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....

[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.....

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).

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...