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Discovery Prepares for Return
Kailash Nadh writes "Discovery's astronauts packed up their stuff on Friday as they prepared to undock from the international space station now that NASA has cleared the shuttle to return to Earth next week.
Their most difficult task before leaving the station was the maneuvering of a huge cargo container filled with 2 1/2 years worth of trash into the shuttle's payload bay. Once back on Earth, the items would either be disposed of or returned to researchers."
NASA is going to freeze the Shuttle program, but I wonder, Shuttle can fly without anyone on-board, so isn't it possible to do that? Just use the damn thing as a cargo vehicle without people on board. Or have one pilot on it who will take it up, and then if the thing is damaged, have it fly back automagically, and let the pilot stay on the space station and go down with a Soyuz crew.
You can't handle the truth.
"hurl this stuff into the sun"
Yeah. Calculate how much energy that would take. It's actually pretty hard to hit the sun from here.
Bringing it down in the shuttle is actually far and away the easiest way to get rid of it. Getting it up there was expensive. Once the shuttle is there, and the bay's empty anyway, bringing anything back is not that big a deal. Some extra mass in the deorbit calculations.
Why would we spend the time and money to build and attach and pilot a remote deorbit pack when we have the shuttle coming back anyway?
The Enterprise had 400-odd people on it. I guarantee they had some pretty extensive waste recycling systems. But they had matter transmutation, so they didn't actually have to deal with disposal, they could just feed mass in, and get food/water/gold/clothing/whatever they needed back out again. If you think about it, people in a society with that technology would soon come to view looking at actual trash as very disgusting.