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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."
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?
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
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*.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Uhhh...for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Wouldn't such a "shove" cause a deviation in the station's orbit?
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.
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.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
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.
--
make install -not war
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!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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
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.
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
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....
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...
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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?
> 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.