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ISS Loses Orbit-Boosting Options
An anonymous reader writes "NewScientist reports is reporting that the International Space Station has lost some of its options when it comes to altitude-boosting due to several recent failures. From the article: 'The problems began on 19 April 2006, when the Russian Zvezda service module's main engines failed during a test. The failure may have been due to a sunshade cover that was not completely open, according to a station status report.'"
As the article itself states, they move the ISS when there is a 1 in 10,000 chance something will hit it, and they know well in advance if that's the case. The ISS is getting so old that I think it's starting to get ridiculous to report all of it's little breakdowns here and there. Personally I think at this point it's a money hole that's outlived it's usefulness.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
How in the world do you plan to get 183 tonnes of mass back to Earth in one piece? The Shuttle has a maximum payload capacity of 25 tonnes. It's the ONLY option currently available for returning large objects to Earth.
It would be way cheaper and easier to send up a bunch of "experts" to figure the sucker out rather than return it to Earth.
(Sorry if I'm a bit snippy. Rough day, and all that.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Let's rename the station to something more appropriate: ICF: International Cluster Fuck
Don't worry they have a procedure for getting these things down. It's called cross your fingers and aim it at an underdeveloped country. ;)
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
The parent is effectively correct, even if he is a bit abrasive about it. The Space Station, just like the Space Shuttle, was a victim of politics. What was originally going to be a staging point for a moon colony became an international piece of junk that should have been scrapped as soon as its stated purpose was lost. Instead, NASA went ahead and built a station in the wrong orbit that wasn't useful for anything other than showing the flag. Construction has been long behind schedule, over budget, and the poor station has been falling apart at the seams from day 1.
Of course, I'm sure there are political reasons why they couldn't NOT build it.
Thank God for the CEV program. It may seem like a step back, but it will actually be a huge step forward for the space program. Let's just hope that Griffin gets it finished before the next political fallout.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I can tell you wht things fail. Quote Alan Shepard: "I was up there looking around, and suddenly I realized I was sitting on top of a rocket built by the lowest bidder".
But bring it back for that? You have GOT to be kidding. Do you also bring your house to a plumber's shop when you have a clogged toilet?
The true use of the space station is that is shows that a long term spaceship can't be built in small sections over a long period of time without the whole assembly obsoleting itself or wearing out before it starts its main mission.
For the sake of argument, presume that the spacestation had been designed to travel to mars. By adding high thrust ion engines and power plants, this could have been done. However an assembly as large as the space station and typical for the requirement, loses over a mile of altitude a day in earth orbit and will burn up in the atmosphere within 1 year of ceasing to re-adjust its orbit higher.
What has been really learned is that complex space ships of conventional design will age too soon to be of much use other than to learn how fast things wear out and wear down in a space environment.
Based on that, which had to be learned, the space station has served its intended purposes well.
It should never have been built in the first place. Using it as a staging area for moon missions? Did anyone believe that would actually save us any money? That's the only reason why it MIGHT be worthwhile. Which it isn't.
It's also too small to be a serious staging area for anything bigger than a toaster, anyway. They'd have had to add significant amounts of storage space, much of which will have to be pressurized, further increasing the demands upon the facility. By the same token, it's too small to do much of anything in, so it's not a useful scientific platform.
The ISS was guaranteed to be a boondoggle from the beginning. It's nothing but a colossal waste of time, aside from the research involved in building the thing and putting it up there. If we were smarter we'd have just built a big spaceship up there in the first place, and sent it to Mars. Of course, we'd still be building the thing, but at least it would be useful when we were done.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Great thoughts! I totally agree with you! However, the only problem is this station is huge! In fact, according to the NASA Mission Page it's 404,069 pounds with a width Across Solar Arrays of 240 feet. It's 146 feet long from Destiny Lab to Zvezda; 171 feet with a Progress docked and 90 feet high!
:). Hope this clears the question of why they let sattelites burn up there too ... In case it doesn't, it costs around 2000 USD per pound to send a sattelite to space. It costs twice as much to recover it (sending an empty shuttle, a space walk, operating the hand, bringing it down) and we're taking a serious risk here, I mean, sending it up requires no humans, so if something goes wrong, we just blew up a few millions, but hey, if a shuttle explodes -- all hell breaks lose. So I say, leave them to burn out!
Whilst if you take a peek at the Shuttle info page you'll find that the cargo bay is 60 ft long, 15 ft in diameter. so there's almost no way you could get that station anywhere inside the orbiter. The only possible way to get it down, is the same way we got it up there in the first place. Which means dismantling it ! I found a nice array of photos showing the process here.
I find the station has cost billions already and is a decade behind schedule. Here's a summary:
INITIAL DESIGN PAPERWORK -- $10 billion
HARDWARE -- $25 billion
SHUTTLE SERVICING COSTS -- $20 billion
MAINTENANCE -- $41 billion
YEAR 2001 COST OVERRUN (disclosed immediately AFTER the presidential election of 2000): $5 billion.
So, multiply this by two and you get the cost of bringing it down. Are you a tax payer? If so, I'm guessing you don't want to pay that
Probabilities of independent events are not cumulative...
Concider this:
What is the probability that the next coin-flip comes up heads? 50%...
After I flip heads, what is the next probability for getting heads? It is still 50%.
The next coin flip getting heads? 50% again.
Now, the probability of three consequtive coin flips getting all heads is 12.5%
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Well, the storage room wouldn't be so expensive if they were to use some modules like the TransHab module..... oops, canceled that.
I was very excited about the possibilities of the Centerfuge Accomidation Module. Finally they could put up some rodents or fish or other small-enough-to-work-on-the-centerfuge research animals and make them run through the entire reproductive cycle in space repeatedly at different levels of gravity, so if a few Blessed Events accidentally happen some day up there, they'll know what to do..... oops, but that got canned to.
It would be useful for on-orbit checkout of large spacecraft.... but the 51 degree inclanation orbit is going to cost you enough in payload and reduced opportunities for launch that there's no point... you might as well launch something sized like the FGB into the right orbit and you'll come out ahead.
It would be great for researching viruses and such because you can crystalize proteins in space easier than on the ground.... except that between the 1980s when they were going on about it and now, they instead developed improved analytical machines that don't require the sort of perfect large crystals that space is good for.
Oh! Right! We can test out space systems that would be useful for the real missions later on. Except that the station STILL relies on a bunch of Russian hardware that we already know is a smidge clunky.
The station makes perfect sense when you realize that it's a bunch of repackaged hardware built around assumptions from the 70s that we knew to be untrue around 85. The problem is that they didn't take a big step backwards at any point between 1985 and 2000 and really reassess things.
For example, the only time that the option of launching some of the American modules on an expendable booster was considered, they wanted to make the Shuttle-C, not just buy a quiver of Atlas or Titan rockets.
Gentoo Sucks
That's how probability works. You *cannot* guarantee an accident will not happen. You can only reduce the odds. You can only get close to 100% guarantee, but not actually achieve 100% guarantee. As you get closer to 100% the costs go up enormously. If you wanted to knock it down to 1:100,000 odds you will pay more than 10x the cost. And then.. it's still only a probability, and not a frequency. You interpretted it as a frequency of problems, and not a probability.
Even with this low probability, the ISS could get whacked once every day.. and the probably would still be 1:10000 with the procedure they are using today. Assuming they are modelling probability properly.
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
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