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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."
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.
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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
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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
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.
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?).
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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
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
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.