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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 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.
Send them in the direction of THE SUN!
Homer: The sun? That's the hottest place on Earth!
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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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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
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.
For evey action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you change the orbit of the excrement, you also slightly change the orbit of the space station. Since there's a bit of atmospheric drag in that low orbit, that might be a good thing. De-orbiting the trash will tend to counter the drag which is slowing the space station.
So, we change orbits by flinging poo. We'll call it the monkey drive.
See what I've been reading.
Getting rid of space trash is easy. Just mix it with anti-trash.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.
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.