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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."
sure they can return the stuff. just open the hatch and shove it out! let gravity do the rest.
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?
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.
So even if the snow doesn't look yellow, it's probably not good to eat.
...that I was upset with broken machines piling up in the cage in the datacenter... at least I don't live there! (Well, ok, not entirely.) Plus, I can go outside to escape looking at it, which is unfortunately not an option for the cosmo/astro-nauts.
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Send them in the direction of THE SUN!
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Space stations are responsible for all the crap in the atmosphere?
An unused airlock is where redneck america of the future will store all their unused junk, making the storage business obsolete.
Imperial Space Stations always dump their trash before jumping to hyperspace. That's just standard procedure, duh!
Major Tom to Ground Control -- mission accomplished...now how do I flush?
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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?
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Don't just dump your sh*t when nobody is looking. You may get caught.
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*.
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Uhhh...for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Wouldn't such a "shove" cause a deviation in the station's orbit?
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...
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We didn't say that the ISS is a garbage skow. We said it should be hauled away *as* garbage.
What abut a garage sale?
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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.
Let the flaming poo jokes commence.
Isn't the Trash Heap supposed to be all-seeing, all-wise, and all-knowing?
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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).
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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.
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
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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?
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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.
Getting rid of space trash is easy. Just mix it with anti-trash.
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Being aboard a mighty achievement of human science, and having your own shit piling up next to you for lack of a means to dispose it.
It would be very demoralizing to me.
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(because we all know that NASA engineers hang out at /. for ideas to dump garbage...)
/. 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...
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
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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!
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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.
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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.
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I didn't mean to say that the Enterprise should be hauling garbage.
I meant to say that it should be hauled away AS garbage" -- Korax (The Trouble With Tribbles)
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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.
Pigs In Space!
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....
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.
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...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.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Wrap it up reeeaaal tight and good, and slap a plaque on it with a couple of stick figures making 'peace' signs, an abstract representation of human DNA, and a model of the solar system, give it a good swift kick and voila. You have a poor man's Voyager!
Only problem would be if all that excreta and broken electronic junk somehow evolved, creating a bionic life form and coming back to haunt us a few hundred years from now as the Son of V'ger...
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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?
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!