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Send the ISS To the Moon
jmichaelg writes "Michael Benson is proposing that NASA send the ISS to the moon instead of leaving it in low earth orbit. (While we're at it, we should re-brand it as the 'International Space Ship.') He points out that it's already designed to be moved periodically to higher orbits so instead of just boosting it a few miles, strap on some ion engines and put it in orbit around the moon instead of the earth. That would provide an initial base for the astronauts going to the moon and give the ISS a purpose other than performing yet more studies on the effect of micro gravity on humans. Benson concludes: 'Let's begin the process of turning the ISS from an Earth-orbiting caterpillar into an interplanetary butterfly.'"
I like this idea on he face of it, but we are talking about a lot of work. The ISS, as presently configured, is in no way designed to stand on its own without regular re-supply... and we are a very long way from the moon in the sense of the energy it takes to keep punting supplies out to a lunar orbit.
Right now, in LEO, getting a new toilet up there is still an effort that can take quite a bit of time and co-ordination. Food and other sundries depend upon lifting resources that cannot be generalized into getting a lot further out of our gravity well; we'd need a new generation of lifters to get that done (and, I suspect, more efficient and hopefully at least somewhat less polluting and poisonous propulsion methods.)
Think over the ISS-related news of the last few years. The oxygen generator failure. The toilet failure. The bad elbow joint on the arm. The computer failures. Solar panel problems. All of these, and more, would have been that much more serious at lunar distances and energy requirements.
Honestly, I get the very strong impression that the ISS is a piecemeal effort, not up to the quality required to exist at a significant distance from resupply and service; more than once there has been talk of having to abandon it. And that doesn't even factor in the dithering support at the political level — at lunar distances, we're talking huge increases in costs, and that will tend to amplify the politician's waffling in support, if indeed one could gain it in the first place.
I would much rather see a serious effort put into a large enough work that it would have some chance at self-sustaining operation; a large hollow globe with cultivation, running water, and a manufacturing base. It'd be hugely expensive, but the vast majority of that would come up front, thus reducing the vulnerability to failed re-supply or loss of political support to kill it outright.
Sadly, I don't see us doing that. We're a lot more likely to commit a trillion dollars or two (of our descendant;s money and interest) to reducing Iran to rubble than we are to seriously attempt to create a viable lunar space station.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see us actually get the heck off this planet and start populating the solar system, but the realities aren't just daunting, they're outright Godzilla-like.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Send that POS into the sun. Good riddance.
My quick Wikipedia-based calculations are that the ISS could match orbits with the moon in 9.2 years if its solar panels were entirely devoted to powering ion engines.
(They wouldn't be, of course, and my other major omission is the need to orbit the moon -- I have no idea how the moon's gravity would perturb the ISS as it approached, I suppose it would increase or decrease orbital transfer efficiency but I don't know which.)
Sources:
Low-thrust transfer - "going from one circular orbit to another by gradually changing the radius costs a delta-v of simply the absolute value of the difference between the two speeds"
Ion engine comparisons - 25 kW can produce 1 N thrust
ISS Solar Arrays - 4 pairs of "wings" to be installed on ISS, totalling 262 kW (I think; might be half that if I misunderstood "wing"); ISS weighs 1 million pounds
Moon's orbital velocity = 1.0 km/sec, ISS's orbital velocity = 7.7 km/sec
Google says: 9.2 years
In various science-fiction novels, such as Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars , old booster rockets are put up into orbit and linked to form space stations instead of just being throw away. Why has NASA never realized that idea? We'd have all the infrastructure in orbit we wanted, and for a very low cost.
And does he have the sufficent knowledge to be making and backing up these crazy suggestions?
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
Actually, I thought this was a cool proposal until I started thinking about it..., these are the ones that came into my head immediately:
* The ISS may be designed to be boosted into a higher orbit, but this is not the same as the stresses involved with a Trans-Lunar injection boost. It would have to have the entire structural integrity improved which would be VERY expensive.
* Yes, solar panels would work at the moon but the whole directional system would have to be redesigned and the number of panels probably increased.
* The resupply craft are not designed to go to the moon nor is there a booster (currently) available that could take them there. We'd need a whole new booster built to even get them close.
* Our current proposal is to put a base ON the moon. There's really not much to be gained by creating, or moving, a space station into lunar orbit. You certainly couldn't land the ISS on the moon (well you *could* I guess but it'd take some serious engineering!).
We better move quick, the Chinese are going to do this in 2010 if I recall.
Why don't we just rename the ISS 'Alice'. Then Jackie Gleason can send it there.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Bad idea. The Moon has a lumpy gravitational field. This makes it very difficult to keep anything in a stable orbit. Look up lunar mascons.
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FTFA:
"The ISS, you see, is already an interplanetary spacecraft -- at least potentially. It's missing a drive system and a steerage module, but those are technicalities."
On that basis my house, next-door's cat and G.W.Bush's arse are also "potentially" interplanetary spacecraft. It's only "technicalities" that prevent them from being so.
One major problem that the author ignores is cosmic rays. In Low Earth Orbit, the ISS is protected from cosmic rays and the solar wind by the Van Allen belts. If you move it out to the moon it won't have this protection any more and the occupants would be exposed to high energy particls much more so than in low earth orbit. I'm not sure of the level of shielding on the ISS but it's probably insufficient to protect the crew.
We've already been to the moon.
Careful... There might be a few around here that disagree with that :)
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The ISS should be left where it is. It should outfitted so that it can serve as a "dry dock" for building the manned Mars mission.
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One thing that I've wondered is why can't the space shuttles be refit for moon missions? I know they are designed only for low orbit. Put extra fuel tanks in the cargo bay as well as several landers. With extra payload capacity of a shuttle and larger crew several places could be explored on the same mission.
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And while we're at it, we can replace the space shuttle with ordinary airplanes by FLYING HIGHER. How come noone has ever thought of this before?
It's obvious we never went to the moon. The whole budget went to building movie studios to fake the moon landings. Why the expense? To simulate lower gravity, they had to film it on Mars.
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One top of the problems enumerated by other poster (time to reach the moon, resupply), Mr Benson seems ignorant of the fact that the ISS lacks radiation shielding - like every other craft in LEO it depends on the Earth's magnetic field to shield it from radiation. The radiation level in the belts, let alone that beyond them, would fry the electronics onboard the ISS and far exceed that considered safe for long term occupation.
That is false.
It is a VERY different trip out of the deep gravity hole, filled with atmosphere that we call earth than it is within space.
The best reason to stop in space is to SWITCH crafts.
Specifically, you need a high G (3 or , aerodynamically sound, craft to get out of the atmosphere.
Once you get out there, you generally want a low G (actually, One G would be perfect), space ship, and you don't care that much about shape. (radiation becoems important however).
We generally deal with this now either two ways:
1. Put a smaller ship inside a throw-away one,
2. give a high initial thrust, and plan it out so that it goes where we want it to without any additional thrust.
These ideas are rather primitive, cheap, and silly. A better idea is to launch ship components up to the space station, build them there, then launch the second ship from there. This gets rid of the size constraint of the method 1, and allows powered flight for much quicker delivery, negating the huge disadvantage of method 2. Yes, this will be more expensive, but it lets us do things we could not at all using the current methods.
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I can think of several valid reasons why moving the ISS to lunar orbit is a horrible idea. This is merely one of the little ones. The current routine for disposing of trash and waste on ISS is to load it into an empty Progress resupply module then deorbit it and let it burn up in the atmosphere or return it to Earth on the Shuttle. Since the Moon has no atmosphere, doing the same thing there might very well bring down several tons of empty MRE wrappers and busted toilet parts onto some very unhappy taikonaut's head on the Moon.
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By the way, what are we going to do with the ISS when we're done with it? That's a lot of hardware up there. Is there a plan to safely de-orbit it without dropping lots of metal on some poor unsuspecting city?
According to the Wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Benson), he's an writer and filmmaker. The closest thing he has to a qualification is a book of reprocessed images from space probes.
Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes.
Yes, I'm sure it's the same guy. Both the article and this wiki page cite the same book. Also, the Wiki page says he's "living in Slovenia", and the article includes a .si email address.
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astrobill wrote:
As a space physicist and engineer, I praise Mr. Benson's enthusiasm for space exploration. However, I feel compelled to explain to him and the millions of Post readers he was allowed to mislead why his idea to send the International Space Station (ISS) on interplanetary jaunts is wholly unrealistic, and frankly, impossible.
For one thing, the shielding, wall thicknesses, and many other design aspects of the ISS were chosen to protect crews from the worst-case radiation environment known to exist throughout its present orbital environment. The ISS spends its entire time wholly within the protective cocoon of the Earth's magnetosphere, a complex electromagnetic structure generated within the Earth which also happens to protect the Earth from most forms of high energy cosmic rays and other ionizing particles. The ISS design is wholly unsuitable for long-duration jaunts outside this region and could not easily or practically be changed at this point to accommodate a different environment.
Secondly, Mr. Benson's proposal to simply connect engines to the ISS and launch it away from Earth and onto interplanetary trajectories completely ignores the fact that every source of propulsion he cites would impart accelerations, even small ones for certain scenarios, that the ISS structure, joints, and arrays simply cannot accommodate -- the structure would simply exceed design tolerances under any source of thrust sufficient to launch it out of Earth orbit and on a transfer trajectory around the Sun to another Solar System body. Moreover, even the low-thrust ion engines Mr. Benson cites (actually, low "specific impulse," but that's another lesson...) would be unable to launch the ISS onto a transfer orbit to another solar system body, and certainly not on any reasonable timescale. It would be, perhaps, years before Mr. Benson's hypothetically-suitable ion engines could impart enough added velocity ("delta-V" to engineers) to move the ISS into an appreciably higher orbit, much less on a suitable trajectory to another planet in our Solar System. The ISS would require thousands of miles per hour of additional velocity to be placed onto such an orbit, regardless of the engine type used.
Thirdly, Mr. Benson's essay completely ignores the fundamental fact that even the most efficient transfer orbit between Earth and, say, Mars, requires at least 8-9 months each way, not to mention the time spent actually DOING anything once there. The ISS is simply unable to hold enough food, water, air, and other "consumables" for any sized crew for the duration of any mission of the type Mr. Benson has in mind. And "direct" trajectory missions that ignore the more efficient transfer trajectories require so much acceleration that the ISS would simply flex and buckle were an attempt made.
Forth, the amount of power the ISS solar arrays can generate is fundamentally tied to the solar energy received on their surfaces. Some of the interplanetary bodies Mr. Benson proposes visiting are at locations too far from the Sun for the arrays to generate enough power to operate systems on board. For example, the ISS solar arrays at Mars would receive only about half as much solar energy per square meter as they do at Earth. The ISS simply cannot accommodate hanging enough "extra" solar panels on its structure to make up for the difference, and wiring in new, additional power sources would require wholesale redesign of the ISS.
There are about a dozen other significant reasons why sending the ISS on interplanetary missions is completely unfeasible from a technical perspective, and which time an space prohibit me from addressing here.
Mr. Benson's claim that "...there are good answers to all these objections..." and his attempt at preemptive criticism of "skeptics" -- as well his claim that NASA is not "particularly welcoming to outside ideas" -- does not obviate the laws of physics, engineering limitations, much less the laws of astrodynamics and the hostile environment of our solar system.
And contrary
Michael Benson is proposing that NASA send the ISS to the moon instead of leaving it low earth orbit
Apart from being ridiculous nonsense by all practial standards, this preposterous suggestion conveniently ignores the fact that the ISS isn't just NASA's property, toy and command target. The other participants of the international space station would hopefully refuse to tolerate such follies.
That's no moon....
It's the space station!
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Mr. Benson is also probably the type to build a house and move in before the carpets are laid or the plumbing is connected. 'Cause hell, the floor is going to get dirty anyways and there's a hole in the bathroom floor you can shit through. "The ISS, you see, is already an interplanetary spacecraft -- at least potentially. It's missing a drive system and a steerage module, but those are technicalities." (From Article) Perhaps he doesn't grasp the concept that just because something is able to be maintained operational in orbit, doesn't mean that you can strap a rocket on it's ass and expect the same level of reliability while moving it further away from it's maintenance source. Alot more spare parts would have to be packed, alot more food stored on it as well as much greater volumes of water. The logistics of getting those things to something in low earth orbit are much easier than pushing it out to the moon so you would have to ensure resonable reserves. While he's making comments like, that he might as well say you can stick a snorkel on it and turn it into a submarine. After all, it's likely water tight.
Currently the ISS spends about half its time in the Earth's shadow. The Moon is only in the Earth's shadow during lunar eclipses.
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Why not take a page from all those sci-fi books and put it in a Lagrange Point?
(according to Wikipedia, several missions are planned there already)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point
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Hey Mr journalist with an English major. Leave the thinking to someone who understands basic stuff like gravity, energy etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Even Jules Verne got it part right. The ISS would be at its fastest near Earth at its closest point to Earth, ditto for the moon, and at its slowest at the point in between where the gravities cancel each other out. In each direction of travel, it starts to accelerate as soon as one gravity is stronger than the other.
Infuriate left and right
There is a reason why the ISS has his I in front. Whicht stands for INTERNATIONAL. Meaning, countries around the world are paying for it. Space Agencies around the world are owning this piece of science together. Why propose NASA to do something with this?!
Who gave NASA sole leadership to this?! This kind of ignorace makes me really angry.
Maybe what we really need, is to get the price of shipping stuff to orbit in line with other shipping destinations.
And the 'killer app' for jumpstarting a heavy-lift industry is Space Based Solar Power...
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Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think you're looking at it backwards. When (not if... it'll definitely be when) an asteroid or comet hits us, presuming we don't get into an all-out nuclear conflict beforehand, if we've not colonized mars, etc., or at least gotten into space so well that we can be absolutely certain we can deflect anything, anywhere, that might hit the planet, then we're done. I don't think that's in our best interests, nor those of our various co-species here. We need to do this. That old saw about having all your eggs in one basket? The basket is the earth; we're the eggs.
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The station is currently boosted via chemical reaction engines which provide a high thrust for a short period of time. ION engines would produce a much lower amount of thrust, but over a very long period of time.
This proposal is a very interesting idea (and probably a lot more useful than the current ISS purpose). Other weaknesses such as the radiation problem are addressable and will have to be solved anyway.
The most expensive part of space exploration is getting into LEO. We have 500 tonnes there already, lets not waste it. Who knows, in the future, fabrication may be possible and the whole thing remelted down into something else.
One of the early ideas was to boost the shuttle external tank into orbit (only requiring a few seconds more of burn) and then turning them into habitable structures. That always seemed like an interesting and feasible engineering effort as was dissappointed nothing ever came of it.
This is slashdot and I think it's safe to assume he's joking, now the general population though would raise that as a valid question. Just look at the movie "Mission to Mars" (or don't, it blows). Lets just say that if the writers knew a little about physics they would have known that one of the main characters didn't have to die...
After all, if someone was tumbling in space and you accelerated to start to catch up to them, the moment you start to close the gap you are already going faster than them and will close the gap (and even overtake them!) in due time. God, I want that hour and a half of my life back...
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