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

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....

[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....

[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: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.

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: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.

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.

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: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: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.

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...

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.