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

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??

[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: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 ...

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: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: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: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?).

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: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

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

[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

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: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: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!