, making the storage business obsolete.

Imperial Space Stations always dump their trash before jumping to hyperspace. That's just standard procedure, duh!

Major Tom to Ground Control -- mission accomplished...now how do I flush?

Sell it on Ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

Ships to: Worldwide
Shipping: Check item description and payment instructions or contact seller for details

Re:Sell it on Ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

Space stations, trash heaps in disguise

They haven't Learned Anythng.......

[TechnoGrl]

It seems that, once again we are unnecessarily endangerig the lives of astronauts for the political expedient of not wanting to abandon what the politicos spent so much money on. Isn't it time to bring these guys back before we have anothe wo entirely unnecessary deaths?

NASA lost it's brains in the 80"s but has it entirely lost it's heart as well?

Re:They haven't Learned Anythng.......

[Skater]

How would abandoning the space shuttle right now help the ISS? We don't have a replacement ready to go...

--RJ

Take a lesson from DMB

[hansoncoyne]

Don't just dump your sh*t when nobody is looking. You may get caught.

Re:Take a lesson from DMB

[mrgreen4242]

Off topic, but " the driver allegedly emptied the contents of the bus' septic tank into the river below, the lawsuit alleged." They allegedly need to get some new alleged staff writers, I alledge.

Re:Take a lesson from DMB

[suwain_2]

I grasp the redundancy you're commenting on, but the irritating overuse of "alleged" is usually necessary to fend off libel/slander suits. (I'd have tried to find another word for the second occurance of "alleged," though.)

Otherwise, anyone found not guilty could turn around and sue them for slander.

Re:Take a lesson from DMB

[aardvarkjoe]

"The lawsuit alleged that the driver emptied the contents of the bus' septic tank into the river below" would do just fine.

Re:Take a lesson from DMB

[SeanDuggan]

"The lawsuit alleged that the driver emptied the contents of the bus' septic tank into the river below" would do just fine
Ah, but what if you quoted the lawsuit incorrectly? And misquoting lawyers could be like playing snatch with a pit bull. Might leave you with less fingers at that...

nasa.ebay.com

[RobertB-DC]

Seriously, who *wouldn't* pay good money for "actual NASA-certified space junk"? Rutan had to have his people guarantee *not* to sell the ballast on the X-Prize flights, so clearly he thinks there's a market.

If NASA can't sell space junk, then Congress needs to give them the ability to do so. It makes sense that you can't find another piece of the Shuttle in East Texas and sell it... it makes no sense that you can't take a blob of solder melted in space and sell *that*.

Re:nasa.ebay.com

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the article--or even the HEADLINE, come on--you'd know they can't get it down to Earth. Makes it a bit tricky to sell.

Re:nasa.ebay.com

[ganhawk]

Seriously, If NASA started selling every bit of junk it can bring back to earth, it will no longer be a rare commodity and people will no longer pay exorbitant prices for it.

BTW, I was replying to the parent where NASA can bring back space junk. Not in this case ...

Re:nasa.ebay.com

[Sophrosyne]

I bet they could make a lot of cash on soiled astronaut panties...

Re:nasa.ebay.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so they get another $50,000 or so (optimistically speaking), partly paying for one astronaut's salary.

Still need to get the rest from the gov't.

Re:nasa.ebay.com

[Stevyn]

Do you remember Tickle Me Elmo? The Berlin Wall? There are so many people who would want a little space junk that they market would take years to dry up. I just don't know if the costs to transport it back to space would be worth it.

Re:nasa.ebay.com

[cybermage]

They could make it free. You just have to pick it up.

One word...

[Shadow Wrought]

eBay. Buyer pays for shipping.

relativity

[kwelch007]

Uhhh...for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Wouldn't such a "shove" cause a deviation in the station's orbit?

Re:relativity

[nizo]

Actually this is perfect, just have a big arm that throws trash down, causing the station to boost into a higher orbit. Now I have this image stuck in my head of a big white-gloved cartoon arm throwing trash at the earth as the space station flies off into space....

Space Garbage

[lilmouse]

Space Garbage is actually a really big problem with the ppl at NASA. We've already dumped a huge amount of junk in orbit, and it really does just kind of stay around in orbit.

An alternate you might suggest is toss it out hard enough to fall into the atmosphere and burn up... Think again! If you do that, you push yourself away from the earth, destabilize your orbit, and lose the station.

A non-trivial problem...

We need a space elevator! ;-)

--LWM

Re:Space Garbage

[starphish]

Couldn't the container you push out have little rocket boosters on it that can either push it away, or towards earth? It seems that it could be made cheaply, and I imagine you would only need a small boost.

Re:Space Garbage

[sjames]

An alternate you might suggest is toss it out hard enough to fall into the atmosphere and burn up... Think again! If you do that, you push yourself away from the earth, destabilize your orbit, and lose the station.

Interestingly, the station needs a periodic reboost anyway.If they could use the trash as reaction mass, it would accomplish that and put the trash into a nice unstable orbit all set to burn up. The real problem is how to accelerate the trash enough. Mass drivers are cool, but they have nowhere near enough electricity for that.

Short of a mass driver, the station has a much greater mass than the trash, so it's not likely a problem.

Re:Space Garbage

[mikael]

You need a recoil-less space squirrel launcher. With a stronger spring, and some crosshairs you could practise space skeet shooting with all that space junk orbiting the earth.

Rather than ejecting space junk using a directional force, couldn't you use a couple of contra-rotating buckets (like a centrifuge). At the right angle, release the buckets and the junk would fly out and away.

Re:Space Garbage

[lphuberdeau]

Actually, they have been having this problem ever since the shuttle incident. I don't know how this is any news...

If I had a better memory, I could probably tell who is working on it and what it is called, but there is a module developped by europeans that will solve this problem. It will basically bring supplies up and trash down at a lower cost than lunching a shuttle or a russian rocket.

Re:Space Garbage

[RJabelman]

How's it a non trivial problem? Throw junk with equal mass in opposite directions with equal speed. Forces cancel. Orbit unchanged.

Re:Space Garbage

[uberdave]

Great! So, now you have half the garbage burning up, and half of it in a different orbit. Oh, and you better hope your "trash bags" don't break apart during the throwing phase, or you're going to spew rubbish in thousands of unpredictable directions.

Re:Space Garbage

[UnapprovedThought]

If throwing garbage out is non-trivial, how about drying it out like buffalo chips and burning it, using the exhaust as propellant?

That way, the space debris is kept to a small particle size, and the exhaust is just as controllable as any conventional thruster.

Whatever is left over (carbon?) might even be useful for something, though I don't think you'll have enough to build a space elevator out of the stuff (that is what you were implying right?)

Re:Space Garbage

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

how do you propose they accelerate the junk to a speed fast enough to actually bring it down rather than just put it into an elliptical orbit?

Re:Space Garbage

[Rii]

What if an astrounaut just got in a space suit with a bag of trash and chucked it straight at earth? He'd float back towards the station, and the trash would not have a stable orbit. Or why don't we just have some sort of catapault do it? How hard would it be to correct the station's orbit after pushing away even a few 100kg of garbage?

Re:Space Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

get best shot gaming kids on the controls of a short range high intesity laser sent into orbit and let them blast the debris. and give them incentive pay, high percentage sessions pay more.

or have a competition, best fighter pilot vs best gamer.

blast the f@#king sh*t of space. after all these f@#king billions on defense and aerospace and space trash is problem? if nasa can't figure it out they deserve to get their funds cut.

environmentalist must now extend their range beyond just the planet.

after the us and soviets have already began polluting space, when other nations start doing the same the us and soviets will say "hey, take care of the environment, even in space", sort of like "we have tens of thousands of nukes "no other country can even have one..........."

The Klingon Spin

[Alien Being]

We didn't say that the ISS is a garbage skow. We said it should be hauled away *as* garbage.

Re:The Klingon Spin

[ravenspear]

MEESTER SPOCK!!!!!!!!

Re:The Klingon Spin

[CoffeeJedi]

and THAT'S when you... hit the Klingon, Mr. Scott?

Empty Oxygen tanks, $.10

[moofdaddy]

What abut a garage sale?

Joe Dirt's Space Poo

[Anonymous Coward]

.... from ISS

spaceballs?

[Chuck Bucket]

We're the protagonists in Spaceballs driving a space dump truck? Maybe they can help. Otherwise it'll be up to a private company to figure out how to fly up and get rid of it! ;)

CB^%*&

Re:spaceballs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it was a space winnibago (sp?)

Re:spaceballs?

[j_cavera]

You're thinking of (god why do I know this?) a short-lived 70's tv series called "Quark". The main characters flew around in a space garbage truck, picking up monsterous trash bags of orbital debris. Prominant characters were a set of clones and a guy who was an intelligent houseplant...

Before you ask: No, I have no life.

Re:spaceballs?

[discord5]

It was a winnebago, but you might be thinking of Space Quest 5. Roger Wilco was captain of a garbage ship in that one.

Re:spaceballs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Beowulf clust...uggh, never MIND.

Re:spaceballs?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also a manga about an astronaut whose job is to take care of orbital debris.

Planetes
Makoto Yukimura
ISBN 1591822629
$10

They didn't think this through, obviously.

[Anton Anatopopov]

NASA takes some $7trillion a year, and they cannot even work out that if you don't take out the trash, it starts to pile up? It's hardly rocket science!

Re:They didn't think this through, obviously.

[Anonymous Coward]

They made a minor error when converting from metric.

Flaming Poo

[killermookie]

Furthermore, the only way they can dispose of trash and human waste is by loading these items in Russian cargo ships that burn up in the atmosphere.

Let the flaming poo jokes commence.

Re:Flaming Poo

[AeroIllini]

Furthermore, the only way they can dispose of trash and human waste is by loading these items in Russian cargo ships that burn up in the atmosphere.

Let the flaming poo jokes commence.

Maybe RotoRooter could set up a target in the South Pacific...

**rimshot**

...come to think of it, that Taco Bell target was the same thing, wasn't it?

**crowd boos, throws things on stage**

Re:Flaming Poo

[Anonymous Coward]

The sky was black, the moon was blue,
Down through the atmosphere the crap-rocket flew;
By the heat of re-entry, its nose cone aglow,
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.
With a thump the light vanished, a holler was heard;
"Johnny's been killed by a flying space turd!"

Re:Flaming Poo

[Anonymous Coward]

come on, this must not be lost, mod it up

The Trash Heap?

[fiannaFailMan]

Isn't the Trash Heap supposed to be all-seeing, all-wise, and all-knowing?

Re:The Trash Heap?

[UglyTool]

Yah, but you have to be two feet tall and furry to understand.

Re:The Trash Heap?

[stratjakt]

What are the little dudes named who shit out the crystal girders that the Fraggles eat?

And the big guys who eat fraggles?

Re:The Trash Heap?

[mrbcs]

Doozers make the stuff the fraggles eat. I think the other ones are gorgs.

Re:The Trash Heap?

[uberdave]

Doozers made the girders out of radishes, not feces. And the Gorgs don't eat Fraggles, they eat peach and garlic pies.

Shuttle vs Soyuz

[FTL]

For the day to day tasks of running a space program, nothing beats the Russian Soyuz vehicle. Cheap, simple, reliable and safe. But now and again you do need to get stuff down from orbit. Soyuz can't do that. Indeed the Russians loved it when the US shuttle visited Mir since it offered them a rare opportunity to bring back stuff.

On the whole, the Shuttle has proved to be an impractical vehicle; it tries to be everything and does nothing properly. Most people in the industry now believe that the Shuttle flights should end 2010. Replace them with three different vehicles: a capsule like Soyuz for getting people into space and back again, expendable launches for hauling cargo up to space, and (something we haven't seen before) an inflatable return vehicle for bringing back large objects. I'm only aware of one instance of the latter, Russia has it (see last entry on this page).

Re:Shuttle vs Soyuz

[Anonymous Coward]

... But now and again you do need to get stuff down from orbit. Soyuz can't do that. ... Replace them with three different vehicles: a capsule like Soyuz for getting people into space and back again, ...

OK, maybe I'm missing something, but if the Soyuz capsule can bring back people, why can't it bring back stuff? Especially stuff that is smaller than a man? Just send back a capsule with 1 astronaut and 2 big bundles of stuff. It might be expensive but I don't see how it would be impossible.

Re:Shuttle vs Soyuz

[Penguinshit]

Would the inflatable craft be called a "Schlockyuz"?

Romanticized science fiction

[sarcastro73]

It's difficult to get public support for research in space when they routinely encounter such problems. People expect Star Trek and are disappointed when real space ventures must deal with more down to earth problems as "Where do we store all the garbage?" No one ever used a toilet on the Enterprise.

Re:Romanticized science fiction

[Blackfire]

No one ever used a toilet on the Enterprise.
Sure they did...

"Captain's log; stardate..."

-=bf

Re:Romanticized science fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

With the power of an antimatter reactor the Enterprise colld easily break down all waste into it's component atoms. These could then either recycled or safely dumped into space.

Re:Romanticized science fiction

[Gnascher]

Where do you think the replicators got all that mass to create Stubing's Tea, Earl Gray, hot?

Re:Romanticized science fiction

[upsidedown_duck]

The Star Fleet engineering manuals show lots of toilets in the Enterprise. With all the diseases that affected the whole crew none seemed to involve vomiting or diarrhea, and even when Capt. Kirk got a hangover we didn't see him collapsed in the bathroom or anything. Very strange, indeed. I conclude that all future humans are really shape shifters from the Delta Quadrant. They took over our planet when humans were weakened from the eugenics conflicts and couldn't fight back! We must prepare for the invasion by destroying all buckets on earth so that the shape shifters will have no place to sleep! They will grow weary and we can strike back before it is too late! Victory is at hand!

Re:Romanticized science fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely you would get something not quite completely unlike tea.

Re:Romanticized science fiction

[Rolo Tomasi]

You know, I've actually noticed that before. My take on this is that they simply beam the shit right out of their guts.

Re:Romanticized science fiction

[Jeremy Erwin]

Star Trek's writers may have shied from the problem, but Lucas advanced the plot with sanitation.

HAN: (sarcastically) Oh! The garbage chute was a really wonderful
idea. What an incredible smell you've discovered! Let's get out of
here! Get away from there...


and, in a later film

HAN: Well, if they follow standard Imperial procedure, they'll dump
their garbage before they go to light-speed, then we just float away.

Re:Romanticized science fiction

[Jeremy Erwin]

"Earl Gray" is an component of "Advanced Tea Substitute". Douglas Adams preferred Earl Grey. Quite possibly, he enjoyed Harrod's No 42 most of all.

burn up on re=entry?

[Chuck Bucket]

Can't they 'bundle' the trash and drop it towards earth? I expect it would all burn up into ash once it starts in the upper atmosphere, and shouldn't liter on the ground.

Am I missing something?

CB*)@@@

Re:burn up on re=entry?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

There's the problem of getting it to head towards earth. As another post points out, it would probably just hang out in another orbit at the same speed as the ISS.

Re:burn up on re=entry?

[Gnascher]

Am I missing something?

Apparently you missed Freshman Physics. You can't just 'drop' things out of orbit.

You'd have to apply force 180 degrees to the direction of travel so that the bundle of garbage would lose orbital velocity and be pulled in by Earth's gravity. Otherwise anything 'dropped' by the ISS will just follow along happily in the existing orbit until the orbit slowly degrades.

On a side note ... the ISS is always on a degrading orbit as well. That's why they occasionally have to boost it into a higher orbit. If left unattended, the ISS would do a skylab impression.

Re:burn up on re=entry?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Can't they 'bundle' the trash and drop it towards earth?... Am I missing something?"

The space station is orbiting the earth at a high velocity, so it is itself in free fall. Anything "dropped" will simply float alongside. Imagine jumping from a plane with a rock in your hand. If you drop the rock, it's just going to hover beside you. The ISS is also freely "falling" around the earth.

Releasing garbage and pushing it backwards or towards the earth, IIRC, would simply give it a lower, faster orbital trajectory. Throwing it forward or outward would put it in a higher orbit. Remember that in orbit, speed is inversely proportional to orbital altitude.

Re:burn up on re=entry?

[lindsley]

To avoid the problems with Newton's Law knocking the spacestation about, how about we load the garbage up on a special GMD (Garbage Movement Device), give it a relatively modest push out of the space station (model rocket engine, maybe, or even just a burst of compressed air), wait several hours for it to get far enough from the space station, then fire off its propulsion system (also low-grade, providing maybe 25-50 mph thrust) which puts it more quickly (and hopefully more predictably) into a reentry and burn orbit. The modest push should affect the station minimally and might even be used to compensate for the natural decay of the station anyway.

The idea would be to use low-power thrust to slowly lower the garbage's orbit. If it takes days or weeks for it to reach burn level, so what? This is not a time-critical operation. Then the question is, does such a low-power thrust device exist? Solar power and a propeller probably won't do it :) but is there anything else low-cost and disposable (that is relatively cheap to build and transport to the station in the first place?)

(Yes, I'm dodging the issue of whether burning garbage in our atmosphere is a good thing and focusing on the technical obstacles. And no, I haven't done the physics because those brain cells were discarded a ways back :)

Re:burn up on re=entry?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

The problem is that during the days or weeks that the garbage is moving around the earth at 5mps it could hit other space debris, causing a change in course and putting the ISS at risk.. Or that the mass of the "garbage ball" may break apart leaving a large amount of loose garbage traveling at a high rate of speed.

It's like pissing out the back of a moving pickup truck.

They did just chuck it

[watermodem]

I watched some of the Video on NASA TV.

They just pushed cardboard boxes of trash away from the spaces tation on a special space walk.

consult the American Way(tm)...

[Sophrosyne]

Just use explosives dammit!
Blow that trash to smithereens!!

Re:consult the American Way(tm)...

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations: You have just been added to the no-fly list.

Re:consult the American Way(tm)...

[cbx_cbx]

..and do like an old video i saw where they blew up a dead whale stucked in a american beach. Before: Dead whale in the beach. After: Milions of pieces of dead whale all over the beach/city. Man, the one that come with that idea could have won a nobel prize. See, the American Way(tm): (Nuke-it/explode-it) dont work every time.

SpaceShipOne

[Anonymous Coward]

A more practical application for SpaceShipOne instead of space tourism, is the junk salvage industry. I'm sure there are lots of dead satellites up there too. Just like Andy Griffith did in Salvage 1.

airlock?

[lawngnome]

I guess opening the airlock and letting the crap fly away isnt PC?

No you can't just chuck the junk into space.

[Greg@RageNet]

I've seen lots of posts along the lines of 'just shove it out the airlock and let gravity do the rest'. The station and anything jetisonned from it orbit at a speed of 27,300 kph. Depending on which way and how hard you toss this stuff out of the airlock is is not likely to deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere. More likely it's going to drift in a slightly different orbit and perhaps someday it will intersect with the IIS again.. If you do the math of two objects traveling at 27,300kph even with a small intercept angle the speeds and energies involved in the two objects would be catostrophic to both apon impact. This is why you can't just 'toss trash out the airlock' while in orbit.

-- Greg

Re:No you can't just chuck the junk into space.

[rco3]

Actually, Greg, two objects traveling at 27,300 kph and impacting each other might not damage each other at all. Like, say, if they're travelling in the same direction? The key, here, is the relative velocity between the two objects. If you dump it out the airlock with no serious acceleration, it's just going to stay in orbit with you. When it hits you again, it won't hit very hard. Problem is, neither will it leave orbit and fall down. THAT's why you can't just dump stuff out the airlock.

Re:No you can't just chuck the junk into space.

[Anonymous Coward]

So why not just tether it to the outside? Send 'em up some garbage bags and a lightweight collapsable frame they can bolt onto the outside of the station, and stash the broken equipment there.

That way, if at some point they get to the point where the need to jury-rig something, they at least have that junkpile to go through.

Obviously this applies mainly to broken equipment, but even the human waste could theoretically eventually be used for agriculture.

It's not like there's actually a shortage of room, just climate controlled room.

Re:No you can't just chuck the junk into space.

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Actually; there is atmosphere at the altitude of the spacestation, and the junk will drift off into a different orbit and reenter in a few years/months.

Also, jettisoning at certain times, for example before station reboost, the chances of the station seeing the junk come back are vanishingly small.

The biggest problem is where it might land. There's about a 1 in a million chance that any heavy metallic stuff will land on someone's head; and this is per item that can survive reentry. Controlled deorbit is essential.

Re:No you can't just chuck the junk into space.

[Derling Whirvish]

This is why you can't just 'toss trash out the airlock' while in orbit.

The Russians did it all the time while Mir was up. Read this:

MCDOWELL: Well, there's all kinds of trash. And, indeed, on the Mir space station, every few weeks we would see five or six new space debris objects be catalogued, and we eventually discovered that they were putting their trash in plastic bags and shoving them out the airlock. And so, that's happened all through the space program. On the Shuttle to the present day, they don't throw trash overboard, but they do jettison water. But in general, all of that stuff is in low orbit. It doesn't stay up very long, and so it's not a huge problem compared to the exploding rocket stages higher up.

Re:No you can't just chuck the junk into space.

[Anonymous Coward]

you got to be carefull with anything, because even if you think the relative velocity is very close, you could be wrong and the smallest thing could cause large damage.

on one of the shuttle missions, the shuttle impacted with a paint chip smaller than my fingernail, but it cause a HUGE crack in teh shuttle windshield kind of like what happens when a rock on the highway hits your car.

tiny tiny things can have HUGE consequences if you smack them

Re:No you can't just chuck the junk into space.

[Mal-2]

Why use interior space to store this stuff at all (ok maybe IMAX film needs protection, but poop does not) when they could strap it to the OUTSIDE of the station? They'd have to balance it somewhat better than they do with it inside (any mass would be further from the plane of rotation and could make the station wobbly), but why does it have to be stored in precious living space? Strap it all together or put it in bags, and tack them outside. It's still there if you need it, and it's not floating in orbit to worry about later.

I can just imagine the request list for the next supply ship -- "toilet paper, plastic garbage bags, and duct tape. Lots and lots of duct tape."

Mal-2

Re:No you can't just chuck the junk into space.

[Illserve]

Sanity checking reveals you are in error.

What you are proposing is the spontaneous creation of energy. Give something a gentle push out the airlock, wait a few years, and the next time you encounter that object, it'll be a catastrophic impact?

Sorry, doesn't work. Relative velocity of the two objects will stay relatively similar unless an outside force interacts.

flaming poo

[humina]

Now flaming bags of poo are found in places other than your front door!

Not "junk", exactly...

[Zocalo]

The actual refuse is simply loaded up into the used Progress supply pods which are then de-orbited and burn up in the atmosphere. The stuff piling up on the station ideally wants to be returned to Earth, either for servicing (spacesuits are expensive), scientific analysis or proper disposal. Getting this sh^Htuff back to Earth ideally requires the shuttle, since the manned Russian Soyuz craft barely have room for the crews they are exchanging. True, you could jettison the stuff, but when even a paint fleck can cause significant collision damage at the kind of velocities involved, what do you think a broken exercise bike is going to do?

Reason for not throwing junk out.......

[Deecrypt]

And the throwing-away -- done during a recent spacewalk -- was done cautiously so that the discarded antenna covers and expired pump panel didn't become deadly boomerangs. Such is life in space, post-Columbia.

I'm sure none of us would want such a tragedy to repeat itself due to space junk.

Khurram

aye caramba!

[aztektum]

I just washed my car! Now that the birds are going south I thought it was safe.

Space station refuse = new hurricane theory

[Rares Marian]

I guess now we can really call Ivan a shitstorm.

It's a bird!..

[khrtt]

It's a plane!..
It's a Russian cargo ship full of human poo burning up in the atmosphere!

Duh..

trash powered rocketry!

[magarity]

They're at orbital velocity. It isn't going to fall, it's just going to sit near the station.

Ah, but if they go on spacewalk in order to heave it behind (relative to orbital path) the station, the station will pick up orbital speed and the trash will loose orbital speed. They'll use a little less fuel in height correction and the garbage will fall to the atmosphere and everyone wins! That's what all rocketry boils down to doing; throwing something (usually burning fuel) out the back in order move foward/upward.

Re:trash powered rocketry!

[Civil_Disobedient]

if they go on spacewalk in order to heave it behind (relative to orbital path) the station, the station will pick up orbital speed and the trash will loose orbital speed

...but in throwing the trash, the astronauts overexert themselves, requiring more water and food, and breathing much harder. So they'll use less fuel of the "rocket" variety, but require more fuel of the "human" variety.

Remember, energy cannot be created or destroyed, just transferred. Or, "You can't get sumthin' for nuthin'"

Re:trash powered rocketry!

[Grab]

Don't the astronauts have to do regular workouts anyway? So that energy can be used for something productive instead of wasted on a treadmill.

Grab.

Re:trash powered rocketry!

[robfoo]

That's what all rocketry boils down to doing; throwing something (usually burning fuel) out the back in order move foward/upward.

Yeah, it's not exactly rocket science.. :)

Re:trash powered rocketry!

[cakefool]

Yes! attatch the treadmills to the propellers... oh, sorry.

No problem

[Tablizer]

Getting rid of space trash is easy. Just mix it with anti-trash.

Re:No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

that would also release energy. there's speculation over whether the airforce's research is for weapons because the article stated the energy release in fuel tanks. so maybe in a future mission that could be a real possibility.

Sad News - Gordon Cooper Dead

[darth_MALL]

CNN says: "Gordon Cooper, one of the nation's first astronauts on the Mercury and Gemini missions, has died, NASA confirms."
Mixed emotions on the space front today.
Godspeed Gordon.

Re:Sad News - Gordon Cooper Dead

[yokem_55]

Just so this doesn't get seen as a bad Stephen King prank, here is the linky.

Imagine the feeling

[HBI]

Being aboard a mighty achievement of human science, and having your own shit piling up next to you for lack of a means to dispose it.

It would be very demoralizing to me.

Re:Imagine the feeling

[sl3xd]

It's not that hard to imagine. Take a bunch of young children on a long car ride. (Preferably 6+ hours)

A Great Rotovator(tm) Counterweight!

[Baldrson]

Hans Moravec's Rotovator(tm) picks up hypersonic (near mach 12) payloads with a tether and slings them to orbit.

Current proposals for implementation of the Moravec's design rely on a hypersonic air-breather of advanced aerodynamic design like the Boeing DF-9 (that exists only on paper).

Is there anything likely come along in the near future that could take paylods to 100km and mach 12?

Clue: Someone just went 100km this morning.

A key to the Rotovator(tm) is getting hub mass in place to keep it out of the atmosphere while it picks up mass -- but that mass can be any old space junk for the hub where it counts the most for high strength materials like carbon nanotubes.

Can you think of anything really massive that is likely to end up as space junk soon?

Clue: This /. article concerns such a hunk of junk.

Nice thing about Rotovators(tm) is that they can be built with much lower capitaliztion over a much shorter period of time using existing commercial materials. All you need is a bunch of mass orbiting near earth, some quite-doable tethers, and sufficient manuverability and speed in the atmospheric leg to hook up with the tether as it reaches the nadir.

Hey!

[Crispin Cowan]

No sooner do they win the X-Prize than there's a new use for their Spaceship One :)

Crispin

Ship to the Chinese

[Anonymous Coward]

They will take them for cheap.

wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, the International Space Station is becoming overloaded with junk, stored among other places in a now unused airlock.

That's one big airlock! How can it fit the whole space station?

Let's look at some of the assumptions...

[geekwench]

[rant] Since "chuck everything out of the airlock" seems to be the favored solution, let's look at some of the problems involved.
As has been pointed out multiple times, the gravitational pull in high earth orbit isn't enough solve the problem. Think about it: if the station isn't affected by the pull of Earth's gravity, something with far less mass isn't going to feel the tug. It would take serious thrust to move the debris out of into an unstable orbit. Possible, but not practical.
Assuming, of course, that "chuck it out of the airlock (using lots of thrust)" becomes practiced out of necessity, it creates another problem. The more debris you have floating around, waiting for enough orbital decay to occur to enable atmospheric incineration, the more likely it is that one of those floating widgets is going to hit something. Every year, more satellites go up; and I for one am not about to tell the residents of Florida and the Bahamas that they really didn't need that fancy weather imaging apparatus.

This article does illustrate a problem largely glossed over by works of speculative fiction - namely waste management in a small space. Air and water have to be recycled, and something has to happen to all of the garbage that is produced in the day-to-day process of living.
Sadly, we don't seem to have that issue licked, even in ther here-and-now; and we're working with a much larger area. Look at the landfills. Look at the trash on the sides of every highway in the US. When people throw things "away", they usually forget that away isn't. The stuff has to go somewhere. Let's not take our failing of "out of sight, out of mind" to the Final Frontier. [/rant]

sounds like a job for ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

you could set up a bid for authentic cosmonaut fecal matter.

Quit making fun of Cowboy Neal

[Anonymous Coward]

He may be a loser, but calling him "human waste" is going too far!

Wasted humans? They do drugs up there?

[dunng808]

Picture Cheech and Chong doing a bit on human waste:

"Wow man, last night we got so high we met some guys in space, and they were so wasted."

"Far out. So that's why my truck is full of shit!"

"Oh yeah, and I thought that was from the cow we passed on the way back."

"Udderly mind blowing. You are talking about the four-legged kind, right? Hey man, not my sister, right? I've had enough of that shit."

"Apparently not enough. Here, have some of this Russian Refuse."

Now that private enterprise has their foot in the space door, how long will it be before we have the first-ever sanitary spacefill?

They need a trash compactor

[drinkypoo]

Then they can crush the trash into bricks/tiles and attach it to the outside of the ISS as a debris shield.

it's all about the intercept angle

[freshfromthevat]

Greg's point was right. He said that even without the difference in speed, intercept angle makes a huge difference and that is true.

It will fall down (after all, they have to boost the station once in a while to keep it from doing just that), just not soon enough for the interest of users of the low earth region.

Re:it's all about the intercept angle

[rco3]

Could you explain this a little better? Keep in mind that speed!=velocity. Explain to me how two objects with small relative velocities can make a large impact.

Re:it's all about the intercept angle

[Keeper]

Their orbits are not parallel. In other words, each time the piece of space junk orbits it's angle of intersection with ISS's orbit change. Eventually the piece of space junk may be intercepting the ISS orbit at a 90 degree angle. If the ISS happens to be there when it happens, mucho pain.

Re:it's all about the intercept angle

[rco3]

So, then, at that point they would have high velocities relative to each other, right?

Re:it's all about the intercept angle

[Keeper]

Yes; at least I think that's the proper way to phrase it...been awhile since I had to take a physics course. ;)

An idea...

[TiggertheMad]

(because we all know that NASA engineers hang out at /. for ideas to dump garbage...)

There are 2 ways you are going to get rid of trash from the space station. Carry it home in the space shuttle, or launch it somewhere.

The Russian ships don't have room to carry stuff back, but here is the thing, you don't have to carry it ALL the way home. Grab a hefty bag, stuff it with trash, and tie it to the back of the capsul as you head back to Earth. You can either release it once it has enough momentum to quickly leave orbit, or drag it in behind you and let it seperate as it burns up.

Alternately, if you go with the 'Dump the trash before entering hyperspace' Imperial method, you have to have a way to get it clear of anywhere you might want to travel. Since we don't know WHERE we might want to travel, just launching it into space to float around for a few billion years seems...shortsighted. So, either a) burn it up by shooting it at the sun, or drop it on a planet.

So how do we do that, cheaply? There was a solar sail technology developed a year or two back, which involved a magnetically generated sail. Would it be cost effective to put a small power source on your trash, and fire it off at a target? I recall that the technology didn't seem too complicated, and the speeds that it could attain were fairly large. Just don't use one of those nuclear batteries mentioned a few days ago on /. to power it if you plan to drop it on Earth. While the ammount of radioactive material that was burned up would be inconsequential, the Luddites would go berserk...

Re:An idea...

[gfreeman]

And then in a thousand years time it squishes New New York.

Re:An idea...

[PurplePhase]

You forgot the all important 3rd option:
Reduce, reuse and recycle

Granted, they can't reduce their use of the 'junked' items now, but why don't they have an on-board smelter or other mechanism to at least be able to reuse the metal or extract other minerals/etc. from 'junk'?

Why not use differently-made items which even if they fail for primary use A can have that part removed and still be useful? Because of the limited resources, every object should really start as multi-use.

How about things which would break down in the station's atmosphere (with no harmful side effects)? Do they even *have* plants in the station?

Other posts mention how the space program contributes to the environment - well how about all these proof-of-concepts being used extensively on the space station and eliminate eliminations?

8-PP

It's not like the neighbors would complain...

[El]

Couldn't they just take up a few large, tightly-knit cargo nets and tie the junk to the outside of the station? It's only a problem if it gets loose, and hey, they might need that shit for something someday!

Re:It's not like the neighbors would complain...

[justins]

Couldn't they just take up a few large, tightly-knit cargo nets and tie the junk to the outside of the station? It's only a problem if it gets loose, and hey, they might need that shit for something someday!

A few objections to that spring to mind. The big one is, spacewalks become a lot harder when the outside of the ship no longer looks like what the astronauts train for on Earth. That was apparently a problem on Mir, which underwent many little changes over the years.

Wait a minute...

[IronChefMorimoto]

So that's not bird shit on my car?

I should've known, what with all the empty cans of Tang in the driveway.

IronChefMorimoto

Nuclear Rockets are the Answer

[serutan]

Nuclear rockets would completely solve the supply problem for orbital stations. Before you knee-jerk on the word "nuclear" read this fascinating engineering scheme for a fully reusable Saturn-V size nuclear rocket, using a Gas Core Nuclear Reactor (GCNR) engine. It's a 12-part article, but skip the first 6 sections if you just want to know how it works. Briefly, gaseous nuclear fuel encapsulated in a light-bulb-like quartz vessel heats up to about 25,000 degrees C, emitting intense ultraviolet light that heats hydrogen flowing around the outside of the bulb. The superheated, non-radioactive hydrogen then jets out of the rocket nozzle. The nuclear fuel stays confined and nothing ever touches it.

Such a rocket could lift 2 million pounds of payload into low orbit (compared to the Shuttle's 60,000 pound capacity) and return with 2 million pounds of cargo to a powered landing rather than an unpowered glide. There is very little information about this technology on the web, but I believe the big aerospace firms are looking into GCNR as the heavy lift engine of the future.

Re:Nuclear Rockets are the Answer

[rveno1]

In the words of Mathematician Richard Courant
"Zis is not nuts, zis is super-nuts!"

Re:Nuclear Rockets are the Answer

[serutan]

In other words, you didn't look at the article and you have no meaningful opinion. Way to go!

Re:Nuclear Rockets are the Answer

[jackbird]

from the article (section 5):

" Yes, Chernobyl was a very bad accident. But bad accidents happen all the time, and are often much, much worse than Chernobyl was. For example, Bhopal, India, makes Chernobyl pale in comparison..."

Enough for me. These people have no idea what they're talking about, and I never even got to the nuts and bolts. Zuper-duper-nutz.

Re:Nuclear Rockets are the Answer

[joto]

Eh.. Did you care to investigate the matter yourself? The authors got it right. Chernobyl was bad, Bhopal was worse. People tend to have an irrational fear of anything "nuclear", but are happy to wipe their ass with dioxins every day.

Re:Nuclear Rockets are the Answer

[Dabido]

I remain unconvinced of the safety of these rockets. Sounds like they are feasible, but when someone glosses over things and makes other things seem insignificant which are not, then I get a bit paranoid about the snake oil I'm being sold.

For instance "To put it into perspective, all of the radioactive nuclides that were released by Chernobyl were also about 10 pounds worth. That's all. Just ten pounds was enough to kill nearly 40 people and generate a terrible panic among hundreds of thousands of others. "

My church used to look after the children from near Chernobyl. All of them used to come out to Australia for a few months for a holiday, because they were all gravely ill from radiation poisoning. (Some at the time were going to die from it.) Most will suffer for the rest of their lives from the effects of the radiation (as will many of the adults who were in and around the area - the same as those who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the are still receiving payments from the Japanese Government). To have the article be-little their plight and pretend it was a "panic" is rather inhumane. (Unless of course the article is ignoring these people all together and the 'panic' refered to was in the rest of the world.)

Then another bit which states:" Enough of the unjustified nuclear paranoia of the last three decades has infected the government that they desire to be insanely cautious. ", is also belittling the concerns people have over these sorts of things. People have a right to question and be concerned about nuclear use, whenever it comes up. I hope any government which uses Nuclear power or rockets are cautious. Even if it appears INSANELY so. I'd rather they account for everything they possibly can, rather than hope that nothing will go wrong. After all, that's what got people paranoid about Nuclear energy to begin with. Many accidents, and many deaths.

As someone who did Atomic Physics at University, I know the Nuclear community like to down play the danger involved. (And those opposed like to pretend that any form of nuclear use is evil - hope they never get X-Rays).

A more balanced view might have helped to keep things in perspective, but the article is written by someone who sounds like they want to play with dynamite and aren't allowed to.

I am sure a safe nuclear reactor can be built one day, but to this day I haven't heard of any being built. (The pebble bad reactors do not have the squeaky clean record some people make them out to have. Such as the incident at Hamm-Uentrop West Germany nine days after the Chernobyl accident. On May 4 1986, a pebble became lodged in a feeder tube. Operators subsequently caused damage to the fuel during attempts to free the pebble. Radiation was released to the environs. The West German government closed down the research program because they found the reactor design unsafe).

In the case of this rocket, my immediate concerns are Human error & Programming error (such as a missing comma in the Arianne 5 Rocket Failure). In the right place, a programming error which shuts down all systems during flight could cause these mobile nuclear devices to plummet to earth. (It's happened on planes before ... even with their in built error checking systems some planes have lost all systems) Imagine it plummetting towards a major population centre. (And you can't press the destruct button, because ALL the systems shutdown). Or worse still, it's plummeting to earth over a population centre, and you can't press destruct, because it would release the radiation over them.
I know the article is talking about them lifting off from the middle of the Pacific ... but rockets don't stay over the pacific for the duration of their flight.
Also, if these rockets are so safe, why are they not building reactors based on their design to use on earth? Keeping the nuclear engine in a remote place on earth sounds a better idea than having one roaming the orbi

Re:Nuclear Rockets are the Answer

[jackbird]

More people may have died at Bhopal, but the long-term effects at Chernobyl are most certainly worse - it depopulated an entire REGION ferchrissake.

PCBs are bad shit, but dioxin only has a half life on the order of 50 years under the worst conditions (and 6 weeks or so under better ones). God help the archaeologists who explore the Chernobyl plant. Not to mention a much larger amount and variety of material was released at Chernobyl.

Re:Nuclear Rockets are the Answer

[serutan]

Chernobyl had nothing to do with the merits or drawbacks of nuclear rockets. The author was just injecting his own perspective about the danger levels of various things. But if you do a little arithmetic, 100 of the rockets described in the article would have to blow up in the atmosphere to release as much radioactive material as a single 1952 bomb test mentioned.

It's kind of too bad that this article has such a long preface before getting to the meat of the matter. The resistance to anything nuclear is tremendous, regardless of whether people actually think through their objections. A poorly worded sentence shouldn't be an excuse not to read enough to evaluate the idea. "Zuper-nuts" is not an evaluation.

Just need to call

[Anonymous Coward]

Quark http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077066/

Isn't this the space station in space?

[eranu]

Why not just strap the stuff to the outside of the station? I mean they have all the space they need outside. For sale - Moon on a stick

Re:Isn't this the space station in space?

[Captain DaFt]

Seems like a reasonable idea, except... What happens when they need to work on something _outside_?
(Geez, Commander, I'm trying to re-align the radar dish, but there's just too much shit in the way!) };-)

Like those neighbors we all whisper about...

[moankey]

that leave tires, cars on blocks or several project cars in the lawn and backyard, along with the vicious unfed scary big dog.

So once Virgin gets his space travel thing together it wont be much different than looking down the block of our earth neighborhoods.

Can't GET outside

[freshfromthevat]

You can't go out to put the garbage by the curb because doing so requires opening up the door. That would cause no end of trouble. It's sort of like living Florida. You have to first take many deep breaths, then put on a space suit, then close the inside door, wait for a while, open the outside door, shade your eyes against the bright sun, clip your safety line to the outside loop, drag yourself outside the door by another outside handle, drag the garbage after you, clip it to something, etc... really much worse than taking the trash out while walking the dog.

Ebay solution

[Hobadee]

Solution: Ebay!
Item: Old airlock, decent condition
Starting bid: $100
S&H: $1,000,000

What the fuck are you talking about?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck are you talking about? Did you bother to read the goddamned article? You idiot.

Re:What the fuck are you talking about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you bother to read the goddamned article?
Of course not, GP poster didn't even bother to proofread the comment before posting, hence why all but like six words are spelled wrong.

More Crap, kind of a Drag.

[Mulletproof]

So, all this junk is piling up on the station. Isn't that adding excess mass to the overall structure? Granted I'm don't know how much crap is actually up there, but in sufficient amounts, it has to be impact the orbital dynamics of the station. Maybe half a second more thrust to keep it in the right orbit, that sort of thing...

Hey, somebody send up some cheap nailgun co2 cylinders to knock all the excess crap down into orbit. Or is that too low-tech to work?

Re:More Crap, kind of a Drag.

[corsec67]

Actually, since the air drag is proportional to the frontal area, adding mass without changing the profile would slightly help, in that you have more momentum. They just have to put it in a specific spot to make the center of mass for the whole station within their desired volume.
Since they **DON'T** ever want to have an acceleration, the more momentum they have the better.

Good question

[Rayonic]

Could SpaceShipOne reach the International Space Station? I'd expect it to need a few modifications first, naturally.

Re:Good question

[Crispin Cowan]

Hell, no. ISS flies at about 140 miles IIRC, and SSO peaks at 62 miles. Much worse, SSO does not have the power to reach orbital velocity, which (again IIRC) is nearly an order of magnitude more energy than is required to just get up to space altitudes.

People who actually know these numbers are welcome to correct me, they are just rough-order-of-magnitude guesses, and it was just a joke-post in the first place.

Crispin

Re:Good question

[Rayonic]

Well, thanks for clearing that up for me. I probably should have looked up the facts myself.

Maybe SpaceShipTwo will have a shot at orbit.

So does this mean...

[Borealis]

(With apologies to Jim Henson)

So does this mean that when the space station sends a transmission that "The Trashheap has spoken!"?

I fail to see how this makes them special..

[lpontiac]

*looks around at his room*

Re:I fail to see how this makes them special..

[evilviper]

I fail to see how this makes them special..

*looks around at his room*

You won't cause millions of dollars in damage if you throw your junk out the window.

How Ironic

[Bendebecker]

Everyone has alreay basically stated that the ISS as it is is nothing but a piece of garbage, now it looks like the physical world is catching up to that fact as well.

Re:How Ironic

[lposeidon]

and all the russian components now have a use... the ISS Intergalactic Garbage Truck... but the question remains, who is driving this thing?

What if not everything gets burned up?

[Ced_Ex]

Say they shove garbage and waste out the airlock towards earth hoping it would burn up on re-entry. I'm pretty sure they aren't tossing fistfuls of shit, rather they are probably in some sort of container.

On the off chance that only the container burns up, and leaves the remaining contents flying towards earth, the last thing I want my family doing is explaining to the insurance company that I died from getting hit with cosmic shit.

WRONG!

[unicorn]

Where do you think all the junk is coming from? It's mass that's already on the station. It's not like they are creating new mass out of vaccum up there.

Re:WRONG!

[Mulletproof]

"Furthermore, the only way they can dispose of trash and human waste is by loading these items in Russian cargo ships that burn up in the atmosphere."

And I suppose they're launching those Russian cargo ships just to see the pretty lights....

oblig. first contact quote

[-kertrats-]

"You do pee in the 24th century, right?" -Zephram Cochrane

In Space : No One Can Hear The Taxpayers Scream

[strangedays]

Amazing ISS discovery, an exception to the hallowed GIGO principle

• Garbage IN : Amazing budget mistake justifies launching it
• Garbage IN : Romanticized support for Buck Rogers in space, despite silly risks
• Garbage IN : Lethal transport system to get up there, and back, sometimes
• Garbage IN : Bogus and hokum soap bubble science, to justify "being up there"
• Garbage IN : Deadly Boring media coverage, to fade out the public attention

• Garbage Out : None. Zip. Zilch.

Great flaming balls of space poo Captain!

Its GIGO, but not as we know it!

Skipping off the atmosphere.

[uberdave]

I was thinking about the Appolo re-entries earlier today. It is always mentioned that if they came in too steep, they would burn up, and if they came in too shallow, they would skip off the atmosphere and return to space. For some reason, I never thought beyond that. Disaster if too steep. Disaster if too shallow. However, today I was thinking, that if they skipped off the atmosphere, they would merely return to orbit. Where's the big disaster in that. They would just fall back into the atmosphere later on. The only drawbacks I can think of is that they may not have the correct attitude/orientation when they re-enter, and they may re-enter at a point that has them doing a splashdown in an unanticipated place.

Re:Skipping off the atmosphere.

[mpe]

It is always mentioned that if they came in too steep, they would burn up, and if they came in too shallow, they would skip off the atmosphere and return to space. For some reason, I never thought beyond that. Disaster if too steep. Disaster if too shallow. However, today I was thinking, that if they skipped off the atmosphere, they would merely return to orbit. Where's the big disaster in that. They would just fall back into the atmosphere later on.

This is after the command module has separated from the service module. Without the service module there is a very limited air supply for the crew.

So, the space shuttle is a garbage scow?

[karlandtanya]

I didn't mean to say that the Enterprise should be hauling garbage.
I meant to say that it should be hauled away AS garbage" -- Korax (The Trouble With Tribbles)

Buried in trash

[Lazy T]

This is a good pointer on what is going to happen to earth in the future.

ion drive!

[blooba]

strap a tiny ion drive to the trash bin, gently nudge it away from the space station (simultaneously compensating with a short burst of one of the station's attitude jets or something), then light the ion drive and gently accelerate the trash into a retrograde orbit! simple!

so, anyone know how to build cheap, disposable ion drives?

Re:ion drive!

[blooba]

or, maybe the ion drive doesn't have to be disposable. since we're dreaming here, why not have the drive detach itself once the trash achieves the necessary trajectory, and then return itself home to the space station! brilliant!

Foam?

[mangu]

(something we haven't seen before) an inflatable return vehicle for bringing back large objects.

I once saw at an electronics equipment factory how they pack irregularly shaped objects. They have a gun which mixes two liquids. These react creating an unbelievable amount of foam. From two finger-sized blobs of liquid they get a box full of foam.

So, why can't they use that kind of foam as an ablative heat shield? The two liquids could come in two glass tubes, inside a plastic bag. Twist the bag to break the glass and the whole thing inflates to a bowl-shaped foam package that will partly evaporate on reentry, leaving enough foam to float when it reaches the ocean surface.

The 'Y' prize

[Anonymous Coward]

How about they give $40mil for the first private craft that can rendezvous with the ISS? Seems to be the next logical step...

Re:The 'Y' prize

[HillBilly]

Excellent idea, let it carry some cargo up there, nothing to important and let it bring a certain amount of space junk home.

Win-Win situation for everyone.

A fitting end

[p51d007]

A fitting tribute to a STUPID idea. Government build/funded space station. After todays X prize flight, maybe the government will start to get out of the space business, and let private industry do it! Had the administration told NASA to build a 100% reusable space vehicle that can have a one week turnaround, be capable of carrying 3 people, NASA would have spent 10 years just "studying" the idea, and countless billions of dollars. Anything the government can do, PRIVATE industy can do better, and cheaper!

Re:A fitting end

[Detritus]

Oh, bullshit.

How many kilograms of payload can SpaceShipOne place in low-Earth orbit?

Z E R O
N O N E
N A D A

Re:A fitting end

[NatasRevol]

Actually, I think it was about 300 lbs ~ 135kg when only one person was flying the craft.

Re:A fitting end

[Detritus]

The problem is that the vehicle doesn't have the speed/energy needed to put itself or anything else into orbit. It's like the first American suborbital manned space flights that used the Redstone rocket. See this for a complete explanation.

mod parent up.

[Anonymous Coward]

do it now, goddamnit.

Jim Henson knew

[Al Al Cool J]

What we need is a new type of astronaut, one that is perfectly happy wallowing in garbage and excrement. The solution should be obvious, as it was forseen decades ago on a popular TV show...

Pigs In Space!

Junk worth more than gold

[jayrtfm]

We paid $10,000 per pound to get that "junk" up there, making it more valuable than gold. Ditto for the progress supply ships.

Of course, this is the bureaucracy that junked an entire working space station....

This of course wouldn't be a problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

If Clinton had funded the Supercollider instead of this silly space station.

Overloaded with Junk?

[Jason Hildebrand]

Apparently, the International Space Station is becoming overloaded with junk

Funny, the same thing is happening down here on earth, too.

A question of relativity...

[Civil_Disobedient]

I'm asking 'cause I don't know.

If you were to "meet" the trash you threw out in orbit, it might be moving at significant velocity, but then, so are you, right? I mean, if something moving at 17,000 miles per hour hits something moving in the same direction at 17,002 miles per hour, it's not the end of the world, is it?

It's not like you're you've got to dig a Tostitos bag from out of your cranium.

Re:A question of relativity...

[The Snowman]

If you were to "meet" the trash you threw out in orbit, it might be moving at significant velocity, but then, so are you, right? I mean, if something moving at 17,000 miles per hour hits something moving in the same direction at 17,002 miles per hour, it's not the end of the world, is it?

Correct, the difference between those two speeds is small enough that it would not be an issue. The problem is that just throwing items out the window is not as simple as it sounds. Giving an item a different trajectory elongates the orbit, making it an ellipse. Elliptical orbits have variable speed: maybe it travels slow at the outskirts, but it speeds up when it gets closer to the Earth. If you give it an eccentric enough orbit the object might be travelling fast enough, maybe 17,100 miles per hour, to damage something. Maybe the ISS will not blow up, but if it is really sharp it might poke a hole in the wall and deflate your station. Or if you are monkey-flinging your poo out of orbit, you will wish you had the windshield wiper upgrade on your space station when it comes back on the other side of the orbit.

Unbelievable amount != heat-resistant

[devphil]

...which about sums it up. You need some pretty kickass foam to survive reentry, even partially.

And it's gotta be cheap, if you're using that much of it. Creating enough buoyancy to keep a large object afloat -- again, with only a partial (and unknown!) amount of foam remaining -- is going to take a lot of it.

And it's gotta be non-soluble, if it's supposed to survive in an ocean long enough for a recovery team to find it.

Then you gotta make it relatively non-toxic, because it will be entering our biosphere.

Probably other problems I can't think of immediately. So yeah, it's likely a good idea, but there are a lot of things standing in the way. DuPont Corp, or whoever, could probably use some help solving them, if you know any bright chemical engineers.

Haven't they heard of EBAY????

[asscroft]

I'd buy someone's broken ++++ISS Laptop notebook NIB NO RESERVE ++++

Instead of being a problem, why not an opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's not like they are short of space or anything!

Why don't they just put it all into a really large net or plastic bag, and tow it along behind the station at the end of a girder or something,

Perhaps it could even be useful if compacted
tiles of rubbish were distributed over the surface of the station, to act as a heat and micrometeorite shield.

You knew this joke was coming, didn't you?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia,

Litter drops on YOU!

Re:You knew this joke was coming, didn't you?

[Anonymous Coward]

The joke is supposed to be backwards dumb ass.

OR

"In Soviet Russia, the joke messes up YOU!"

Year 2530

[picardsb]

This is the captains logbook - stardate 3265.2

A large poly-ethelene bag was seen drifting aimlessly in space. We decided to explore it. Among other things, it contained human excreta believed to be 500 years old. These were sent to science lab for proper study. The priliminary results show that that the humans of the time had strange eating habits. This is really interesting stuff - and a detailed study will reveal a lot about the daily life of those olf times.

P = NP

[PingPongBoy]

The solution is to reduce to an equivalent problem.

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

The next X-Prize???

[d474]

Maybe this should be the goal of the next Ansari X-Prize: Who can figure out a way to dump 2 loads of garbage from the space station with in 2 weeks of each dump. Yee-haw. Space is cool.

this is an easy one

[zxflash]

they just need to right click and choose 'empty recycle bin'

or they could install an incinerator

I don't get it.

[Vo0k]

While camping in the wild, you dig up a small hole not too far away from the camp, then leave all your trash there, and when leaving you just cover the hole with soil.

Why can't they wrap it up in some plastic or something and designate a piece of space, say 500m away from the station and just let the junk float there freely on the same orbit till there's enough to make sense to attach some engines and pull it into atmosphere to burn?

Problem solved.

[clambake]

stored among other places in a now unused airlock.

For a bunch of smart people, they sure can be stupid... The solution is just a red button push away.

Use it to make Contact

[fuzzybunny]

Wrap it up reeeaaal tight and good, and slap a plaque on it with a couple of stick figures making 'peace' signs, an abstract representation of human DNA, and a model of the solar system, give it a good swift kick and voila. You have a poor man's Voyager!

Only problem would be if all that excreta and broken electronic junk somehow evolved, creating a bionic life form and coming back to haunt us a few hundred years from now as the Son of V'ger...

recycling

[monkey_jam]

might i suggest RECYCLING the junk? think about it, if there were some easy way to extract raw materials from these (refining the junk down to super concentrated crap), surely it'd save bringing more stuff up later?

a-HA!

[LittleGuy]

So THAT'S what happened to Oscar Madison....

Re:Nuclear Rockets are the Answer, HA!

[Ancient_Hacker]

Just a FEW quibbles with this nuclear gas rocket design: * 25,000 degrees C hot uranium hexafloride is going to melt and react with the the quartz toute-suite. * You'd need hundreds of pounds of 100% enriched UF6 to get a critical mass. Even under pressure, that's a lot of volume. * Reactors are controllable due to the 1 to 2 percent of fissions that result in delayed neutron emission. But this gas is going to have a lot more than 1 or 2 percent variations in density. Ergo you're going to have a really hard time (~impossible) controlling the reaction. * You're still going to need reaction mass to shove out the back. Just try to find a compound that is (1) Liquid, (2) Not too toxic (3) Doesnt disassociate at 25,000K Otherwise OK!

This is what you don't want.

[hummassa]

180degrees and the thing will hit you 2hours later, in your next orbital round. You want to jettison it 90degrees, ie, in the direction of the center of the Earth. It will describe a nice long spiral (angular speed of 20000 and centripetal of 200, plot a graph) and burn in the atmosphere.

Re:This is what you don't want.

[Fenris Ulf]

No, you're wrong. Throwing toward the center of the earth just puts it in a faster, lower orbit.

Forward takes you Out
Out takes you Backward
Backward takes you In
In takes you Forward.

You want to throw the trash directly behind yourself.

Dump with a tether

[Anonymous Coward]

Idea: Use a long tether to lower the garbage toward the earth and then release the thether at the station end.

This will decrease the orbital velocity of the garbage and increase the orbital velocity of the station. If the garbabe is lowered enough (into the upper atmosphere), its orbit will decay quickly. (Of course, lower it too far and it begins to act as a drag on the station, sort of like a sea anchor for a boat).

NASA has some experience with tethers. Does anyone know how long such a tether could be? And what the tension on it would be (i.e. how strong it would have to be)?

Ehmm, read it again...

[Vario]

It is about 36000 km or 22000 miles above the equator, not 22 miles. Just read your own source again.

Space Ship Number Two

[Anonymous Coward]

Rutan was clearly thinking ahead with his naming scheme.

He will have a built-in business for commercial space flight.

I'll bet he could even get a contract with Haliburton to clean up the mess in the space station!

space station getting cluttered up... Mmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

I think our apartment is getting cluttered up as well - lots of computers, computer parts, cables, etc... maybe I'll just call it a tribute to the ISS

somehow I don't think my wife will buy it though :(

Humanity is doomed.

[Corwyn ap]

If 'rocket scientists' can't figure out what to do with fuel for a air purification systems, we will never get our butts off this rock. Seriously, where is the composting and greywater system, with the compost growing plants to convert CO2 into O2. It seems to me that this is the FIRST thing that should be worked out. Without it, space travel is just a HUGE drain on planet-side resources. With it, we are on our way to the stars.

Re:Nuclear Rockets are the Answer, HA!

[serutan]

Interesting. Nice to see some intelligent comments (also the previous long post). I have posted info about Gas Core Nuclear Reactor rockets before and the reactions are generally of the "This is nuts" calibre with no analysis.

I too wondered about the containment of the UF6. The article a buffer gas that keeps the reactant away from the inside of the quartz vessel, but it doesn't specify what the buffer gas would be. I keep looking for more information and critical assessments of what the real engineering challenges would be.

Lovely word choice...

[TheConfusedOne]

"Maybe the ISS will not blow up, but if it is really sharp it might poke a hole in the wall and deflate your station."

Thanks, now I have this cartoonish mental image of the ISS whipping randomly through space as it deflates to finally come to a rest as an empty husk draped over the lower crescent of the moon...

obligatory sexist comment...

[jthayden]

"It'd be a real pain in the butt to have to calculate orbital vectors every time you wanted to take out the trash."

At least it would keep the role of the sexes the same. Now instead of having to take the garbage out because it's heavy, they guy has to take it out because it involves math.