NASA Plans To De-Orbit ISS In 2016

NewbieV writes "The international space station is by far the largest spacecraft ever built by earthlings. Circling the Earth every 90 minutes, it often passes over North America and is visible from the ground when night has fallen but the station, up high, is still bathed in sunlight. After more than a decade of construction, it is nearing completion and finally has a full crew of six astronauts. The last components should be installed by the end of next year. And then? 'In the first quarter of 2016, we'll prep and de-orbit the spacecraft,' says NASA's space station program manager, Michael T. Suffredini."

Comments

It'll never happen

[7of7]

NASA is terrible with arbitrary deadlines. Remember how the Mars rovers were only supposed to work for 90 days? They've been at it for years now. The date will be pushed back over and over again.

Re:It'll never happen

[haifastudent]

NASA is terrible with arbitrary deadlines.

I agree, but for a different reason. This is a way to get the public involved (read: outraged) and secure funding. I hope it works.

Re:It'll never happen

[mcvos]

NASA is terrible with arbitrary deadlines. Remember how the Mars rovers were only supposed to work for 90 days? They've been at it for years now. The date will be pushed back over and over again.

I hope you're right, but de-orbiting the ISS is a somewhat different matter than a Mars rover breaking down. You can't predict when a breakdown occurs, and as long as it doesn't, it's cheap to keep using it.

De-orbiting the ISS is an active choice, however. It's expensive to keep manned and operational. I suppose they could simply abandon it and leave it up there, but it's going to come down eventually. If I understand correctly, its orbit is so low that it experiences drag from Earth's atmosphere, which means it regularly needs a boost, and therefore fuel. I guess they prefer to have it come down in a controlled manner, so nobody gets hit on the head with the thing.

(I may have started by expressing the hope that the ISS stays up there for a while, but I'm not at all sure that's a good idea. Critics say it's a waste of money with no scientific value whatsoever. So why did we put it up there in the first place? Shouldn't we be figuring out how to mine asteroids instead?)

Re:It'll never happen

[Bakkster]

De-orbiting the ISS is an active choice, however. It's expensive to keep manned and operational. I suppose they could simply abandon it and leave it up there, but it's going to come down eventually. If I understand correctly, its orbit is so low that it experiences drag from Earth's atmosphere, which means it regularly needs a boost, and therefore fuel. I guess they prefer to have it come down in a controlled manner, so nobody gets hit on the head with the thing.

Yes, the ISS has no engines and will fall out of the sky eventually, much like Skylab. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Altitude_control

(I may have started by expressing the hope that the ISS stays up there for a while, but I'm not at all sure that's a good idea. Critics say it's a waste of money with no scientific value whatsoever. So why did we put it up there in the first place? Shouldn't we be figuring out how to mine asteroids instead?)

You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc. My guess is to why we hear less about ISS science is that it's harder to write in a pop-culture headline. At least with the others you get pretty pictures or the ability to wildly extrapolate (liquid water, therefor aliens) or fear-monger (black holes sound scary, microscopic ones must be even more frightening). Zero gravity is so 1990, so regardless of how useful the research, your average person not interested in science will not care, and thus think it's a waste. You just can't pitch the importance to them.

There's no other location where we can do long-term scientific research in zero gravity, so we would do well to keep the ISS if we plan to keep learning from it.

Re:It'll never happen

[Joce640k]

It would be much cooler to add engines to it and send it off into space. Maybe even use one of the to-be-trashed shuttles for the job.

For me, they could trash it tomorrow and divert the money they save into building more rovers to visit all the planets ... and especially some for the moon to check out the He3 content.

Re:It'll never happen

[MindKata]

"NASA is terrible with arbitrary deadlines"

I think I should just politely point out, surely you're missing the main part of the news? ... I mean, you can't think NASA's deadline accountancy errors are the biggest part of this potentially huge news event?

For example, from the main summary:
"The international space station is by far the largest spacecraft ever built by earthlings"

I mean come on, hold the front page or what, call the joint chiefs now! ... there are spacecraft bigger than we make up there!?! ... UMMM??!! .... AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! [inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale] AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! cool or what!!?!

Re:It'll never happen

[Linker3000]

"...so nobody gets hit on the head...". For some reason, that conjured up a Monty Python-type sketch...

"Oh doctor, it was terrible; there I was minding my own business, walking down the street without a care in the world when this bloody big space station hit me on the head. It's given me such a headache..."

Re:It'll never happen

[2short]

The Mars rovers were supposed to to have a very high degree of probability of full functionality for a minimum of 90 days. Warranty jokes aside, you can't design something to work perfectly until it breaks down on day 91. To be really sure it will work for 90 days, you've got to design it probably work for much,much longer. That they have managed to limp along for years is awesome, but not entirely shocking. In terms of the science produced, the fairly small cost (of staff on Earth) to keep the rovers operating is pretty reasonable, since they are already on Mars.

The IIS is a whole different story. It costs insanely more money, and doesn't produce any science. It's mission, and it's end date, are entirely political. With construction complete, it's not quite as good a way for politicians to give aerospace companies money, but there isn't much better until the shuttle-replacement ramps up, so expect great gnashing of teeth about how horrible it will be if we don't have astronauts bravely exploring the inside of a can they built as it skims along barely above the atmosphere.

Re:It'll never happen

[feder]

Hey, wait a minute - aren't they installing a new ion drive on the thing (VASIMR)? Just set it at full speed ahead, and leave it to some alien civilization to find it... (yeah, yeah, I know, escape velocity and all - they can do gravity assist or something)

Re:It'll never happen

[feder]

What?

Re:It'll never happen

[mcvos]

Yes, the ISS has no engines and will fall out of the sky eventually, much like Skylab. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Altitude_control

Have you read that link? It says the ISS does have engines, which it needs regularly to stop from dropping out of the sky. The idea of a plasma drive on the ISS so it's cheaper to keep it up there is an interesting one.

(I may have started by expressing the hope that the ISS stays up there for a while, but I'm not at all sure that's a good idea. Critics say it's a waste of money with no scientific value whatsoever. So why did we put it up there in the first place? Shouldn't we be figuring out how to mine asteroids instead?)

You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc.

I could but won't. Hubble has let us look further than ever before. Sure it's an expensive telescope with its share of problems, but the lack of atmosphere matters a lot. The Mars Rovers were quite cheap, especially in comparison with the ISS, but we now know a lot more about Mars than we did 15 years ago. The LHC hasn't gotten us anything yet, but it's something we need if we want to look at even smaller particles than we have so far.

There's no other location where we can do long-term scientific research in zero gravity, so we would do well to keep the ISS if we plan to keep learning from it.

We could do it in a cheaper space station. We've done it in the Shuttle, Mir and Skylab. Also, I heard that the ISS isn't even all the useful for real zero g research. It's more microgravity, what with people moving about on board, atmospheric drag, regularly needing a boost to a higher orbit, etc.

Sure you can do research there, but is it the best way to do that research?

Re:It'll never happen

[Hurricane78]

The question is, whey it has no scientific value. Then create some experiments that give it value. After all the money that got pumped into it, it should last at least 30 years! And I don't care if it looks like the Mir afterwards. Looks are irrelevant when you still can do research on it.

Seriously. I bet someone will come up with some valuable experiments for it in this very thread.

Re:It'll never happen

[Hal_Porter]

They should put some celebrities on it and have them plead for money unless people want to watch them die a horrible fiery death.

Hmm, on second thoughts that woul be awesome to watch.

Re:It'll never happen

[TooMuchToDo]

There are other ways to keep orbiting craft in orbit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_dynamics_and_control#Magnetic_torquers

Re:It'll never happen

[holmstar]

..and doesn't produce any science.

Not true. But as to whether it produces enough science to justify the cost? who knows.

Re:It'll never happen

[Lumpy]

ISS is modular, short of a major problem (like modules breaking in 1/2 there is no reason to deorbit the whole damn thing. This is not like the one-big-chunk (tm) that skylab was.

Re:It'll never happen

[mcvos]

The question is, whey it has no scientific value. Then create some experiments that give it value.

You mean, now that we have a cool solution, we need to create a cool problem for it to solve? My impression was that it's not really all that suitable for a lot of experiments that scientists wanted to do in space. Or it's too expensive for what we get in return.

I fully agree the ISS is really cool, but not everything that's cool is really worth $100 billion.

Re:It'll never happen

[BrokenHalo]

I doubt if the public will get a say in it.

But did you notice the last line in TFA? I found it a bit chilling: "Give it to China. Let them support the damn thing."

Now I could be coming across as overly paranoid here, but the Chinese Government has its own agenda (a fact that is typically overlooked by the West as it scrambles slavishly for every trade dollar it can scavenge) and the record amply shows that does not necessarily include the welfare of anyone else. They certainly don't feel the need to recognise anyone else's laws, as we can see from the current fiasco over the detention of an Australian company executive when they didn't get the iron ore deal they wanted.

Handing them something like the ISS seems incredbly stupid to me.

Re:It'll never happen

[2short]

Alright, I was exaggerating. It produces very little science.

Does it produce enough science to justify the cost? You say "who knows." I say that's ridiculous. We have scores of other NASA missions to compare it to with known costs and results. Comparing scientific results to one another is necessarily somewhat subjective, but that's no reason to throw up our hands and declare rational evaluation of priorities impossible.

Has it produced 30 times the scientific value the Hubble? Has it produced a hundred times as much value as the Mars rovers? I can't see how you'd argue it was even on par with either, let alone ahead by such extreme multipliers.

Re:It'll never happen

[Dr. Spork]

You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc.

Bullshit. All of those project significantly advanced human knowledge (or are about to - if we learn as little from the LHC as we did from the ISS, it will be called the most miserable failure in all of science).

Face it, the ISS was a make-work project for NASA. It was not a tool designed to teach us something we wanted to know. When it crashes to Earth, science will barely notice.

Re:It'll never happen

[DerekLyons]

Yes, the ISS has no engines and will fall out of the sky eventually, much like Skylab. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Altitude_control

 
Actually, if you read your own reference, you'll find that the ISS does have it's own reboost capability - thrusters located on the Zvezda module.

Re:It'll never happen

[couchslug]

"Remember how the Mars rovers were only supposed to work for 90 days? They've been at it for years now. The date will be pushed back over and over again."

Unmanned systems can be used as long as they still function.

Manned systems are primitive, arguably not necessary at this early stage of space exploration (don't confuse the Cold War Space Race with anything but ideological competition), and sap resources we could use to build robot systems whose short development lifecycle will allow rapid evolution.

When humans and ships were expendable and inexpensive, using them to explore made sense. Now, humans are a burden on the exploration process unless they stay on the ground.

Re:It'll never happen

[ckaminski]

Right, all of which the ISS has. What it doesn't have is an ALTITUDE corrector. It depends on the Space Shuttle for that.

Once the Shuttle is no longer required to visit the ISS, they can consider boosting it to a higher orbit that requires fewer reboosting visits. That 220 mile limit is an artifact of being the highest the Shuttle can reach with maximum cargo.

Re:It'll never happen

[Stormy Dragon]

Critics say it's a waste of money with no scientific value whatsoever. So why did we put it up there in the first place?

So that at election time, congress critters could go back to their districts and brag about all the new local jobs they've created in the federally subsidized white elephant industry.

Re:It'll never happen

[DarthStrydre]

Actually, magnetic torquers CAN be used to increase altitude as well as maintain attitude. The issue is whether there is enough spare power for it to be worthwhile.

Re:It'll never happen

[Jedi Holocron]

So why did we put it up there in the first place?

To validate the continuation of the Space Shuttle program. Without the ISS the Shuttle was pointless years ago...

Re:It'll never happen

[Nai7]

Oooo, only if we get to nominate the celebrities!

Re:It'll never happen

[ionix5891]

you know our culture has become so shallow that more people would watch "ISS Survivor" than the moon landings

Re:It'll never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Mr Nuts is implying that NASA are implying that aliens have big space ships floating around.

Amazing how much you can extrapolate out of a single sentance, especially if you are in the tin foil hat brigade.

Re:It'll never happen

[camperdave]

Then create some experiments that give it value.

What do you think all those astronauts that go to the ISS are doing? Sitting on their thumbs and admiring the view? No, they are doing science experiments in physics, biology, meteorology, and astronomy. They are testing procedures for living and working in space. They are determining how a zero grav environment affects plants and animals. How crystals may or may not form (can we say bone decalcification, anyone?) How to fight fires, and do surgery, and the effects of microgravity on blood flow to the brain, and, and, and...

Re:It'll never happen

[Teancum]

I doubt if the public will get a say in it.

But did you notice the last line in TFA? I found it a bit chilling: "Give it to China. Let them support the damn thing."

Now I could be coming across as overly paranoid here, but the Chinese Government has its own agenda (a fact that is typically overlooked by the West as it scrambles slavishly for every trade dollar it can scavenge) and the record amply shows that does not necessarily include the welfare of anyone else. They certainly don't feel the need to recognise anyone else's laws, as we can see from the current fiasco over the detention of an Australian company executive when they didn't get the iron ore deal they wanted.

Handing them something like the ISS seems incredbly stupid to me.

While the typical American citizen has generally stayed aloof in terms of their support for NASA and the ISS, I think this is one of those thing that is going to cause ordinary folks to write... often for the first time... to their respective congressmen and demand that something be done. To say that the public will not get a say in this matter is to completely ignore that America is a representative republic.

Then again, you may be onto something that America is just a titular republic with an oligarchy represented by the "New World Order" that actually controls everything. If so, opinions don't matter anyway and this is just a sport to see what will happen next. I'll leave that to the conspiracy theory nuts to take it further.

This said, handing the thing over to the Chinese is the last thing that will happen. Sometimes I don't know where folks like a supposedly respectable newspaper like the "Washington Post" comes up with quotes like this, nor why a reporter who even remotely claims journalistic integrity would even put something like that into an article of this nature. Not only will such a thing never happen, but the individual being quoted has no more say on what is going to happen than you or I. Likely to have ultimately even less of an impact on the future of the ISS based solely on a stupid and asinine comment of that nature which is only intended to provide shock value.

The Chinese have made repeated requests to join into the consortium of nations that have contributed to the ISS, and there may be some rationale for including them in the mix... but that doesn't mean we should simply hand the whole thing over to them. Why both Russia and the USA don't want them involved (the key decision makers if you have to ask) is another matter, and it should be noted that the Chinese haven't even been given permission to board as a temporary guest. Simply put, if they aren't made an ISS partner, they never will get access to the ISS.

Re:It'll never happen

[Teancum]

Most of the Russian "half" (a little less than half now) of the ISS was originally built to be added onto the original MIR spacecraft in the first place. Believe it or not, some of it was built with Soviet funds back in the good old days.

I have heard some discussion that perhaps the Russians will take their modules from the ISS and use them as a core to a completely new space station.... essentially MIR-II. If that is the case, I wish the Russian Republic luck and success in the future. An American partner like the ones supposedly running this program deserve no better.

Re:It'll never happen

[PachmanP]

you know our culture has become so shallow that more people would watch "ISS Survivor" than the moon landings

Did they space anyone during the moon landings? 'nuff said.

Re:It'll never happen

[Foobar of Borg]

Don't start about recognizing laws when you unlawfully invaded a sovereign country and executed their democratically elected head of state.

Which country and head of state are you talking about? There have been so many.

Re:It'll never happen

[ari_j]

You'd have to hedge your bets. Have celebrities plead for money to avoid a fiery death, and then broadcast their fiery death on pay-per-view.

Re:It'll never happen

[644bd346996]

It's estimated that more than 12% of the global population was watching or listening to live broadcasts of the first moon walk. Or, to put it differently, about 4 times as many people as there are currently households in the US with a television. That market share would today be equivalent to about 850M people. Compare that to the roughly 500M people who speak English as their native language.

Re:It'll never happen

[twidarkling]

Does it produce enough science to justify the cost? You say "who knows." I say that's ridiculous.

I say putting a dollar value on knowledge is ridiculous. To quantify the effect of knowledge gained, based on the money expended to obtain it? By that, penecillin must have been one of the best ROI discoveries ever.

If the money to keep it running can be found, and they can still think of things to do, then they should continue. If they run out of tasks, experiments, et al, then yes, nix it then.

Re:It'll never happen

[shess]

Survivor ISS.

Re:It'll never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

And a bunch of other stuff that was already learned adequately on Skylab and Mir.

Re:It'll never happen

[Orange Crush]

Hey, that's a neat twist on the whole "getting voted off the island" bit . . .

Re:It'll never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't understand money. Those dollars represent a lot of work put in by hundreds of real people. Those people won't just disappear if you cancel the project, they're freed to work on other things. Things that could possibly give us even more knowledge for the same amount of effort. Life is a prioritirisation game, deal with it.

Re:It'll never happen

[Hal_Porter]

Survivor ISS.

There will be no survivors, that's the point. I was thinking of calling it

Die in a fire! Burn in Hell!

Re:It'll never happen

[Hadlock]

I doubt if the public will get a say in it.
 
Considering that NASA lives or dies by the public interest (I'm aware they do a lot more than Space Exploration) but it's mostly Space Exploration that gets NASA more funding than say, the EPA. Bush knew it was a popular program with the public, and that its a fairly partisan-neutral program as far as most people are concerned, and a point of national pride. A rare bright point for the government.

Re:It'll never happen

[drerwk]

You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc. My guess is to why we hear less about ISS science is that it's harder to write in a pop-culture headline. At least with the others you get pretty pictures or the ability to wildly extrapolate (liquid water, therefor aliens) or fear-monger (black holes sound scary, microscopic ones must be even more frightening).

Have a look through the last ten years of Nature and you will not have to guess. The reason you don't read about ISS science is because of the total dearth of ISS science. Pretty pictures do not themselves write journal articles. And if zero-g is what interests you, you can get a whole lot of it for $100 Billion without building a space station.
I want to keep the station up there, but let's not pretend it is for science.

Re:It'll never happen

[recharged95]

NASA is terrible with arbitrary deadlines

So, you're saying they'll de-orbit in 2014? Missing deadlines goes both ways with NASA. It's usually earlier when they intertwine politics into the decision making.

Re:It'll never happen

[dpilot]

In fiction, "Tank Farm Dynamo" by David Brin

Re:It'll never happen

[roc97007]

Only if physical survival was the goal this time. I was so disappointed the first time I saw Survivor. "You mean the losers get to live? What a scam!"

Re:It'll never happen

[2short]

"I say putting a dollar value on knowledge is ridiculous. To quantify the effect of knowledge gained, based on the money expended to obtain it? By that, penecillin must have been one of the best ROI discoveries ever."

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Obviously knowledge is valuable. Obviously that value is not based on the money expended to obtain it. That's the point. We want to gain the most value of knowledge in exchange for expending the least value of money.

"If the money to keep it running can be found, and they can still think of things to do, then they should continue. If they run out of tasks, experiments, et al, then yes, nix it then."

Money isn't "found". It is taken away from one thing and spent on another. What should we spend it on? Lots of people can think of things to do, and none of them will ever run out of experiments. You are saying "knowledge is priceless" as justification for spending money on something that produces less knowledge, and not spending it on things that produce more.

Re:It'll never happen

[BlueStrat]

When humans and ships were expendable and inexpensive, using them to explore made sense. Now, humans are a burden on the exploration process unless they stay on the ground.

I'm sorry, maybe it was all the pot smoke floating around back in the '60s and '70s, but I must have missed the time where the most highly skilled, schooled, and trained humans the US could find to be astronauts were expendable & inexpensive.

Robot exploration is a tool. Like any other tool there are situations where that tool suites the job best, and other situations where another tool does a better job.

One thing about human exploration; there are no robotic systems that can compete with humans when it comes to quickly processing and analyzing data (especially unexpected data) on the spot and rendering a decision and taking actions on-the-fly that may not be within the original mission-scope.

If humans had been sent to Mars, we'd have known about the water there almost immediately as one of the explorers would certainly kick there heel or toes into the soil and reveal the frost/ice, and would have quickly done a couple simple (for humans) tests to determine it was water.

Strat

Re:It'll never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

The ISS has no engines? On the wikipedia link you gave it says "This reboost can be performed by the station's two main engines on the Zvezda service module"

Re:It'll never happen

[stonedcat]

Bruce Willis.

Re:It'll never happen

[meadowsoft]

So you mean less people percentage wise and population wise were watching the moon landing than the Jacko funeral? So sad...

Re:It'll never happen

[DerekLyons]

ISS is sectional - not modular. You can't break it apart and reassemble it in a different configuration, nor can modules be easily removed for use elsewhere. Though it was launched in pieces, effectively it is one-big-chunk.

Re:It'll never happen

[Dun Malg]

This is exactly right. The ISS and SST are a pair of largely useless projects that for the last couple decades merely served to justify each others' existence. The trouble started when the DoD demanded the shuttle be large enough to haul a KH-11 satellite. The minimum thrust and payload volume specs kept having to be pushed up to match the KH-11 design, which incrementally grew heavier and larger during development. Then, when it became apparent that the expense of operating a shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg for polar orbit launches would be far greater than simply sticking with unmanned launch vehicles, the DoD largely withdrew from the shuttle program. In the end, NASA ended up with a white elephant that didn't do what they'd originally wanted, but was too far along in the process to change. When commercial satellite launches and repairs turned out to be a poor business plan, they started tub-thumping for a space station Space Station Freedom, later reborn as the ISS, initially came about as a project to give the shuttle something to do. No particular goal, just "let's try building a space station with the shuttle". Now we have a space station in too low an orbit to be truly useful, and a shuttle we have to keep around so we have something to haul part up to our useless space station. I say turn the SST's into museum pieces, drop the ISS into the Pacific, and start off fresh with no freakin' albatrosses around our collective space exploring neck.

Re:It'll never happen

[Nethemas the Great]

Critics say it's a waste of money with no scientific value whatsoever. So why did we put it up there in the first place?

That's the interesting part. Originally the thing was intended to enable a fair bit of "real science" and not just be an expensive engineering play toy and tourist attraction. Unfortunately the modules intended to enable this were never launched. I guess putting craters in the desert and violating pregnant women at the airport were greater priorities. How can they expect science to be carried out if the preoccupied astronauts can't even perform acts of a personal nature. In all seriousness though, I am heartened to see that the U.S. congress put AMS back on the launch manifest albeit delayed. CAM certainly deserved better though.

Re:It'll never happen

[x2A]

"I'm sorry, maybe it was all the pot smoke floating around back in the '60s and '70s"

Ships... not spaceships... when ships were used for exploration I think you'll have to go back a little further than 60s and 70s USA... think: how was America most recently discovered? By people, many considered 'expendable' (ie, would otherwise just be in prisons) on ships.

Say what you want about what we're learnt about the moon, but if we'd had to send people along, do you think we'd have made discoveries about the farthest reachest of out solar system as we have with the Voyagers, or know what we do about the composition of the gas planet's moons, or know what we do about Pluto? That's exploration, of the kind that we have made simply because we took sending humans along out of the equation.

Re:It'll never happen

[Workaphobia]

I don't understand why we can't park the ISS at an higher orbit that won't decay. Is there any particular reason the ISS has to be so Near in Near-Earth-Orbit?

Re:It'll never happen

[BlueStrat]

"I'm sorry, maybe it was all the pot smoke floating around back in the '60s and '70s"

Ships... not spaceships... when ships were used for exploration I think you'll have to go back a little further than 60s and 70s USA... think: how was America most recently discovered? By people, many considered 'expendable' (ie, would otherwise just be in prisons) on ships.

Say what you want about what we're learnt about the moon, but if we'd had to send people along, do you think we'd have made discoveries about the farthest reachest of out solar system as we have with the Voyagers, or know what we do about the composition of the gas planet's moons, or know what we do about Pluto? That's exploration, of the kind that we have made simply because we took sending humans along out of the equation.

Although there were significant discoveries made far in the past like the ancient Viking discovery of N. America, many more-modern discoveries were also made by famous explorers that were relatively well-funded, often by royal houses or shipping & trade companies.

The experienced sailors, captains, and the explorer themselves weren't considered "expendable". Sure, there would be finite cost to losing everyone and everything on an unlucky voyage, but the overall risk was deemed acceptable to the country/power funding the exploration as well as to the explorer, captain, and crew. That's not what *I* would take "being expendable" to mean.

As far as your argument make here:

Say what you want about what we're learnt about the moon, but if we'd had to send people along, do you think we'd have made discoveries about the farthest reachest of out solar system as we have with the Voyagers, or know what we do about the composition of the gas planet's moons, or know what we do about Pluto?

This is a false dichotomy, and/or a strawman. There's no "either-or" here. Both methods can and *should* be utilized together, in a balanced and sensible manner. There are only so many things robots can tell us. There's no way currently to be fully "telepresent" such that we are able to use all our senses, to get a "feel" for a place, and we thus render ourselves much, much less able to make intuitive judgments and gather subliminal data clues that can lead to "hunches" and leaps of logic, thereby greatly accelerating the pace of discovery and it's depth.

If the whole idea of space travel and exploration is simply an aside, an occasional commercial interest, an interesting scientific problem and data pool to occasionally delve into when it's convenient and leave alone when we get distracted, then robotic exploration is the sensible way to go.

If, however, mankind dreams of expanding and surviving, to reach out and explore all the universe holds, to gain the ultimate freedom from tyranny by people being able to leave when governments got too oppressive, to tap the infinite reserves of energy and materials, and become a new type of organism from Earth...spacefaring...and take the next step in our evolution, then robotics, although having it's place as a useful tool, is only that. A tool. Not the goal. A tool we should use to help the species grow, advance, and expand beyond our current boundaries.

Strat

Re:It'll never happen

[eobanb]

Because with current launch costs, it would be uneconomical and/or impossible to go higher than LEO. With enough boosts and/or propellant, the ISS can be placed in a very high orbit, theoretically. But then that means the shuttle can't reach it. A Constellation vehicle could surely reach it but it would be incredibly expensive to get there. In the future, when we build larger and even more permanent space stations, perhaps they'll be placed in geosynchronous orbit or L4/L5. Every satellite that has ever been launched into geosynchronous orbit will be there for the next billion years unless it collides with something like another satellite or space trash or an asteroid. Until we have significantly cheaper launches, though, LEO is where it's at. In fact, even with much cheaper launches I suspect it'll still be cheaper to stay in LEO and simply constantly thrust with ion engines or something like it.

Re:It'll never happen

[Anonymous Coward]

How about Chuck No~ ##NO CARRIER

Re:It'll never happen

[Phoghat]

"That's a polite way of saying that NASA will make the space station fall back into the atmosphere, where it will turn into a fireball and then crash into the Pacific Ocean. It'll be a controlled reentry, to ensure that it doesn't take out a major city. But it'll be destroyed as surely as a Lego palace obliterated by the sweeping arm of a suddenly bored kid. "

OK, we have all these billions of dollars worth of equipment orbiting and we're just going to junk it. WTF?????

Re:It'll never happen

[MindKata]

Its called humor, its just the mod failed to read the main title said "biggest ever built by earthlings"

As in implying other non-earthlings also build spacecraft and some maybe bigger objects, which is in itself a funny concept. I was then building on that in the way scifi films react to aliens. So it was on topic and it was simply a joke. But it seems the mod and commenter prefer to enjoy putting people down. (Once a comment is put down it usually stays down due to Priming but I wouldn't stretch you mind to comprehend that).

All humor is like a Turing Test for humans. That mod and feder failed.

Re:It'll never happen

[GigsVT]

Maybe one day they will teach economics in elementary school. That would kind of be like teaching slaves to read though.

Re:It'll never happen

[lavalamp70]

Wish I had $100 billion to piss away. Oh wait - that was my money....

Re:It'll never happen

[x2A]

"This is a false dichotomy, and/or a strawman"

Not really... there's a big difference between manned exploring in space as opposed to on earth, at least at speeds within our grasp. Take the famous 1492 voyage to India by travelling round the back of the globe. Those folks never did reach India, as the America's were discovered to be somewhat in the way. But the entire journey, there's fish to be found in the sea, and where they landed, even though it was *completely* not what they thought it was, they'd've been able to find fresh water, other food, been able to breath. Some 25-30% of the surface of earth is land, but the same is nowhere near true for space. You can't just point your ship west and hope you hit something. You can travel for hundreds of years and if you spot a gas planet and a sub-freezing methane sea planet be considered lucky. We need to use probe's for exploring, because in space, we need to know where there is we can go.

Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[GargamelSpaceman]

It will stay there for a decade or two longer because those sucking the tit will find a way to keep the milk coming.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[KronosReaver]

Will find a way?

This is the way.

Step 1 - Announce over and over that your going to "De-Orbit".

Step 2 - Wait for public outcry.

Step 3 - Cash ISS Stimulus check before the government runs out of paper to print money on.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Richard_at_work]

The question becomes - without the ISS as a destination, what does the CEV do between the deorbit of the ISS and any planned moon or mars mission in the early 2020s? Does NASA just launch this new expensive vehicle to orbit with no destination? What capacity does the CEV have for independent science while in orbit?

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[ozbird]

There's a small flaw in your plan - the ISS is not the Hubble Space Telescope.

I think this is closer to the truth:
1. Announce that you are launching a shuttle to install a porch on the ISS.
2. Wait for the public outcry.
3. Skip installing the jacuzzi and gazebo, and announce you will de-orbit the ISS in 2016.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[GargamelSpaceman]

Well hopefully, there will be no moon or mars missions in the forseeable future. These would be probably just as useless as the ISS, and more expensive and dangerous.

Manned spaceflight should end until earth to orbit costs $100/lb or less.

However space probes and experiments should continue to be sent up. In fact if the entire budget that is being used for manned spaceflight were redirected to unmanned space exploration and science it would be good.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Yvan256]

a WAY to keep the MILK coming.

I see what you did there.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[vlm]

without the ISS as a destination, what does the CEV do between the deorbit of the ISS and any planned moon or mars mission in the early 2020s?

Nothing?

I can just hear the next bureaucratic speech "Due to forseen circumstances, that no one could have predicted, the CEV program unfortunately no longer has a mission, and is therefore rightsized."

Then a month after the CEV program is unalterably terminated, we can continue the ISS mission as planned.

Basically an elaborate way to cancel the CEV program, to shift the business to space-X or maybe just plain ole get out of the manned launches business.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Joce640k]

Could they move it into lunar orbit?

Having a station in orbit around the moon would be a lot cooler than having one a couple of hundred miles away and we could use it as a starting point for lunar mining.

You want to capture public imagination? Something like this would definitely do it (and it even has a "Save the Earth" angle - He3 to save us from global warming). The sooner the better, I say, before it starts falling apart.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Volante3192]

Space flight is inherently dangerous, but that won't stop people from wanting it.

As far as calling manned missions useless, Sample #15415 would disagree. Rovers can do a lot, but they have limited mobility and distance, can't chip off samples, and can't decide if this sample or that sample is more important.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Cid Highwind]

"Manned spaceflight should end until earth to orbit costs $100/lb or less. "
 
...and what, pray tell, is going to drive developing the technology to do *that* when the only things going up are light, cheap rovers and satellites? Real life isn't like "Civilization", where some offscreen God delivers complete blueprints for engineering marvels as soon as you reach some arbitrary stage of the game. The only thing that would come close to $100/lb to LEO is a space elevator amortized over a century or two of constant use. That would require decades of materials research and engineering with a budget that would make NASA's new manned rocket program look like peanuts, before we could even start arguing about whether to fund building the thing.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[holmstar]

I find your position amusing considering your id.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[TheMeuge]

Manned spaceflight should end until earth to orbit costs $100/lb or less.

Without more flights, it'll never cost any less... so this is a perfect way to guarantee that we're all stuck here till we kill ourselves.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[holmstar]

That is a nice idea and all, but I have a suspicion that the amount of fuel that would be required to achieve that would be impractical to blast into orbit. Also, being that the ISS is in low earth orbit, it gets to benefit from the earths protective magnetic field. If we were to send it to the moon, we would probably have to add radiation shielding to many components that weren't designed to operate away from the Earth. (and probably some sort of safe-room for the astronauts for the inevitable solar flare)

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[khayman80]

No. The ISS is huge, so getting it into a Hohmann transfer orbit would require vastly more fuel than the Apollo missions did. And, the ISS isn't designed for more than the miniscule amount of thrust needed for station keeping. And, the ISS is designed to keep humans alive underneath the Van Allen radiation belts. Venturing above them would subject the astronauts to much more radiation. Also, lunar orbits are very unstable because of the "lumpiness" of the moon's gravity field. Only orbits with specific inclinations are remotely stable, which means the fuel requirements are even higher than a straightforward Hohmann trajectory would imply.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Dr. Spork]

The outcry won't be from me. Yeah, I want Hubble to stay up as long as possible. The ISS? I sort of don't care. I don't feel like I've really learned anything from the hundred billion dollars we spent on it. (We already knew that our shuttles suck and occasionally explode.) It's a shame we put all that money into it, and put tons of noxious crap into the atmosphere from all the solid rocket fuel... but, fuck it. It's been a distraction from day 1 and the sooner it goes down, the sooner we can start doing something valuable in space.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[damburger]

Damn, I thought Montezuma of the Aztecs would trade us Advanced Rocketry if we converted to his religion!

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[khayman80]

The necessary thrust could be reduced by using an ion drive like VASIMR, which could be operated at a low enough thrust that it wouldn't snap the station in half like a twig. The station would slowly (VERY slowly!) spiral up towards the moon like SMART-1 did. Here's some recommended reading that shows how difficult this would be. It would also make resupply much harder, and require a complete redesign of the attitude stabilization and tracking software for the solar panels. I suspect the insulation and radiators would have to be modified as well because low earth orbit is a much different thermal environment than a lunar orbit.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wouldn't you want to just build the station on the moon? Why would you need/want an orbiting station? If you're going to mine the moon, you'll have to land on it sometime anyway, so why not just set up post there?

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[jo_ham]

Not to mention that you have to feed the people on board. The moon is not so great for crops, so you'd have to create regular supply missions back and forth to lunar orbit, and as far as I know, we don't really have anything that can do that at the moment, except for wheeling out the Saturn V blueprints.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[GargamelSpaceman]

Because the technology currently used to reach orbit ( rockets ) can not be improved to reach the $100.00/lb target, there is no need to maintain a 'manned spaceflight infrastructure' based upon that technology. There will never be enough incremental improvements to rocket based spaceflight to make it economical to send astronaughts to space.

Human spaceflight should be human spaceflight *in style* which means adequate safety measures and backups that a disaster is somewhat unlikely, and that barring disasters nobody will be harmed. This means for instance that a mission to Mars should not expose astronaughts to much more radiation than they would recieve had they stayed home. This means lots of heavy lead sheilding. If that's prohibitively expensive, then humans should not go. If humans can't bring enough supplies to stay a while in comfort and also enough instruments to do meaningful science then they shouldn't go either.

With the the price per pound to orbit forced by having to use rockets it makes more sense to employ robots. If they blow up on the launch pad, then make another one, and you don't need to provide air, transportation, supplies, or a return ticket home, and you can optimise reliability to maximize expected scientific knowledge per cost instead of having to consider risk to human life.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[GargamelSpaceman]

There's a ridiculous picture of Gargamel wearing a spacesuit floating around. Ridiculous is the key thing about it.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[GargamelSpaceman]

Rocket based spaceflight just isn't capable of providing escape and no amount of incremental improvements are going to help. It's like trying to improve hot air balloon technology to achieve supersonic flight. The wing needed to be invented first. If people stopped making hot air balloons prior to the Wright Bros, then they still would have invented their airplane. It took the internal combustion engine. Then the winged aircraft were eventually fitted with jet engines and THOSE were incrementally improved to achieve supersonic flight.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Teancum]

Is the environment at L-5 really all that much different than LEO? Redesigning the software is something trivial, and simply takes a team on the ground here on Earth to make the changes. I don't consider a software change to be (for the price of the ISS) a big deal. Give me a few million dollars, and I'll make the changes myself and hire the team to get it done.

The main environmental difference is that at L-5 you no longer have protection of the Van Allen belts (most of the time), and the day/night cycles for each orbit would give way to 24/7/365 sunlight with only minor exceptions during an eclipse that would happen roughly as often as a Lunar Eclipse. Batteries wouldn't be as critical as they are now (about half of the time the ISS is in shadow in LEO) but the radiators might have to be beefed up a little bit.

Even with all this, I don't think it would be as difficult as you would think. An ion drive like you are suggesting might be all that is necessary in order to get the delta-v to move to L-5.... and moving between L-5 and the Moon is comparatively trivial in comparison. This Wikipedia article gives a pretty good overview of how much energy is needed for moving from place to place in the Solar System. Moving from LEO to L-5 takes as much energy (actually more) than going from L-5 to Phobos. Now that is something to think about.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Grishnakh]

The moon's gravity field is "lumpy"? Wouldn't that indicate that the density of the moon is non-uniform?

I wonder if the Monolith has anything to do with this.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rovers [...] have limited mobility and distance, can't chip off samples, and can't decide if this sample or that sample is more important.

I think you misunderestimate the advances in robotics. You also seem to have never heard of remote controls?

If only a tenth of your military budget got invested in space research, you'd have domed cities on Mars by now.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Maximum Prophet]

Yep. One of the reasons that the moon always keeps the same face towards us. If it were complete uniform, it would probably be spinning out of sync with the Earth.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[J05H]

Without more flights, it'll never cost any less...

TheMeuge gives us the best post in thread. Flight frequency has the most elastic effect on launch cost and therefore price in a market. The more often a launch system flies the cheaper it becomes per unit.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[GargamelSpaceman]

Only to a point. You're never going to develop supersonic hot air balloon travel. You need the wing.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Paua Fritter]

Hohmann orbit too mechanically stressful and expensive? Use a cheaper and slower transfer orbit.

Lumpy gravitational field? Orbit a Lagrange point instead of the Moon itself.

Too much radiation? Use supplementary radiation shielding.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[khayman80]

Yep, it's lumpy.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[khayman80]

All good points. I don't really know how different LEO is from L5. This is outside my field, so I was just guessing about the thermal requirements. The "night" that the ISS experiences in LEO has a planet at 286K filling half the sky with its blackbody radiation (although if I recall correctly one effect of greenhouse gases is that Earth radiates at a slightly lower temperature.)

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[khayman80]

Also, an ion drive would be very slow... probably taking years to climb out of LEO if not decades given the power constraints and requirement not to use too much thrust that the solar panels snap off. This means that the station would spend a lot of time inside the Van Allen radiation belts. The station would almost certainly have to be evacuated during this time period, and the radiation would cause all sorts of problems that could only be fixed by subjecting humans to their radiation for far longer than the Apollo astronauts had to endure.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Nethemas the Great]

Many of us want to romanticize the ISS as being far more than it really is. The project has a specific design capability and that is for LEO, having a couple decade long lifespan. It was designed to perform under a very limited role with certain expectations of serviceability and modest fail safes. Even if we wished to spend the cash to push it to GEO, a Lagrange point, or even lunar orbit the poor thing would likely tear itself apart in the process. Surviving that, we'd find constant component failure issues from the prolonged exposure to the harsh environs of space. It's difficult to rebuild/remodel that which wasn't designed to be rebuild and remodeled.

I think the best thing we can do is to encourage our respective governments and private industry to plan and execute our next great step in manned space outposts. We've learned a great deal since the ISS was conceived and engineered. That was one of the main purposes of the ISS. Let's take our current state-of-the-art and create an outpost for our future dreams not prolong and rehash our old ones. I for one would love to see a permanent outpost from which we could more easily (and cheaply) launch both manned and robotic missions. Lets learn how to harvest and process off-world resources. Lets learn how to manufacture using those resources. Lets learn how to maintain partial subsistence. These things are inconceivable with the ISS.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Teancum]

An ion drive is currently being used with the Dawn Mission, where the delta-v requirements are certainly as comparable to going from LEO to L-5. That mission started in 1997 (yes, it is in space right now and flying with the engine running and producing thrust right now) and it will ultimately last until at least 2015, reaching Vesta in 2011. Using that as a rule of thumb, I would expect at a maximum of a similar duration of time to get the ISS to L5... about 3-4 years if you use this comparison. I would expect it to happen much faster, and certainly not take decades.

The ISS is clearly intended to be boosted up into a higher orbit, and the hardpoints to keep the vehicle together are well understood... at least with moderate thrust velocities. I would expect accelerations similar to that provided by Progress boosters to be similar, and there are designs to put the engines directly on the ISS for altitude control. An ESA resupply module docket to the ISS and provided a delta-v that accelerated to an additional 2.65 m/s. I don't know how long that took (giving some idea on the acceleration tolerances of the ISS), but it was a conventional rocket. Surprisingly, this is nearly half of the delta-v that is necessary to get to L-5.

Using the previous example, I don't think the ISS would spend all that much time in the Van Allen belts, and to leave it unmanned for a brief period of time wouldn't be the end of the world either. This is something that certainly could happen if there was an objective to make it happen, and even just moving the ISS to L-5 as a place to "park" the structure as a historical monument to future generations rather than having it crash into the Earth causing potential damage or even death may make the effort worthwhile.

Heck, it may even be cheaper in terms of boosting the ISS to a very high altitude rather than using a similar booster to attempt a more controlled re-entry over what would be presumably an uninhabited part of the Earth like the Pacific Ocean. Sending a crew up to the ISS to perform the dismantling process, getting multiple boosters onto each ISS module, and simply trying to deal with the thing may on the whole be easier to even crash it on the Moon.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[khayman80]

An ion drive is currently being used with the Dawn Mission, where the delta-v requirements are certainly as comparable to going from LEO to L-5.

Yes, ion drives are amazing technology suitable for relatively light robotic probes. But isn't the correct measure to use here the required thrust, rather than the delta-V? The delta-V requirements ignore the fact that the ISS is much heavier than Dawn, no?

Using that as a rule of thumb, I would expect at a maximum of a similar duration of time to get the ISS to L5... about 3-4 years if you use this comparison. I would expect it to happen much faster, and certainly not take decades.

Jamie did the calculation last year and arrived at a transit time of ~9 years. I think the station would probably spend months in the radiation belts, and I wonder how much of their electronics have been hardened enough to even keep automated systems running. (Again, I'm not an aerospace engineer, I don't even know if Jamie's calculations are correct, let alone how much of that number would be spent in the belts.)

An ESA resupply module docket to the ISS and provided a delta-v that accelerated to an additional 2.65 m/s. ... Surprisingly, this is nearly half of the delta-v that is necessary to get to L-5.

According to this website, the delta-V to go from LEO to L5 is 3.9 km/s. Maybe they're off by a factor of a thousand?

This is something that certainly could happen if there was an objective to make it happen, and even just moving the ISS to L-5 as a place to "park" the structure as a historical monument to future generations rather than having it crash into the Earth causing potential damage or even death may make the effort worthwhile.

An interesting idea, but I wonder what kind of shape it would be in after slowly passing through the debris field that lies at a higher altitude than the ISS is currently at. Remember that the recent Hubble service mission was especially dangerous because 300km above the Earth's surface is a very "dirty" orbit filled with projectiles moving at multiple kilometers per second.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[khayman80]

Sigh... no, Jamie's estimate was for intercepting the Moon. I guess I'm still thinking about the original question that prompted this discussion rather than your L5 proposal. Sorry for the confusion, your 3-4 year estimate may very well be accurate.

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[khayman80]

I do have to say, though, that it's a tad alarmist to wonder about death and destruction as a result of the ISS de-orbit maneuver. Celestial mechanics has come a long way since Skylab- I'd be surprised if we couldn't sink the sucker in the Pacific. (Not to say that I want that to happen- I agree that it seems criminally wasteful to ditch the ISS if there's a decent chance we can do some real science with it.)

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[Teancum]

When the ISS was originally sent up (aka the first module, Unity, was added to the Russian module Zarya) nearly every article mentioned that the ISS was going to be a permanent structure. When NASA officials were asked what that meant (going back to 1988 mind you), they responded that the ISS was going to be so large that it would be impossible and even dangerous to consider deorbiting the space station.

To give an interesting size comparison, the following graphic compares the ISS to the fictional sizes of the USS Enterprise, the Corellian Corvette that Princess Leia was in at the beginning of Star Wars ep IV, and the Battlestar Galactica (2004 reimagined version):

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/ISS-size-comparison.jpg

In short, the ISS is the single largest structure that has ever been put together by mankind for use in space. It also will likely to continue to have that distinction for a great many years into the future.

Also, I have not heard of any significant breakthrough in celestial mechanics that has happened in the past 40 years. The computers of 1970 were certainly capable of being able to plot the trajectories and paths of an incoming body, and I would lay a challenge to any rocket scientist to come up with any such calculation that couldn't be performed nearly as quickly on a PDP-11 (in terms of results returned from a human time frame). The variables that would cause an error of hitting Australia vs. somewhere in the Pacific are still there (variations in solar activity, storm activity, sea water temperatures, and atmospheric density on a local level). The primary reason for the margin of error with Skylab was because it had no guidance system whatever. Please educate me if I'm mistaken, but I don't know what new stuff has been added to this discipline that wasn't already known in the 1960s, including Einstein's theory of relativity.

The ISS is a huge structure, and even with the best and most careful planning it would be a major accomplishment to be able to bring it safely back to the Earth. I suppose that the ISS could take advantage of the vehicle that brought everything up there: The Space Shuttle. Unfortunately, that is being retired and no other space vehicle has the capability of being able to bring things from orbit back to the Earth as efficiently as the shuttle.

Bringing the ISS down in multiple pieces with some sort of control module on each piece to provide guidance is going to take not only a whole bunch of extra hardware, it is also going to require sending up at least a dozen or more astronauts to perform the labor of performing the demolition. For this reason alone, I believe it to be vastly cheaper and IMHO safer for both those on the ground as well as mitigating the potential loss of life from just having astronauts make the trip up to space (spaceflight is hardly 100% assurance you will even make it to orbit alive or return safely).

Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen.

[khayman80]

If I weren't so exhausted, I'd try to respond. Sorry. Your graph of relative size was the highlight of my otherwise very frustrating day!

So what does that make the IRR?

[inviolet]

How much was invested in this thing, I wonder?

I am aware of the "sunk cost fallacy", and maybe the ISS has taught us everything it set out to teach... but I could've sworn that we were originally sold a much larger bill of goods than NASA now intends to deliver. Remember all the talk about a permanent space station from which to stage lunar and martian missions?

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[KronosReaver]

How much was invested in this thing, I wonder?

If only there were a way we could find out...

Oh wait... I know...

Maybe check the single link to the very short article where it mentions twice an "estimated" 100 Billion (US$) combined from all involved countries.

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[hardburn]

Remember all the talk about a permanent space station from which to stage lunar and martian missions?

Would have been great, and the shuttle was originally designed with that in mind, but the ISS can't do it. You need a station in orbit around the equator for that, but the ISS was put at a big inclination in order to make it easier for the Russians to get to it.

On the one hand, I'm sad to see a major space project come and go like this. On the other hand, I'm not sure what the ISS can accomplish compared to spending that money on another major space project.

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would have been great, and the shuttle was originally designed with that in mind, but the ISS can't do it. You need a station in orbit around the equator for that, but the ISS was put at a big inclination in order to make it easier for the Russians to get to it.

And that was the other of the two reasons the ISS was built.

1) In the early 80s, "To give the Shuttle somewhere to go and something to do, so that Shuttle dollars keep getting allocated even though it's easier/cheaper to launch satellites on expendabe vehicles."
2) In the early 90s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, "To give unemployed Russian rocket scientists something else to build besides ballistic missiles for sale to the highest bidder."

Science (or staging/assembly points for future missions) were only the goal of the scientists. But scientists don't make the decisions on what gets funded, politicians do. And politicians don't know (and don't care) about science.

As someone else suggested above - if the Iraq War had been over within 6 months instead of 6 years, none of the contractors would have made any real money off it. There's no money to be made in winning wars, but plenty to be had in prolonging them.

Likewise, when you build a space station, the money doesn't get spent in space, it gets spent on Earth. From the point of view of a Congressman, a working space station's useless. There's no more money to be made from having it in orbit. So you build it - decades late and hundreds of billions overbudget - and then within an eyeblink of having completed the project, you deorbit it and build something new.

So you build it, put it in an orbit that's useless for staging or assembling future missions, and you trash it within an eyeblink of having finished the job.

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[vadim_t]

I don't think the sunk costs fallacy applies to the ISS.

If for instance, a software migration is being worked on that's clearly not going to be successful, then throwing more money on it is clearly pointless. Since the old system can be kept, the decision is "waste more money on the non-working new system, and at some later point return to the old one" vs "return to the other one". Keeping spending money on the migration is clearly a complete waste and achieves nothing useful.

But the ISS isn't like that. It's already in orbit, and it's already producing results. If anything useful at all still gets done on it, then deorbiting it will have negative consequences, and if later they want to change their mind they can't just go and put it back in orbit. They'll have to make a new one, or go without whatever research it could have enabled. And making a new one will almost certainly cost a lot more than to keep the current one working.

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[hardburn]

But the ISS isn't like that. It's already in orbit, and it's already producing results. If anything useful at all still gets done on it, then deorbiting it will have negative consequences, and if later they want to change their mind they can't just go and put it back in orbit.

That has to be compared the benefits that could be provided by another project with the same amount of funding. The Sunk Cost Fallacy still applies, as does Opportunity Cost. The ISS just isn't that useful compared to other space projects.

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[camperdave]

Remember all the talk about a permanent space station from which to stage lunar and martian missions?

Well, the Russians bolloxed that up. In order to encourage Russian participation in the ISS, the station's orbit was set at 51 degrees. This would allow the Russians to launch from their high lattitude launch facilites. (The greater the latitude, the greater the orbit inclination.) Unfortunately, this means that the ISS is in a pretty much useless orbit when it comes to being a staging area for assembling and launching spacecraft to other planets. For that purpose, you'd want the station to be orbiting in the same plane as the ecliptic: 23.5 degrees.

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[Anonymous Coward]

The ISS was initially intended to function as a starting point for further exploration, and was going to be built in a high orbit to facilitate this. Then the Russians came on board. They could not get a Soyuz craft into a high enough orbit for our plans, so we brought the station down to them. We gained an international partner but we lost capability. Since then its been restricted to performing experiments in microgravity and perfecting human habitation in space/hazardous environments. Lots of knowledge has been developed about space construction techniques and many countries have begun contributing and building their own space programs. I think its been a very successful part of our program and after its finished being built we might deorbit it and start anew on the moon or decide that even more can be gained from continued operation and get more funding. Having private companies develop space capability for resupply and crew changes would make the second option more likely.

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[Richard_at_work]

Yup, the Russian involvement was certainly something that continued to be frowned upon as an 'extravagence' while the Shuttle was grounded, and the only transport mechanisms to and from the ISS were both Russian for several months...

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[Hurricane78]

maybe the ISS has taught us everything it set out to teach...

What stops us from setting a new goal? If you made it up to the largest mountain in your state, will you just stop and never climb a mountain again? No. You will already plan for the next mountain when you are at the top of that first one. :)

And with all the knowledge that we gained, I bet even more questions popped up. And many people can't wait to solve them.

I don't think there is ever an excuse for deorbiting that thing before it blows up like the Mir in Armageddon. ^^

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[fishbowl]

So the only option is to destroy it? Moving it is out of the question?

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Would have been great, and the shuttle was originally designed with that in mind, but the ISS can't do it. You need a station in orbit around the equator for that

No, ideally you want an orbit in the plane of the ecliptic to do that, not the Equator.

The Equator is inclined 23.44 degrees from the ecliptic, so a station orbiting at the Equator would have just as much trouble as the current ISS for a launch to Mars, the Moon, etc.

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[DerekLyons]

Remember all the talk about a permanent space station from which to stage lunar and martian missions?

Yes, I remember all that talk - because that's all it was, talk among people who haven't kept up with the times or don't know what they are talking about.
 
Being a base for staging missions was an early feature of Space Station Freedom. That feature was deferred during one of the rounds of redesign/down scoping (in the late 1980's) and removed completely when Freedom became ISS in the early 1990's. The change of orbital inclination to accommodate the Russians essentially made it impractical to stage missions from the station because of the resulting low altitude and lowered cargo capacity (because of the payload hit required for launches other than Russian to the new orbit).

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many hands do you have?

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[damburger]

I don't think its at all true to suggest that moving the ISS to an inclination the Russians could reach (which,by the way, also got you several modules which were to form part of Mir 2, without which the ISS might never have got off the ground) scuppered plans to use it as a staging area for interplanetary missions. Firstly, the equator of Earth is not in the plane of the ecliptic so is not really any better for departing for the planets, and secondly the amount of delta-v difference is quite small compared to how much you need to leave Earth orbit.

The reason why the ISS hasn't been used as a place to assemble interplanetary manned spacecraft, is that nobody has paid for any interplanetary manned spacecraft. It is not the fault of the ISS, and certainly not the Russians fault, that the US has elected not to use the ISS for this purpose.

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[Anonymous Coward]

$100 billion? Jeez, for that we could have nationalized two more GMs!

Re:So what does that make the IRR?

[Anenome]

You have to understand the long term plans here. The US wants to have space stations that are wholly our own. While the ISS was fun for practicing what it took to run a space station, we've largely learned those lessons now.

One forecaster thinks the US will have manned 'Battlestar' class space stationsfby 2050, protected by constellations of support satellites designed to provide military support and surveillance of the entire world from space using three constellation clusters strategically placed in orbit.

For that to work, the ISS eventually needs to be disposed of. So, look at this not so much as a waste of taxpayer money so much as a time-frame for the next development in space.

luckily for us

[markringen]

luckily for us Nasa doesn't decide anything!

Re:luckily for us

[KronosReaver]

Except which projects they will continue to support or not every time their budget is cut.

Russia already said a couple of months ago they would detach their module(s) and keep them in orbit, but if NASA decides to "De-Orbit" everything they have control over there isn't much anyone else can do about it.

And even if NASA just left it up there, who really wants to try and support old warn out tech designed by someone else?

Re:luckily for us

[ae1294]

And even if NASA just left it up there, who really wants to try and support old warn out tech designed by someone else?

The Russians apparently...

I hear they are going to install black jack tables and send up hookers... I'd love to get in on that action as it really sounds like a capitalist dream come true but alas I live in America...

Re:luckily for us

[Anonymous Coward]

You think congresscritters are a better option?

Let's see - NASA doing science... Congress doing science...

Re:luckily for us

[markringen]

it is the ISS not NSS. international space station is run by everyone not just Nasa, they have very little to say about what happens with the ISS.

Re:luckily for us

[assemblerex]

Oh the irony. I guess when they lost the "c" in Naca they lost their cojones too.

Re:luckily for us

[markringen]

Nasa is nothing but a tax rip-off scheme except without any return. nasa is highly inefficient compared to other space agency, even commercial ones make a profit. Nasa manages to make losses after losses, it's strange a government would keep funding something which drains money and isn't contributing much to technology compared to even commercial company's in space.

Guess the Permanent Interplanetary Internet Node..

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't really permanent, eh?

Only 6 years after completion?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, what a rathole for money that thing is.

You shouldn't even be reading this post for another ten minutes or so, because I should be writing it on Mars. Instead, yay, let's pay a bunch of underemployed Russian rocket scientists to build another Skylab/Mir, and see what happens when we blow bubbles in LEO.

Coming as it does near the anniversary of the first Apollo landing, this is a really depressing story. Idiocracy, indeed.

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[Relic of the Future]

Coming as it does near the anniversary of the first Apollo landing, this is a really depressing story. Idiocracy, indeed.

I assure you, that's not a coincidence; that's genius marketing. And I don't see what it has to do with Idiocracy.

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[jfengel]

You shouldn't even be reading this post for another ten minutes or so, because I should be writing it on Mars.

Er, you do realize that you yourself don't actually get to go to Mars, right?

They could have put the money into sending SOMEBODY to Mars, but the odds against it being you are, uh, astronomical. Face it: if you're very lucky, you might be able to spend $100k and get into a brief orbit before you die. Not even the Moon is in your actual reach.

If you think that a vicarious trip to another planet is worth the scores of billions of dollars we'd all have to come up with to pay for it, by all means agitate for that. But be very, very clear: it's not going to be you.

Personally, I'm not crazy about spending those billions so somebody else gets to go to space and produce very little science. I'd rather see it put into expendable robot missions, and that goes for the ISS as well.

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[Thoughts from Englan]

Coming as it does near the anniversary of the first Apollo landing, this is a really depressing story. Idiocracy, indeed.

I assure you, that's not a coincidence; that's genius marketing. And I don't see what it has to do with Idiocracy.

Well it's 40 years to late to be Lunacy

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can't really go to Mars without the know-how that you get from building large-scale space stations.

NASA could have completed many space stations in the early 80's and landed on Mars several times since the 90's. Unfortunately, the majority of American voters considered military spending to be more important.

And they still do...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[kestasjk]

How are we supposed to go to Mars without any understanding of surviving outside of Earth for extended periods? Why would we keep the ISS' heavy maintenance costs going longer than they're needed?

Don't think of it as a "space station, to conquer the far reaches of outer space", or a permanent monument for space tourists to visit. It's a zero-gravity lab, plain and simple; an extended mission, which will be discarded when complete.

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[jvkjvk]

Er, you do realize that you yourself don't actually get to go to Mars, right?

They could have put the money into sending SOMEBODY to Mars, but the odds against it being you are, uh, astronomical. Face it: if you're very lucky, you might be able to spend $100k and get into a brief orbit before you die. Not even the Moon is in your actual reach.

I think that was his point. I believe he is saying that by now, we should probably already have a base on mars, with the various people there having the ability to post to slashdot.

Your reply is making his point, not refuting it.

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[damburger]

The ISS is a perfectly capable space station. It isn't keeping anybody from Mars; in fact by providing a place to assemble a Mars-bound spaceship, it is helping. Certainly the Ares V, if it ever flies, cannot put up a Mars mission in one shot.

Do not blame a cheap (on the scale of government spending, not NASA spending) project for the fact that space travel is horrifically underfunded. Blame the small-minded penny pinchers demanding a tax cut for the millionaires they are convinced they shall join one day, and the politicians cynically purchasing the votes of the elderly with social spending and the campaign funds of the corporations with acquisitive wars.

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[Grishnakh]

His point is that lots of people should be in space, or on other planets/moons by now. Watch 2001 some time; if we had kept up the same rate of development that we had in the 60s, the things shown in that movie (large orbiting space station, moon base, regular transports to/from moon, manned ship en route to Jupiter, etc.) would be a reality by now.

Personally, I'm not crazy about spending those billions so somebody else gets to go to space and produce very little science. I'd rather see it put into expendable robot missions, and that goes for the ISS as well.

If we sent a team of geologists and other scientists to Mars, we would get far more science, far more quickly, than sending a handful of small robotic probes. It would cost a lot, yes, but you'd also get a lot. Spend a little, get a little, spend a lot, get a lot.

If we want to get to the point where we're doing things in space which actually benefit the economy in visible ways (asteroid mining, space-based solar power, or whatever), that'll require sending actual humans up there to do the work. We're not developing our know-how for this by sending up robots. The only way to get better at sending humans into space is to actually send humans into space and learn from the mistakes made.

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[Grishnakh]

I don't see a whole lot of people demanding tax cuts for millionaires. In fact, millionaires are already taxed far more than other people.

What I do see people complaining about is wasteful government spending. Instead of funding useful things like the space program, we're (actually, the Democrats) bailing out poorly-performing corporations so they can give big bonuses to their executives (AIG), and continually funding unnecessary wars. People are tired of being taxed to pay for crap like this, when they could spend their money on more useful things instead.

If the US government stopped the bail-outs, and cut the military funding to 1/4, diverted 1/4 to NASA, and returned the other 1/2 to the people with a big tax cut (for everyone, not just millionaires), I don't think there'd be a lot of complaining. Legalizing pot and stopping the enormous expenditure associated with its enforcement would also help the federal and state budgets a lot.

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[icebrain]

Ah, ignorance. "Just cut military spending and put it towards other stuff!" Sounds great--I like and support space exploration, too. But what are you going to give up in exchange?

Sustaining a certain level of military operations requires a certain amount of funding. And despite the fantasies and delusions of many, it's not there just to keep somebody's friends rich. Everything the military does, everything it operates, everywhere it goes, is driven in some way by the policies made by the civilian government.

For example, the US is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual-defense alliance created in response to a perceived threat from the Soviet Union following World War II. Effective membership in NATO carries with it certain obligations and responsibilities, including joint training operations and equipment purchases. Those cost money.

It has long been US policy to assist Taiwan in the event of an attack by the PRC. Again, fulfilling this commitment requires maintaining a certain level of readiness, both in terms of training and equipment. That costs money.

I could go on, but that would take more time than is reasonable. The point is, at the top level, the military has a certain set of "missions" assigned to it by the civilian leadership, both in furtherance of international policy goals and in direct defense of the US mainland. In addition, there is a further, almost unspoken policy requirement (driven by the people as a whole) that the military will try to minimize civilian collateral damage and its own casualties whenever possible.

At the next level down, the military looks at the missions and goals assigned to it, and tries to figure out the best way it can accomplish those goals within the financial, material, and human resources allocated to it. This is kind of a feedback loop; the military decides what it would ideally have and feeds that back to the civilian government, which might issue a revision, etc. In any case, the military analysis will come back with requirements for X airplanes, Y ships, Z people, etc.

Now, it's important to understand a few things. The notion of a "fair fight", of "honor" and "chivalry" on the battlefield, got kicked to the curb and left for dead a long time ago. You don't want a fair fight. You want it to be as unfair in your advantage as you can make it. If you're fighting a fair fight, you f'ed up. One of the ways you make the fight unfair is through advanced technology--more specifically, having more advanced technology than your opponent. It allows you to do many things, like minimize your own casualties, minimize civilian casualties and collateral damage, commit fewer personnel to an operation, operate with less supporting infrastructure, and so on. Obviously, advanced technology is expensive. You also have to think ahead if you want to maintain that advantage, and keep advancing at least as fast as any potential opponents. In practice, this means that you can't wait until everyone else is caught up with you before you bring out the next generation of equipment. You need to bring it out now, while even your current equipment is still better than everyone else, so you can start working on the next generation.

Even if you already have it designed, all this equipment is still more intricate and requires much greater resources to manufacture than in previous generations. You can't just ramp up the production rate overnight and build a whole bunch more fighters or ships after the war breaks out; it'll probably be over by the time the extra equipment starts rolling off the line. That means you have to have this stuff already made and ready to go; you can't just rely on being able to build more after the conflict starts.

Now, all of this pretty equipment is great and all, but it doesn't do anyone any good if nobody knows how to use it, or if it's broken. That means you need to train with it, and you need to maintain it, or you won't be able to use it when you need to. The same goes for personnel, too; everyon

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[Grishnakh]

Sustaining a certain level of military operations requires a certain amount of funding. And despite the fantasies and delusions of many, it's not there just to keep somebody's friends rich.

Most of it is. Halliburton and Blackwater sure got rich from the Iraq debacle.

Everything the military does, everything it operates, everywhere it goes, is driven in some way by the policies made by the civilian government.

No shit. The civilian government is corrupt, so the military, being an extension of that, operates in a way to benefits its civilian masters (who in turn act to benefit their buddies at Halliburton).

For example, the US is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual-defense alliance created in response to a perceived threat from the Soviet Union following World War II. Effective membership in NATO carries with it certain obligations and responsibilities, including joint training operations and equipment purchases. Those cost money.

Hello? The Soviets are gone now. Time to pare down those obligations and responsibilities. There's a lot of countries that are part of NATO, and they collectively spend a small fraction of what the US does for defense. It's time for us to return to a small level of spending like that.

It has long been US policy to assist Taiwan in the event of an attack by the PRC. Again, fulfilling this commitment requires maintaining a certain level of readiness, both in terms of training and equipment. That costs money.

I could go on, but that would take more time than is reasonable.

No, I think you should go on and on, because a couple of small examples do not explain why the USA needs to have military bases in more than 130 countries overseas.

We could easily be a part of NATO, and also effectively counter the North Korean threat, while giving the DOD a budget 1/10 as large as it currently has. Of course, we'd need to pull out of Iraq, a place we never had any business getting involved.

Now, it's important to understand a few things. The notion of a "fair fight", of "honor" and "chivalry" on the battlefield, got kicked to the curb and left for dead a long time ago. You don't want a fair fight. You want it to be as unfair in your advantage as you can make it. If you're fighting a fair fight, you f'ed up. One of the ways you make the fight unfair is through advanced technology--more specifically, having more advanced technology than your opponent. It allows you to do many things, like minimize your own casualties, minimize civilian casualties and collateral damage, commit fewer personnel to an operation, operate with less supporting infrastructure, and so on. Obviously, advanced technology is expensive. You also have to think ahead if you want to maintain that advantage, and keep advancing at least as fast as any potential opponents. In practice, this means that you can't wait until everyone else is caught up with you before you bring out the next generation of equipment. You need to bring it out now, while even your current equipment is still better than everyone else, so you can start working on the next generation.

Blah, blah, blah. We don't have any highly technologically advanced enemies. Our enemies are countries like NK (which has no real technology to speak of, except some very short-range nukes to threaten SK and Japan with), Iran (which is flying our own F-14s from way way back when we sold them to them; they don't exactly have any modern hardware either), and Iraq and Afghanistan which have no military technology at all. In short, technologically, all we need are a handful of nukes to scare places like NK and Iran, and maybe some Navy ships to project force, and that's about it. We certainly don't need any cutting-edge military technology, because no one else has it either. And all our recent campaigns have needed boots on the ground far more than any expensive technologies.

It means that you can't just arbitrarily cut the military's fun

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[bored]

What you are describing is called an arms race. Worse yet, the whole thought pattern stems from the idea that you need big ground and air offensive capability. If you step back and consider simple defense its actually quite simple, either MAD with hydrogen MIRVs works, or it doesn't. Then the only real offensive capability you need is in the form of being able to project special forces teams anywhere in the globe on short order to deal with situations that don't warrant the big guns. Even worse, small automated missiles are basically unstoppable in large enough quantities to take out anything of real value (aircraft carriers, bombers, etc) so you looking at a a fairly small offensive capability being able to do pretty serious damage. Thankfully, the same actors that have that kind of technology also have nukes so we don't go to war with them. Still, even without big government support the military is massively lacking against this kind of attack. Look at the current crop of IEDs in Iraq. A fairly small number of "guerrillas" has done an inordinate amount of damage. The current military/political stance is just a huge error.

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[xednieht]

Christ, what a rathole for money that thing is.

You shouldn't even be reading this post for another ten minutes or so, because I should be writing it on Mars. Instead, yay, let's pay a bunch of underemployed Russian rocket scientists to build another Skylab/Mir, and see what happens when we blow bubbles in LEO.

Coming as it does near the anniversary of the first Apollo landing, this is a really depressing story. Idiocracy, indeed.

NASA is the rathole for money.

There's nothing up there, in fact there's such an abundance of nothing there that there's a vacuum.

Re:Only 6 years after completion?!

[icebrain]

First, I never stated that we should have a "global" military with bases all over the world, and be involved everywhere. What I said was that, if you want to cut military funding, you're going to have to give some of that up, and you're going to have to think long and hard about the consequences. Maybe it would be good to do that, to pull out of most places we're involved in and lock down the borders. I think it would be, anyways. But you still have to think about your actions before just abruptly cutting funds. Many people are under the illusion that you can just drastically cut the military's budget at random without any effect; I'm trying to point out that that isn't the case.

Second, "this is what we're doing right now" and "this is what we need right now" is not any kind of basis on which to plan military procurement for the next 20 years. That's a classic case of "trying to fight the last war" syndrome. No, we don't need F-22s in Iraq. But they'll be useful in North Korea for taking down air defense sites and helping to stop the flood of low-tech fighters they use. They'll certainly be useful if anything happens against Iran, since their aircraft are somewhat more advanced (they use relatively modern Russian designs, and have fairly advanced ground-based defenses). And you flat-out [i]need[/i] them in a war with China, as unlikely as such a war may seem [i]at the present time[/i]. You don't plan your military on best-case scenarios, and given the speed at which modern wars erupt, you simply don't have time to build up a small peacetime military to face the threat. It has to be ready beforehand. If there's one thing in history class, it's that you can't make definitive statements about the future when it comes to international relations. Fifteen years from now, the country you were at war with might be your friend, and your previously close ally might be aiming artillery your direction. You have to plan accordingly, and if that means buying expensive fighters and submarines that may never get used to their full capability, so be it. I'd rather spend the money now, even if we don't use that capability, than skimp on it to save money and be desperately wishing we had those F-22s later on. It's kind of like paying extra for additional airbags and safety features in your car--you probably won't ever need them, in which case you spent the money for nothing and dragged all that additional weight around. But that's better than getting in an accident without those things to protect you, and wishing you had paid for them.

Third, the reason many other countries get away with such small military budgets is that they know full well the US will ride to their aid in a serious conflict. That's why European countries have gotten away with smaller expenditures; not only are their economies smaller, but the US has essentially a permanent presence there. The US kind of adopted that "world policeman" status; right or wrong, many came to rely on that.

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it...

1. Build ISS
2. Deorbit...
.
.
.
X. Profit?!?!

Re:WTF?

[uofitorn]

The ISS remains an enormous cash sink to maintain with relatively little scientific value compared to other endeavors. If you want something to complain about, look towards the people who made the decision to build it to begin with. At this point, I think it's about cutting losses.

I can't find the article in question at the moment, but the Economist ran an article a few months ago reporting that something along the lines of 50% of NASA's budget is devoted to the ISS alone.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't a recent president once say: "For NASA, space is still a high priority".
Would this indicate that he didn't know what he was talking about...?

  And what is it with republicans and mental capacity anyways?
You had Reagan, who wasn't a complete dunce but not far from. Then GB Senior, who I guess was kinda OK but had that fantastic quote-machine Dan Quayle attached and then George "The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country." W. Nuff said there.

  At the same time the democrats have had Bill Clinton (yes he fooled around with his intern, did that really make him a worse president or were y'all just jealouse ?) and now Obama (well to be fair he does have Joe Biden). Each one of them probably have a higher IQ than the last three republican presidents put together.

  - Peder

Re:WTF?

[vlm]

I don't get it...

Here, let me help you

1. Build ISS
2. Deorbit...
.
. .

I think we are OK so far?

X. Profit?!?!

You mean:

X. Profit for the sub-contractor friends of the congressmen in the 80s whom originally approved the thing.

But that was friends of the senatorial class of '80. Even Strom Thurmond is gone now. So, who needs to kick-back his friends anymore? Deorbit the thing and work on a new make-work/make-vote/make-contributions program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond

Re:WTF?

[ArsonSmith]

Seriously, NASA is just welfare for engineers.

Re:WTF?

[SydShamino]

The profit was for the contractors, and occurred at step 1...

Re:WTF?

[Hurricane78]

You raise I bigger point than you may be aware of:
What if the whole point was to make money. And now the only way to keep making money off of it, is to plan a de-orbit and bill for that. Then plan a new station and let the cycle begin again. Meanwhile filling the pockets of Boeing or whoever earned most from it.

Re:WTF?

[sanosuke001]

almost...

1. Build ISS
2. State plans for De-Orbit
3. Receive additional funding
4. Profit!
5. GOTO 2

Re:WTF?

[ndavis]

I don't get it...

1. Build ISS 2. Deorbit... . . . X. Profit?!?!

This is NASA which is government funded so profit does not happen so instead the last step is infusions of capital from Congress.

1. Build ISS
2. Talk about Deorbit and deadline
3. .....
4. Cash Infusion from Congress to keep ISS in obit
5. Deorbit ISS anyhow

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing the critical step in the middle:

3. A fucking miracle happens.

Re:WTF?

[kestasjk]

1. Build ISS
2. Perform the zero-gravity experiments it was constructed for, getting many years of science out of it (including the ones up until now)
3. Deorbit

By your logic I could say "what are the LHC guys thinking? they'll be shutting it down in a few years!" But that completely misses the point of constructing it..

I don't get how so many have completely misunderstood the ISS' purpose..

Re:WTF?

[damburger]

War is welfare for military contractors. Nation building is welfare for whatever corporations scratch the leaders back. Capitalism is, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky, welfare for the uber-rich.

Judging by your signature, you would want a government that focuses on the latter; spending only on those facilities required to keep the rich, rich. I would rather world governments gave money to the kind of people who sent men to the Moon than to the kind of people who made a killing wrecking the world economy, but perhaps that is me being a pinko liberal European commie socialist or some bullshit like that.

Re:WTF?

[damburger]

Basically its a Bond villain strategy: give us money or we begin orbital bombardment.

Re:WTF?

[OrangeTide]

Retaining engineers in your country is a very strategic endeavor, even if you don't have anything practical for them to do.

Re:WTF?

[dpilot]

You forgot "lather, rinse, repeat".

You've got to destroy the first one before you can say, "Oops, we really DID need that thing up there," and go for another one.

Re:WTF?

[ArsonSmith]

You paraphrased out a fairly important part of that being 'American' Capitalism. A natural capitalism wouldn't have things like limited liability or government sponsored corporations for people to hide their failures, yet still reap their benefits. The recently fluttered term "to big to fail" would never be said in a true capitalist economy.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

War is welfare for military contractors. Nation building is welfare for whatever corporations scratch the leaders back. Capitalism is ... welfare for the uber-rich.

Military and "Nation building" are government activities. These have nothing to do with capitalism. Do you know what it is? Have you considered going back to school or perhaps studying harder if you are still in school?

Tags: damburger (981828), back to school.

Re:WTF?

[damburger]

Military and nation building in pursuit of capital is by definition capitalism, isn't it? You are a bit of a retard really.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Military and nation building in pursuit of capital is by definition capitalism, isn't it? You are a bit of a retard really.

You are very far off. Perhaps you should watch less TV? A typical definition of capitalism: "an economic system based on private ownership of capital". There are both definitions more derogatory and those that are more philosophically flushed out. To write, "state activities X & Y in pursuit of capital" hardly makes it capitalism. You are confusing a, at best, fucked-up-instance of a class with the definition of the class itself. It would also require private ownership and investment risk of the pursuers, i.e., the armed forces. That is not the case. As a homework assignment, perhaps you should look up "retard".

Tags: damburger (981828), retard(?).

What gives them the right

[petes_PoV]

... to say when or if it should be destroyed.

The first word in it's title is "International" and a lot of countries have put a lot of money into building it. Maybe they would like to start getting some returns on their payments now that it's finally almost finished, rather than having one single country decide that just because they're bored with it the whole thing should be crashed into the sea.

Re:What gives them the right

[SkankinMonkey]

I believe NASA was given control of its decommissioning when the countries established the ISS charter.

Re:What gives them the right

[RobBebop]

I know NASA (and inherently the USA) has put more money than all the other nations involved (possibly combined) into the ISS.

Nonetheless, I think this is an example of a political maneuver to get those in charge of the money to wake up and realize that NASA has two huge projects on it's hands that need funding. Between ISS and Constellation, the NASA budget needs a bump or both of these will end up in the doldrums because of underfunding.

Remember at the end of Apollo when missions 18, 19, and 20 transitioned to Project Skylab? I think resolving what to do with ISS will be a matter of figuring out a new function for it to serve in the 20's and 30's. Hell... I'd like to see them tether it to a geosynchronous orbit and convert the thing into a space elevator to reduce the cost of energy needed to send 1 kg of material into space to less than $10k.

Re:What gives them the right

[Karrde45]

The ISS would be absolutely worthless as a tether for a space elevator, not enough mass to be useful. Not to mention the fact that the anchor for a theoretical space elevator would have to be well past Geosynchronous orbit. The CG of the elevator needs to be at GEO, not the end of it.

Re:What gives them the right

[maxume]

Well, someone has to pay for the orbital boosts it needs on a regular basis or it will de-orbit all on its own, and NASA is probably the most on the hook if it crashes into something, so if NASA doesn't feel like paying and no one else steps up...

Re:What gives them the right

[SkankinMonkey]

The Russians already have plans to detach part of the ISS and use it for part of their next station, so it's not a total loss when decommissioned.

Re:What gives them the right

[BobMcD]

Nonetheless, I think this is an example of a political maneuver to get those in charge of the money to wake up and realize that NASA has two huge projects on it's hands that need funding. Between ISS and Constellation, the NASA budget needs a bump or both of these will end up in the doldrums because of underfunding.

Speaking of wake-up calls, someone needs to get the word out that the economy is really bad right now, and serious attention needs to be paid toward operating with smaller budgets. This goes for government, NASA, and even our own pocketbooks. It would be really swell to get those in charge of the money to wake up and realize THAT.

Posturing for money right now seems to be in very bad taste. I wish I had awakened to a world where NASA was describing how they're going to keep it aloft on a shoestring, or some such, due to the reduction of money at the economic level.

Re:What gives them the right

[Anonymous Coward]

so why not just sell the rest to them? sounds like a better deal than crashing it on the ocean for free...

Re:What gives them the right

[holmstar]

I remember hearing about a research satellite that had a very long tether that it could use to either generate electricity from the earths magnetic field (by sacrificing some of it's own velocity/altitude) or use electricity to push against the magnetic field and raise its orbit.

Seems like that would be a partial solution to the space stations orbital decay problem. It has power from it's solar panels, so it theoretically could boost it's own orbit without needing a spacecraft (with extra fuel) attached.

Resupply missions would still be needed, of course, but they wouldn't have to bring excess fuel, so they could be done cheaper than is currently possible.

Re:What gives them the right

[maxume]

The station has a mass of 300,000 kg. I'm not going to look up how much power the solar panels produce and how much thrust that would translate into, but even so, I'm pretty sure it is not even close to enough.

Re:What gives them the right

[kestasjk]

They're not "crashing it into the sea" out of spite. It takes massive maintenance costs to keep it up there! Honestly do you think if other countries decided to absorb NASA's costs NASA would still be de-orbiting it?

Re:What gives them the right

[Anonymous Coward]

The last component is a warp drive. The will de-orbit into outer space.

Re:What gives them the right

[DerekLyons]

Sure they have plans - but like dozens of other 'plans' they've publicized over the last twenty years, this one too hasn't a snowballs chance of happening. They can't even come up with the money to meet their current commitments, let alone the considerably larger hardware/cash commitments required to support an independent station.

Re:What gives them the right

[kestasjk]

Hell... I'd like to see them tether it to a geosynchronous orbit and convert the thing into a space elevator to reduce the cost of energy needed to send 1 kg of material into space to less than $10k.

Wow I don't know where to begin with this..

First off the ISS is 350km above the earth. Geosynchronous orbit is 42,164km out, over 100x higher. And the ISS is huge, the size of the rocket needed to move it out to that distance would make the Saturn V rocket (skyscraper size) look like a firecracker.

That doesn't include the "rope" needed, which doesn't even exist yet.

And that doesn't solve the fact that the ISS is a laboratory and can't just be converted to something functionally completely different.. The various ISS modules are for the various experiments it performs, you can't just say "let's make this thing a space elevator" any more than you can make a satellite a space elevator.

Plus if the ISS actually was that far out it would become useless for its actual purpose, because it would be ridiculously expensive to get astronauts out there.

.. News for nerds indeed..

Re:What gives them the right

[RobBebop]

Since intricate knowledge of orbital mechanics is one-step beyond the expertise of normal "news for nerds", I'd like to thank you for the clarification. I was just throwing an idea out there. My point wasn't "make it a space elevator", but rather "there might be some other use".

Fuck... here's another non-thought-out idea... if it's really not worth continuing to fund, why not try selling it to Disney for pennies on the dollar and let them commercialize it as a movie location or extension of their earth bound theme parks.

Re:What gives them the right

[Bigby]

But this is the US and Russia and you are talking about capitalism.

Re:What gives them the right

[Anonymous Coward]

an alternative could be to abandon it and let the other countries pick up the slack, saving the option to blow it up should its orbit destabilize over the United States due to a lack of support from the other countries.

in this case perhaps they were willing to abandon the ISS and nobody ccame forward with the means to keep it up there. you can't expect the United States to shoulder the costs so that the rest of the world has a space station. the US doesn't owe anyone that.

Re:What gives them the right

[Dr. Spork]

I agree! We could sell it to China or some private company who will pay for the deorbiting and has an actual plan of what could be done there. Maybe they could grow silicon crystals? Who knows? But now that we burned so much fuel lifting all that stuff, it's a shame to just let it all fall down.

Re:What gives them the right

[uvajed_ekil]

International? I suppose the ISS is slightly more international than the international coalition that invaded and defeated Iraq. Slightly. The US has always been behind most of the engineering, construction, funding and maintenance of the ISS, you know. I suppose if the ESA wanted to take it over we'd chuckle and let them handle the problems, but that isn't going to happen.

Re:What gives them the right

[osu-neko]

... to say when or if it should be destroyed.

Nothing gives them the right, unfortunately. If it were up to them, they'd keep it up there. But since they don't have the right to do that, they'll be forced to bring it down. From TFA:

"If we've spent a hundred billion dollars, I don't think we want to shut it down in 2015," Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) told Augustine's committee.

Suffredini [the NASA head who was there announcing the plan] agrees.

It's a bad idea. NASA agrees it's a good idea. NASA doesn't want to shut it down in 2015. But if no one comes up with the money to keep it going, it'll have to be shut down in 2015. If you don't want it shut down, come up with the money.

Re:What gives them the right

[osu-neko]

ugh s/good/bad/

Re:What gives them the right

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA wants funding, why not sell it to China or Russia?

Re:What gives them the right

[Anonymous Coward]

In Russia, space station module detaches you.

Re:What gives them the right

[spire3661]

How much of it do they actually own? From what I recall the US ended up having to build alot of the Russian parts themsleves, or at least have a helping hand in it.

Re:What gives them the right

[Anonymous Coward]

"crashed into the sea."

Would that be the "D" sea?

Re:What gives them the right

[Anonymous Coward]

Since any orbit beyond GEO has a frequency of over 24 hours, the tether would not be geosynchronous. Therefore the space elevator won't work.

Everything I've read about space elevators has this 'nail one end down, the other comes loose' kind of problem.

Re:What gives them the right

[holmstar]

It only has to counteract drag from the VERY thin atmosphere that is present at that altitude. I don't think the power requirements would be particularly high. It would just be a constant gentle nudge.

Re:What gives them the right

[maxume]

Well, here is a NASA discussion of the thing:

http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast08sep97_1.htm

It indicates that a powered tether could indeed counteract much of the atmospheric drag (apparently if varies throughout the year and the tether they discuss is not sized such that it would be enough all of the time).

Re:What a waste

[MeatBag PussRocket]

what, your laptop getting warranty repair work again?

Why not preserve it?

[bbasgen]

I don't fully understand why useful objects in space are discarded into the atmosphere. Isn't it feasible to send them into space, either in an extremely high orbit or just give it enough inertia to keep traveling in open space? Is it really not worth the time/fuel/effort? It seems odd that we can't keep a consistent, physical presence in space.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[The_mad_linguist]

Because it's less hazardous for future space missions to clear them out of orbit while we still can, rather than having to track new orbiting material.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[MobyDisk]

I think by "send them into space" he meant "send them out of orbit"

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Guysmiley777]

It takes a huge, huge, huge amount of energy to boost a kilogram in LEO out of the Earth's gravity well compared to how much energy it takes to deorbit that same kilogram.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[maxume]

If you boost it into a higher orbit, you need a bigger rocket to get there, making the station less useful. Boosting something the size of ISS completely out of a low orbit would take a huge amount of fuel.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[jafiwam]

Escape velocity is approximately twice orbital velocity. * So, the ISS would need to have the booster equivalent of all the stuff they have up there COMBINED times two to get into Solar orbit as opposed to Earth orbit.

Even then, you aren't getting too far out of Earth orbit and run the risk of dropping the thing back from an unpredictable orbit some time over the next centuries.

So, no, it's not economical in any way shape or form to escape them, and it could be dangerous.

Deorbiting into the Pacific (which is usually where they target) is much safer and easier and can be done with a fraction of the fuel (they probably have enough on board).

*Extremely rough terms

Re:Why not preserve it?

[mcvos]

That takes way too much energy. It'd be a very big mission in itself, and it's not something that ISS is designed to do. A higher orbit might be an option, but still costs a lot of energy. De-orbiting is cheap.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[PieSquared]

"Isn't it feasible to send them into space?"

No. Remember the moon mission? Remember the rocket we strapped to the lander to get it into lunar orbit? Yea, we'd need a bigger one to push the lander actually out of earth orbit. And of course the ISS is larger then the lunar lander. To burn it up in the atmosphere, though... well it needs periodic boosts to *not* burn up in the atmosphere. We of course would like to pick when and where exactly it falls, so there will be a little push at the end, but nowhere what we'd need to get it out of earth orbit.

Besides, why *not* burn it in the atmosphere? Not like it's dangerous when we do it on purpose - satellites burn up entirely and something big like the ISS will end up in a few square miles of open ocean after a few days of warnings. And a space station in sun orbit instead of earth orbit... would be as useful as one lying burnt at the bottom of the pacific. I suppose one at a L4/5 could be useful, but only if we had plans/reasons to visit periodically. No, the most useful place for the ISS is just where it is.

Honestly, NASA probably just wants more money. Space travel is expensive, and we want them to hold the ISS in orbit, go to the moon, and keep launching satellites and whatnot. If they don't have enough money, one of them has to go, as this is a not-so-subtle reminder of.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I say stuff it with sensor and make it wander around the solar system, manned.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[mrdoogee]

Delta-V required to generate escape velocity for an object that size would be huge. The Earth's gravity even at the height the ISS is at is still incredibly powerful. I sincerely doubt that the onboard fuel reserves have enough thrust to accomplish that. The easier solution is to just give it a nudge toward Earth and let gravity and friction do the work for you.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[GigG]

Gravity is cheap. Rocket engines, the fuel for them, getting both of those up to space isn't.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell us why the value of keeping the ISS around is less than the cost of tracking one more object.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Anonymous Coward]

A better ( and fairly inexpensive ) solution would be to install an ion engine on it ( very low thrust, which is all the ISS can stand anyway, very long duration, and very efficient ) and boost it on into Lunar orbit. It could still do science and serve as a stepping stone to a Lunar colony, which is both way less expensive than a Martian one. If nothing else, an ion engine would be able to maintain the existing orbit for a verrry long time, and serve as a long duration test bed for the ion engine, which we would need for a Martian outpost anyway.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Volante3192]

Because over long enough time it won't be just 'one more object.' It'll be 'many more objects.'

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Candid88]

That makes no sense at all.

There's tons of man-made waste discarded in space. From big pieces of Saturn V rockets to small pieces of smashed up Chinese satellite.

So NASA and and friends aren't too bothered about leaving useless bits of metal in space, but a multi-billion dollar space station of obvious advantage to future manned space flight must be destroyed?

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's relatively easy to de-orbit things, especially things in LEO, but reaching escape velocity takes a lot of fuel.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[RobBebop]

I say stuff it with sensor and make it wander around the solar system, manned.

The crew would die after about 6 month because they'd run out of food.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Because if we just abandon it, it's orbit will decay in months perhaps, and it will result in an uncontrolled reentry, over who-knows-which inhabited regions. It takes stationkeeping to counter the decay from atmospheric drag, stationkeeping takes fuel, fuel needs to be brought there, which takes more Shuttle/ATV/Progress/whatever missions, which cost money. The same atmospheric drag on the other hand will prevent the station from ever becoming space junk (for more than a few months anyway).

Re:Why not preserve it?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Delta-V required to generate escape velocity for an object that size would be huge.

Delta-V required to generate escape speed (not velocity) for an object that size is exactly the same as escape speed for a basketball. Escape speed does not depend on mass.

Also, it's largely irrelevant. If we wanted to keep ISS, we'd not be sending it out of Earth orbit. Raise its orbit, maybe.

Which is doable, if we're willing to start real soon - double the size of whatever it's using now to maintain orbit, and keep feeding it fuel, and eventually it will be in a new, higher, orbit. Or if whatever we're using now is only used intermittently, run it less intermittently, and keep feeding it fuel.

Problem being that we won't have any way to reach it in a higher orbit, unless we develop an OTV (which we had planned to do in the 80's), or develop a new manned vehicle with, say, 1 nautical mile per second of delta-V (which, oddly enough, is the design delta-V of Orion - God only knows why they picked that exact value.).

Note that Orion can reach an orbit more than 2000 km above the Earth's surface....

Re:Why not preserve it?

[onemorechip]

Escape velocity is approximately twice orbital velocity...Extremely rough terms

I'll say. The actual factor is the square root of 2 (assuming by "orbital velocity" we are referring to a circular orbit).

Re:Why not preserve it?

[onemorechip]

"Gravity" is not what you use to achieve the change in kinetic energy required to de-orbit an object. You need to fire rockets to slow the thing down. Once the speed is reduced enough so that perigee is within Earth's atmosphere, then atmospheric braking does the rest.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell us why the value of keeping the ISS around is less than the cost of tracking one more object.

Without regular shipments of fuel and regular thruster maintenance, the the ISS would no longer be able to change its course back into an orbit, which it has to do roughly once a month, otherwise it would fall back towards earth and be destroyed in the atmosphere anyway, except now with a very real potential of large chunks not burning up and striking land many places over.

Do you know how much ONE such lawsuit would cost?
A lot more than 15 minutes worth of fuel (which would be the last 15 minuets left by the time they de-orbited it)

Now, the option of sending it out of orbit INTO space is a nice idea.
This would still cost a few million dollars to do, but only once. (It requires a lot more fuel to boost out of orbit than to stay in it) but once that is done, it would no longer be an orbital piece of junk to track/avoid.
It might even be possible to include a part of that fuel in with it's regular resupply missions so less is needed at the time of de-commission.

Sadly, even that little amount of thrust needed will probably tear the partial station apart.
The Russians plan to keep their ISS modules, so only the US segments will be privy to this plan.

This means we need a few more billion dollars to figure out how to attach thrusters to multiple separate non-connecting station segments, not all of which were designed for this, and then get fuel to all of them.
Such a project, if started now, could be finished by decommission time, but it is far from a last minute project to pull off.

If only this was NASA's tact. Make the final mission to 'decommission' the station last 16 years in and of itself ;}

Oh, all those extra years will need money to pay these people. I won't pretend to estimate NASA salary and man hour counts for such a project, but all that would need money too.

Suggestions like this remind me of StarTreks Q in 'Deja-Q'
"Easy, simple, just change the gravitational constant of the universe!"

Easy perhaps to a genius with more IQ points than all of NASA put together such as the GP :}
Not so easy us engineers who have those pesky annoying laws of physics to deal with...

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Androclese]

Because that huge station will be hit by all the small useless bit of junk, making more bits of junk to float about in orbit. Eventually, that solid station would look like swiss cheese and turn into a giant floating junk pile of millions of bits. That would be horrifyingly worse.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[AshtangiMan]

We could man it with politicians.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[GigG]

There are basicly two forces acting on ISS and everyting else in orbit right now. Gravity and inertia. The inertia wants to send the body in a straight line. Gravity does too it is just a different straigt line. Left alone sooner or later the ISS will loose inertia and gravity will win. But what I should have said was the rockets and fuel de-orbit it are cheaper than the many rockets and many loads of fuel to keep it up their forever.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[osu-neko]

That makes no sense at all.

There's tons of man-made waste discarded in space. From big pieces of Saturn V rockets to small pieces of smashed up Chinese satellite.

Yes, and this is a serious problem of great concern to NASA.

So NASA and and friends aren't too bothered about leaving useless bits of metal in space,

They're extremely bothered by this.

.... but a multi-billion dollar space station of obvious advantage to future manned space flight must be destroyed?

Not if they can help it, but if no one comes up with the money to keep it up, then their own choices are to deorbit it in a controlled manner or watch it deorbit of its own accord in a possibly disastrous and even life-threatening manner. Oddly enough, they've chosen the most safe option of the ones that they have available to them.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[AK Marc]

You were right, he was pedantic. Gravity is what crashes them. Orbit is flinging yourself at the ground and missing. De-orbiting is just a little nudge so that you don't miss. Gravity still does all the real work.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[bbasgen]

Besides, why *not* burn it in the atmosphere?

It seems wasteful. For example, the rovers provide very tangible benefits at relatively low cost and they managed to outlive their "useful" lives many times over. The benefits of the ISS don't seem as tangible, and the cost is very high. The struggle for a lay person like myself is that the notion of a human presence on a space station lends itself to the idea of a progressively longer arrangement. If Mir did it in 15 years, then ISS will do it in 30, for example. This provides some crude indication of a progression, improvement, such that bigger and more long lasting stations will continue into the future. In essence, this all seems to lead to a conclusion that ISS is not terribly ground breaking. It may instead by Mir version 1.5: continuing similar science without really stepping space exploration into the next phase.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[onemorechip]

Actually gravity curves spacetime. The ISS will follow a geodesic path (a straight line is a special case: a geodesic in flat space), to the extent it isn't acted on by external forces. There is always going to be some decay of an orbit because of external forces, but Earth's gravity will never change the object's orbit. Without the external forces it would stay up forever. (To be pedantic, since gravity according to general relativity isn't a force, you could have perturbations of the orbit that aren't caused by "external forces" that would result in the object crashing to Earth, but that's not how we'd want to de-orbit the ISS.)

Re:Why not preserve it?

[onemorechip]

I wasn't being pedantic but now I will be: "Work" is force integrated over distance. Gravity is not a force so does no work. Actual work will change the geodesic path followed by an object (the ground hitting the object will do this in a big way, for example).

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Workaphobia]

New orbiting material? It's one very large, predictable and trackable piece compared to the tens of thousands that we already have to deal with.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[metaforest]

Deorbiting into the Pacific (which is usually where they target) is much safer and easier and can be done with a fraction of the fuel (they probably have enough on board).

I'm pretty sure that there's a mission requirement that they have more than enough fuel on-board for a controlled de-orbit at all times.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on some back of an envelope calculations, it takes about twice the energy to escape Earth's gravity as it took to put the ISS into orbit, and the ISS was put there piece by piece over several missions. So I would say not worth the time/fuel/effort.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[AK Marc]

Gravity is not a force so does no work.

Gravity isn't a force? F=g*m1*m2/r^2. That's gravity, and it's a force. I'm confused as to what you think gravity is, if not a force.

I wasn't being pedantic but now I will be:

If you are going to be pedantic, at least be correct...

Re:Why not preserve it?

[syousef]

I don't fully understand why useful objects in space are discarded into the atmosphere. Isn't it feasible to send them into space, either in an extremely high orbit or just give it enough inertia to keep traveling in open space?

For the same reason that, when you finish playing with a ball, you don't hurl it into space. You drop it. It takes a lot less energy.

To hurl something into space like that you'd need to send up another massive rocket to push it out.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[codeButcher]

We could man it with politicians.

As a male, I resent your use of the word "man" in that sentence. May I suggest you use "stuff"?

Also, this seems a good option only if the course is set to the shortest route to the sun.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[onemorechip]

I'm working in the ISS's inertial frame of reference. Here gravity is a fictitious force, no more a force than centrifugal force is.

I'm well aware of that you could model it as a real force and work in a non-inertial frame of reference. But whether you choose to do so or not is completely beside the point. An object in orbit, not being acted on by (real) forces, will have a constant total energy. The change in energy required to deorbit an object doesn't come from gravity, even if you are working in the Earth's non-inertial frame. You seem to disagree but I'm not sure why.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[AK Marc]

The change in energy required to deorbit an object doesn't come from gravity, even if you are working in the Earth's non-inertial frame. You seem to disagree but I'm not sure why.

I disagree because you are wrong. Gravity is a force. You said it is not. If you use energy that decelerates the object, the force of gravity will de-orbit it. You don't need to make it collide with the Earth by accelerating it towards the Earth, you just need to slow it down and the force of gravity will do the rest. You seem to be saying that there is no real effect of gravity, yet it's obviously a big deal there because if the force of gravity wasn't acting, it would be shooting off in a straight line and there would be no orbit.

Re:Why not preserve it?

[onemorechip]

If you use energy that decelerates the object, the force of gravity will de-orbit it

Changing the object's energy is what changes the orbit. Gravity does not. There are two ways (that I know of) to change the object's energy. One way is dissipation as heat (braking through the atmosphere). The other is to transfer the energy to or from something else. I can suggest three means of accomplishing the second: propulsion, collision, and tethering.

Gravity does not *change* the orbit. Gravity is the curvature of spacetime that *defines* the orbit (and all possible orbits). Which is not the same as "saying that there is no real effect of gravity".

W.T.F.

[chebucto]

From wikipedia:

On-orbit construction of the station began in 1998 and is scheduled to be complete by 2011, with operations continuing until at least 2015. In the first quarter of 2016 unless there is a change in policy ... the space station will be de-orbited.

So, 13 years of construction and four years of (full-capacity) operation. This sets the standard for white elephants. As far as I'm concerned, they should either de-orbit it now and stop throwing good money after bad, or keep it up there for a lot longer, if only to do experiments on long-term living in space.

Re:W.T.F.

[Anubis IV]

Of course, you're discounting the fact that they've been able to do experiments and science up there in it for over a decade already. It's not as if those last four years will be more valuable than all of the previous years combined. I'd imagine that a significantly greater quantity of research of greater importance would have been carried out in those first thirteen years, as compared to the last four years, given the newness of the station and the length of time it was in use.

Re:W.T.F.

[A beautiful mind]

Not to mention the fact that the ISS is not so much a station, but a learning experiment on how to construct and run a space station. Think of all the subtle things, like the problems they had with toilets and so on...

Re:W.T.F.

[haifastudent]

Of course, you're discounting the fact that they've been able to do experiments and science up there in it for over a decade already. It's not as if those last four years will be more valuable than all of the previous years combined. I'd imagine that a significantly greater quantity of research of greater importance would have been carried out in those first thirteen years, as compared to the last four years, given the newness of the station and the length of time it was in use.

Wrong, almost no manned science has been happening on the ISS so far, only automated experiments (and no manufacturing). This is because the ship needs a three-person crew to run it. Only now, with six astronauts, is there crew available for science.

Re:W.T.F.

[larry bagina]

Did they find out if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in a zero gravity environment?

Re:W.T.F.

[morgauxo]

"It's not as if those last four years will be more valuable than all of the previous years combined."

Full sized crew.
Focus on using hte station rather than it's construction.

Why shouldn't the last years be the most valuable ones?

Re:W.T.F.

[AlecC]

Hardly new. The Apollo missions took years to build, and had a total mission length of about two weeks. Military aircraft have a design life of 5000 or so hours, compares to the 70,000 or so of civil aircraft. Just because it is expensive doesn't mean it needs to be long life.

Re:W.T.F.

[acoustix]

Not only that, but remember that the US won't have a vehicle to travel to the ISS after it's completed. Can you tell that this is a government-run operation?

And to think that we want the US government to get more involved in health care.....I can't wait!

Re:W.T.F.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your clarification doesn't make the GP wrong, smarty pants.

Re:W.T.F.

[Anonymous Coward]

But whats the point of de-orbiting it?

Keep the thing up there, and send up the tech required to break / melt it down to re-use as building materials for a FUTURE space station. (hell, there is a fucking SUN out there that can be used for exactly that with no blocking (except when it goes behind)
Just build a solar melter.

But as usual, NASAs shitty decisions have lead to this article.

Re:W.T.F.

[5KVGhost]

Well, let's say it's a model of how the post-Apollo NASA can construct and run a space station. Von Braun and his contemporaries had proposed multiple workable plans for constructing a space station back in the 1950's. And the American Skylab and Soviet Salyut missions had long since worked out a lot of the niggling little details.

Unfortunately, with our space program run solely by a pseudo-governmental agency, political and budget considerations inevitably meant that the station's scientific mission was heavily compromised. The original Space Station Freedom project was whittled down to the point where I remember reading space advocates sadly joke that, in the end, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." What we ended up with was the ISS.

Re:W.T.F.

[fm6]

... they've been able to do experiments and science up there in it for over a decade already.

No they haven't. They've done a fair amount of science, but there have been very long periods when there wasn't enough crew to do more than maintenance. These include the 30 months that the entire shuttle fleet was grounded after the loss of Columbia. Other periods have been forced by budget cutbacks.

Re:W.T.F.

[Anonymous Coward]

... Think of all the subtle things, like the problems they had with toilets and so on...

My friend, there's nothing subtle about a problem with the only toilet around....

Re:W.T.F.

[darkmeridian]

This sounds like NASA posturing meant to get more funding for the ISS.

At the same time, I think a lot has been learned while building the ISS. I am far from certain that the lessons justify the cost, but just building a complex structure in space was a valuable exercise.

Re:W.T.F.

[hab136]

But whats the point of de-orbiting it?

It will de-orbit on its own unless regular supply missions add more fuel to keep it in orbit, and a crew stays on board to keep it working.

If NASA de-orbits it, it will (hopefully) land someplace safe - like the ocean.

If it de-orbits on its own, it could land anywhere. Including on top of your house.

Re:W.T.F.

[osu-neko]

... or keep it up there for a lot longer, if only to do experiments on long-term living in space.

That would be NASA's first choice, if they had the ability to do so. Alas, they can't do this without money. As things stand right now, they must cease operations in 2015. It's not a "choice", it's a fact that they need to deal with and have absolutely no control over. They don't control the purse strings, they can only do what their funding allows, and their funding doesn't allow for that option both you and they would prefer.

Re:W.T.F.

[Anonymous Coward]

No no no. If you "learn" how to do something in orbit, then you never need to "learn" how to do it again, and how many people will have their employment threatened by all this "learning" if it is allowed to happen?

Just to turn a bolt, you need a special space wrench and a manual on how to use it (manufacturing, documentation writers), spares for training (more manufacturing), submerged tank testing (divers, support crews, scenario writers, videographers), not to mention the training classes (trainers, instructors) for the astronauts, who require lodging (housekeeping staff) while they train to use the wrench for that one bolt.

IF you get to a point where people just know how to do stuff in space, then ALL of that goes away. If it becomes, "put wrench on bolt and turn the sucker!" literally dozens of people will be out of work. The economy will be devastated.

So for that reason, space programs will never reach a point where they "know" something as a fact. This is why NASA is going back to the moon pretty much the way we did it the first time: everything about Apollo is set to be "relearned" from scratch. The science hasn't changed much in 40 years. The moon is the same. NASA's approach is more or less the same. What is new is the techniques to "learn" everything all over again and extract maximum dollars from it. So we're going to borrow grandad's space program and subject it to spending forces beyond human comprehension.

This is guaranteed employment for hundreds of thousands of workers for literally the next two or three decades. The shuttle program is being shut down not because it isn't effective and good for the most part. No. It's being shut down only because it can no longer garner the kind of attention and love and spending to keep everybody "learning" and working. It's run it's course. It's time for something new. And by new, I mean new enough to merit lots of spending.

Ares doesn't even have to work right away. Even better if it fails because THAT will ensure it takes even longer to do the mission. And that keeps people employed "learning" new stuff.

Re:W.T.F.

[gmhowell]

it could land anywhere. Including on top of your house.

It doesn't seem that that would be a huge concern, given that he's probably posting from his mom's basement.

I sure hope so....

[hesaigo999ca]

Of course, they have to bring it down , so they can get a new budget, or keep the old one, and then resend the new ISS up to space, instead of reusing/recycling parts, have a full forge up there, so you can melt down steel to then reshape it, etc...

There has to be many ways of doing certain things, even if we leave it up there and start building a second newer version, then the newer version with its smelt, can add to itself by taking apart the old one, and so on, and so on...sort of like the replicators from Stargate SG!..., no?

It would be cheaper, and alos less dangerous, for people down here....waiting for that ship to drop!

Re:I sure hope so....

[morgauxo]

in-orbit smelting seems a bit far fetched, at least for the next few decades but why not build a new station off of the old one? just keep adding modules, eventually start deorbiting old modules. Why build a whole new station every X years?

Next stop...

[scubamage]

...space port? Imagine it, we build a space port in geosynchronous orbit. It would decrease the necessity to have massive quantities of fuel expended for vehicles to reach orbital velocity since you'd already be at speed at launch time. They could plan for modularized spacecraft, and then simply deliver them to the port for construction and deployment. If a space elevator were ever to be built, it could serve as the end linkage. There are a ton of possibilities, and I think its ultimately where we're headed. So why not swing for the stars (no pun intended)?

Re:Next stop...

[cpotoso]

...space port? Imagine it, we build a space port in geosynchronous orbit. It would decrease the necessity to have massive quantities of fuel expended for vehicles to reach orbital velocity since you'd already be at speed at launch time. They could plan for modularized spacecraft, and then simply deliver them to the port for construction and deployment. If a space elevator were ever to be built, it could serve as the end linkage. There are a ton of possibilities, and I think its ultimately where we're headed. So why not swing for the stars (no pun intended)?

Right, because it will not cost anything to bring things to gs orbit... You still need to get the astronauts, fuel, food, water, gear, etc to there before you assemble and launch. I do not see the savings.

Re:Next stop...

[ctetc007]

Actually, the fuel spent would be the same (if not more) because it had to be spent to get the spacecraft components and fuel up to that altitude. The same spacecraft mass is still going to the same place, so the same amount of energy is being expended. It could actually be more because these components are being brought up in other launch vehicles, thus fuel is being spent on the carrier craft as well.

What this does help with, though, is reliability and redundancy. Instead of throwing all your eggs in one launch vehicle basket, you're going up to GEO in bits in and pieces, so if one of the launches fails, you don't loose the whole thing. This same idea is the main concept for the F6 fractionated spacecraft program.

Re:Next stop...

[Ambitwistor]

Why would you want to put a space port in geosynchronous orbit? It's harder to get there than to LEO, and I don't see any benefit of locating a space port over a stationary point on the Earth's surface, which is the only advantage of GEO. ("Future endpoint of a space elevator" doesn't sound like a very practical justification to me.)

(And a space port would decrease the necessity to expend fuel to reach orbital velocity? As others have pointed out, whatever you launch from the port, or its raw materials, needs to get to the space port somehow, so you're not saving fuel that way. You might save fuel if you build everything on the Moon and ship it from there instead of from Earth, but that presumes a moon base or factory too.)

Re:Next stop...

[scubamage]

We could begin creating specialized vehicles. Right now we have to build vessels with many purposes in mind. They have numerous stages to get the vehicles into orbit. Then the vehicles must have parts for landing, scientific observation, satellite dropping, repair facilities, etc. By having a space port, we could build dedicated craft to deliver equipment to said port - think space barges. Likewise, the vehicles launched from orbit could have specialized purposes. It would bring an end to the current idea that vessels have to be 'jacks of all trades.' Further the stage rockets would no longer be needed for individual craft to reach orbit since they are already there. To put it mathematically... suppose you launch 4 vehicles from earth, and each costs 1 million to launch (completely theoretical numbers). However, you build a barge type vehicle which needs its own stage rockets, costing 2.5 million to launch. It is capable of delivering the modular parts to create the 4 space craft to the port. Since those craft no longer need to be launched from earth, they no longer need the stage rockets to get there (the largest parts of our current space craft). This leads to an overall savings of 1.5 million on the launches alone. I'm pulling these numbers out of my arse, but I hope you are picking up on my train of thought.

Re:Next stop...

[imroy]

Imagine it, we build a space port in geosynchronous orbit. It would decrease the necessity to have massive quantities of fuel expended for vehicles to reach orbital velocity since you'd already be at speed at launch time.

Um, geosynchronous orbit (GEO) is a long way out - 36 000 km. It's a very high orbit compared to most other things we put into orbit. When a GEO satellite is launched, the rocket only launches it into a "geosynchronous transfer orbit" (GTO); a large booster then gives it enough delta-V to get up into GEO. Your idea would certainly not decrease the need for fuel.

Re:Next stop...

[Eric52902]

No pun intended? Really? Its like saying, "with all due respect". You can say it, but I see right through your little farce!

Re:Next stop...

[scubamage]

I am not a rocket scientist, and was mostly just throwing an idea out there as a pondering point :) As for decreasing the need for fuel, read my other followup post. By creating specialized delivery vehicles which could contain the parts for numerous other vehicles, you could yield a substantial savings. Further it would allow us to begin stockpiling parts in orbit, decreasing need for further launches to deploy parts.

Re:Next stop...

[Degro]

Then deorbit it?

Re:Next stop...

[imroy]

You might be interested in Russia's planned Parom spacecraft.

Re:Next stop...

[holmstar]

Further the stage rockets would no longer be needed for individual craft to reach orbit since they are already there.

What are you talking about? What the heck is a "stage rocket"? I presume this is just your name for the lifter, ie the rocket itself, and not the spacecraft attached to the top.

To put it mathematically... suppose you launch 4 vehicles from earth, and each costs 1 million to launch (completely theoretical numbers). However, you build a barge type vehicle which needs its own stage rockets, costing 2.5 million to launch. It is capable of delivering the modular parts to create the 4 space craft to the port. Since those craft no longer need to be launched from earth, they no longer need the stage rockets to get there (the largest parts of our current space craft). This leads to an overall savings of 1.5 million on the launches alone. I'm pulling these numbers out of my arse, but I hope you are picking up on my train of thought.

So you are proposing to build a huge heavy lift rocket that is capable of launching in one shot the same amount of mass (the four spacecraft) as four smaller rockets. (which you would then apparently have to assemble in orbit)

One large rocket probably is more efficient in terms of fuel consumed per kg of mass to orbit presuming appropriately sized stages, but I seriously doubt that it would be as much of an improvement as you are suggesting. Also you have to take into account the non-trivial cost of maintaining the space-port. Not to mention the fact that building things in microgravity is really difficult, and we are not at all good at it.

Frankly, I think you are more excited about the the idea that we would have a space-port than any practical improvements in terms of cost.

Re:Next stop...

[scubamage]

As mentioned elsewhere, I am not a rocket scientist, and I am trying to look at things in terms of cost. If a large amount of fuel is used in larger lift rockets (I used the term stage as I know they're often referred to as stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, etc), you do not need to have the metal housings, the assemblies to attach those housings to one another, the labor to assemble them, etc. Further, none of the crafts contained within have to have the mass of those housings, assemblies, etc.

Re:Next stop...

[holmstar]

The dry mass of a larger rocket (ie one that could lift as much as the four smaller rockets) might not be less than that of the four smaller rockets. Making the rocket larger means that the forces involved have increased, so the engines and structure all have to be made significantly stronger. In the end, you may well end up with a rocket that uses more fuel per kg than four smaller ones that can be built lighter. Yes, you wouldn't need 4 navigation/control computers on the large rocket, but computers don't weigh very much, and the only thing that is really going to matter is weight.

Re:Next stop...

[Jerom]

You're a manager aren't you? Hell, the way you sound, you could be my boss... ;-)

Re:Next stop...

[scubamage]

I wish I made that much money :) I'm just a network engineer, hahaha.

Re:Next stop...

[cpotoso]

Yes, you are pulling these numbers out of your arse. They have no support whatsoever. The cost to launch a payload is proportional to its weight (and to a lesser degree to the volume). To assemble things in orbit requires personnel (= food, air, etc). It will be much cheaper and easier to launch several pieces and have them couple together in orbit, without "assembly" per se. I do not see how you could have been modded up so high, to be honest...

Wait, before you do!

[SickFreak]

Build another one, then de-orbit both of them. Why build and destroy one when you can do two for twice the price?

Re:Wait, before you do!

[tburke261]

The first rule of goverment spending: "Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?". It's a great quote out of "Contact"

Re:Wait, before you do!

[morgauxo]

hey!! Maybe there's a second ISS already up there???

Re:Wait, before you do!

[mknewman]

Actually there are 2 more, sort of. There are 2 private space stations built by Bigelow, that have not ever been occupied (they were test vehicles). There are plans for a much larger 3 module permanent station. http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/080509-bigelow-genesis1-milestone.html

Re:Wait, before you do!

[dpilot]

It's also telling that the Bigelow design is basically NASAs "TransHab". I never understood the whole story, but the TranHab project had some really sore enemies, to the point that (from what I heard) ISS funding legislation was written specifically forbidding the TransHab to EVER be attached. Sounds like some more wonderful bits of corruption, there. I was at first skeptical because it was "inflatable" but upon further reading it sounded safer than traditional solid construction.

Sounds like a negotiation

[MpVpRb]

Sounds to me like the first move in a series of negotiations.

"Give us more money, or we drop it in the ocean".

This is not the last article on the subject that we will see...

Re:Sounds like a negotiation

[Colonel Korn]

Sounds to me like the first move in a series of negotiations.

"Give us more money, or we drop it in the ocean".

This is not the last article on the subject that we will see...

It's not exactly the first move, since this has been the publicly available schedule since before construction on the ISS even began.

Re:Sounds like a negotiation

[Razalhague]

This is not the last article on the subject that we will see...

Well, duh. The last article will be "ISS De-orbited Today".

Re:Sounds like a negotiation

[Anonymous Coward]

"Give us more money, or we drop it on the White House"

Fixed that for you.

At least make it an outhouse

[VoyagerRadio]

Fer cryin' out loud, at least make it an outhouse. A perfect one, too, if they make it bottomless...that's maintenance free!

First we need to...

[GottliebPins]

Deorbit Washington

Re:First we need to...

[haifastudent]

You do realize that this was the plan since the beginning: 13 years of construction and five of operation. Since it's construction began in 1998, the bodies in charge have had the goal of completing the station in 2011 and decommissioning it in 2016. This is nothing new to NASA or anyone else involved.

Re:First we need to...

[morgauxo]

But what if it doesn't entirely burn up? That could create a second Detroit!

Re:First we need to...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's means it is. I'm constantly amazed by the seemingly intelligent people that don't grasp this elementary fact.

Lock the doors and repel all boarders

[petes_PoV]

and declare independence.

With the russians being the only people (once the scuttle is sent to the knacker's yard) who have the ability to send people to the ISS, and the europeans with their independent supply craft, it may even be possible to ignore whatever NASA wants to do. Come 2016, it may even be that there were no more americans on the station - in which case all the existing occupants would have to do would be to stop any more of them arriving. Once the high costs of construction have been met and the station enters a lower cost maintenance phase of it's life, there could well be deals to be done with other countries to keep the station supplied and crews rotated and some real work done.

Last of all, I would really laugh if the de-orbiting project threw up some show-stoppers which showed that the station was now TOO BIG to be safely taken apart, without affecting it's overall stability - and the risk of the whole thing crashing back in one large piece.

Re:Lock the doors and repel all boarders

[mrdoogee]

Except even if you omit the cost of the Shuttle program, the cost of maintaining the ISS is HUMONGUS. Millions if not Billions of US dollars go into it a year, and no other nation's space program gets the kind of money that the US does. I'm guessing no other nation can pick up the tab to keep the lights on if the US kills its funding.

Re:Lock the doors and repel all boarders

[2short]

There is a quite large, continuing cost to keep boosting the things orbit back up. If anyone wants to pay that, I'm sure that's fine with NASA. If nobody pays that, the thing is coming down, it's just a question of how predictably.

"I would really laugh if ... the station was now TOO BIG to be safely taken apart, without affecting it's overall stability - and the risk of the whole thing crashing back in one large piece."

What mental model of orbital dynamics are you working with? You think it's going to fall off its sky-hook or something?

Re:Lock the doors and repel all boarders

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Sounds like William Gibson got there first. Red Star, Winter Orbit.

Re:Lock the doors and repel all boarders

[Volante3192]

I'm certain the 'too big' remark was a joke about certain companies in the US being 'too big' to fail.

Re:Lock the doors and repel all boarders

[kestasjk]

If the Europeans and Russians wanted to take over maintenance of the ISS that's fine, but it's pretty pricey and why keep an experiment running after it's finished?

Re:Lock the doors and repel all boarders

[Jeff DeMaagd]

If you want to play the end game bit, then you have a problem of supplies. There is only so much food that can be grown up there, and things do break.

Re:Lock the doors and repel all boarders

[petes_PoV]

What mental model of orbital dynamics are you working with? You think it's going to fall off its sky-hook or something?

Err, no. Just conservation of angular momentum in it''s orbit, plus maybe some things about not getting it spinning. Disassembly will never be simply the opposite of assembly. Also don't forget that it'll be the occupants who have to take it apart - so avoiding bumping large chunks of old space-station into their only means of getting home could make it quite a tricky operation.

P.S. it's not on a skyhook - I don't know what they've been teaching you guys.

Re:Lock the doors and repel all boarders

[evilviper]

it may even be possible to ignore whatever NASA wants to do.

Of course it's possible, but that doesn't matter in the slightest. From the very beginning, this was a US move to subsidize Russian rocket scientists.

NASA gets to decide what happens with ISS, because the US is the one spending the majority of the money. If they stop paying, it's over. You vastly overestimate Russia and Europe's willingness to invest HEAVILY in leading-edge space exploration. Sure, MIR was good, but it was peanuts by comparison, and that was mostly sunk cost before the end of the cold war, which was steadily decaying, even with the Americans shoveling out money for a ride in prep for developing ISS.

Re:Lock the doors and repel all boarders

[2short]

All uses of the words "too big" are jokes about the financial industry, even if there is no direct reference to that at all? That certainly puts certain conversations with my girlfriend in a new light. Bummer.

Re:Lock the doors and repel all boarders

[2short]

"Err, no. Just conservation of angular momentum in it''s orbit, plus maybe some things about not getting it spinning"

Don't randomly fire big rockets; not sure how they'll screw that up.

"Disassembly will never be simply the opposite of assembly."

Right, it's obviously much easier. You don't have to maneuver big stuff together. You detach it, get it moving apart (even very slowly) and it will just keep doing so. Orbital mechanics are very predictable.

Not quite what the article implies

[spinkham]

Article implies they are planning on trashing it in 2016 unless they get more funding.. This is a political move, and the ISS will probably be kept in service longer then that.

Re:Not quite what the article implies

[osu-neko]

Article implies they are planning on trashing it in 2016 unless they get more funding.. This is a political move, and the ISS will probably be kept in service longer then that.

The plan, or the announcement of it? The plan isn't a political move. They can't keep it up when they no longer have any money to keep it up; simple fact of life. The plan is simply dealing with reality as it is. The announcement? Certainly that's a political move, but a good one. If they want to keep the ISS up longer (and they do), they need to get more money, they can't keep it up without more money. And they live in a democratic society. If they want money, they need to appeal dramatically to congress and the public to get it. No public agency in a democracy can succeed at its job without making "political moves" -- this is by design, and it's a good thing. Let the debating begin...

Re:Not quite what the article implies

[spinkham]

The announcement.. Most of the first comments to this article seemed to imply NASA wanted to kill it. According to the article they don't want to drop it, they want to keep it, but need to whip get some congressmen outraged at the cancelation so they will give them more money. The plan seems to be working. ;-) Therefore, it is probable the ISS will last quite a bit past 2016, assuming the economy doesn't further implode and scrap NASA in the process..

Re:Not quite what the article implies

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I hope not. They should have dumped that piece of junk 10 years ago. Its does nothing but cost a *lot* of money... to do .. nothing....

I'm guessing their bluffing

[nobodyman]

After reading the article, it sounds more like this is a game of chicken that NASA intends to play in order to secure more funding, either from congress or elsewhere.

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[iceborer]

it sounds more like this is a game of chicken that NASA intends to play in order to secure more funding, either from congress or elsewhere.

It's called the "Washington Monument ploy" (briefly described here). Agencies do it all the time. It takes its name from the Park Service saying that they'll have to close down sites like the Washington Monument to make the necessary spending cuts when their budget is reduced.

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[timster]

"Game of chicken"? That seems like a somewhat sensational interpretation of a plan that basically says "if someone doesn't fund this project, it will end"

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[demachina]

Let them play it. Until ISS starts doing useful science, which at this point it probably never will, its just a money pit. But, if NASA thinks they can deorbit a $150 billion in sunk costs and 40 wasted years and get away unscathed they are mistaken. It will make NASA's manned space office permenently damaged goods, more so than they already are.

NASA's manned space office has just been using ISS and Shuttle as a giant job's program since Apollo ended. They couldn't get funding for or think of anything useful to do so they've just been pouring money in to two failed programs, circling around in LEO doing nothing for nearly 40 years. It was just a scheme so they would get pay checks and underachieving overachievers could put "astronaut" on their resume. So far Orion and Ares aren't any better.

Either:

- Give the money in well structured grants to the private sector, like Burt Ruttan and Elon Musk, at least they are smaller, leaner and willing to think outside the box
- Give the money to parts of NASA that work like JPL for robotics missions or the great observatories
- Find someone with the ability and willingness to colonize Mars though you would have to throw a lot more money at it than NASA's current budget. Since we've thrown trillions in to the pockets of corrupt bankers, Iraq, brain dead stimulus, GM, etc. colonizing Mars seems vastly better by comparison.

You put the kind of money in to JPL the ISS and Shuttle have been sucking up for the last four decades you could do some amazing robotic missions. Robotics just wasn't there when Apollo ended. Now it is and it can do a whole lot more for a whole lot less than putting men in space, especially with the current safety obsession in the wake of the two shuttle disaster, which is pretty much paralyzing manned missions. Problem with putting men in space is it consumes vast resources and money just to keep them alive. Only value in it is if you are going to build a self sustaining colony on Mars, presuming such a thing is even possible.

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[ari wins]

It's a smart move by NASA too. Opponents like physicist Robert L. Park of the University of Maryland who said "..putting astronauts on the space station is akin to "flagpole-sitting."" make the idea of junking it seem silly. Instead of wasting his vast mental ability arguing, why doesn't he come up with a mission that would contribute to society? Instead, his brilliant conclusion to the article is "Give it to China. Let them support the damn thing."

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the absurdity of his argument. We need to squeeze every last bit of scientific data we can out of what we have up there, while we have it. It's served multiple purposes already, as stated in the article. It's advanced our views and available technologies in space. It served as posturing during the 80's, provided jobs during the following space boon, and has provided a stage for international unity. We can't back down now when we're just about to reach what we've been striving for.

But what do I know, IANAAP, I just stock food at the local grocery store.

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[holmstar]

Exactly. Isn't that what is supposed to happen when a project isn't funded?

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[kestasjk]

It costs money to keep something that heavy in orbit, at that height there is still friction, and that's just one of the maintenance costs.

If you understand the value of the ISS and don't think it's worth it then fine, but don't think you can cut off NASA and have it continue to function.

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[Anonymous Coward]

Let them play it. Until ISS starts doing useful science, which at this point it probably never will, its just a money pit. But, if NASA thinks they can deorbit a $150 billion in sunk costs and 40 wasted years and get away unscathed they are mistaken.

So what you are saying is, they are screwed in your eyes either way.

When the ISS was first proposed before any money was spent, the plan was to decommission it in 2015. They are leaving it up an entire extra unplanned year, and because you didn't bother reading the ISS mission statement, you are surprised they are doing exactly what is on it.

In your opinion, it would be better to piss off all the other countries involved in the ISS instead? That sounds smart, as it is one of the reasons the world hates the USA now.

Russia wants their modules back for their next station. This has been planned and scheduled for a decade. What, you think its OK for them to just say 'No Russia, you can't have your modules back, we changed our plans at the last minute.' and get away unscathed?

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[camperdave]

Until ISS starts doing useful science, which at this point it probably never will, its just a money pit.

Why do you think it is not doing useful science?

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[demachina]

Have you HEARD of any useful discoveries coming out of it that would justify the $150 billion dollar price tag? There is no doubt they are doing science on it, the burning question is what science have they done that justified the price tag or couldn't done through other means for a LOT less like on Mir before it was deorbited under pressure. ISS and NASA have been so obsessed with zero G biology on ISS its nearly excluded everything else.

The main problem is they are just now reaching the point that they can put a full crew of six on ISS. A three main crew was largely consumed just maintaining the station. They are also just now getting many of the main science modules attached. Most of them are like a decade late in being delivered to the ISS and its amazing countries like Japan are even sticking with their models after the staggering delays. About the time they actually finish the ISS and manage to keep a full crew on it, if they ever do, they will A) have a poor ability to deliver and retrieve people and cargo from the station since the Shuttle will be done and B) since they are already talking about deorbiting it, this insures no one will risk investing anything more in it.

There was one really interesting experiment I remember reading about a while ago but I think it was killed and will never make it to the ISS. Can't remember what it was called or what it did though.

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but that original mission plan didn't include years in down time due to space shuttles exploding. The ISS was supposed to be at a full crew complement years ago. The smaller crew complements have severely affected the availability of crew time for performing research as opposed to maintenance.

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[demachina]

Of course they are screwed either way. How can you botch a program as bad as that one has been botched and salvage anything out of it.

"When the ISS was first proposed before any money was spent, the plan was to decommission it in 2015"

How many years behind schedule is the ISS? That is the crux of the problem. If they finished it on time and on budget and had a full crew on it for the last ten years it might have worked. Instead they went through a decade of politically ensnarled redesigns and then years of further delays because the Shuttle proved to be inherently unreliable. At this point they are going to finish it and then pretty much trash it. Once they killed the Centrifuge Accomodations module and all of the other specialized equipment for interesting experiments it turned in to nothing but a white elephant and a vampire sucking resources away from anything useful.

You have to hand it to the Russians that they are astute and practical enough to rip their modules out of it and go back to their Mir heritage with affordable space stations doing interesting things on a reasonable budget.

Giving NASA's manned space budget to the Russian Space Agency would also probably lead to an exciting space program. NASA's manned space program is so dysfunctional at this point I'm not sure it can ever be turned around. I'm pretty sure the only reason Russia joined ISS in the first place was because back when they agreed to it the Soviet Union had just collapsed, they were broke and desperate for money. Putin has, if nothing else, pulled them out from being a basket case, and they may have enough money to go it alone again in space again depending on where the price of oil and natural gas are at a given point in time. I wager the Russian Space Agency can't wait to escape the bureaucratic BS that is NASA's manned space division.

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead they went through a decade of politically ensnarled redesigns and then years of further delays because the Shuttle proved to be inherently unreliable.

What the Orbiter proved is that replacing components chosen through good design with new "more eco-friendly" substitutes is a reliable way to spectacularly kill people (and destroy rather expensive spacecraft in the process). The original Orbiter design is possibly the most reliable construction engineers have ever accomplished.

Disclaimer: I work in for a NASA contractor. The task order that pays my salary is part of the manned spaceflight effort, but neither I nor the company I work for are involved with design, manufacturing, or maintenance of the spacecraft or flight systems.

From some of the really weird ideas expressed by the parent post, I wonder if demachina shouldn't have revealed a conflict of interest of his/her own. The Russian Space Agency hasn't produced anything on spec or on schedule despite a ton of funding being passed in their direction. Giving them more would be a huge mistake.

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[demachina]

"The original Orbiter design is possibly the most reliable construction engineers have ever accomplished."

Excepting of course it can't fly in rain without damaging the tiles, and it rains in Florida pretty much every freaking day.

Excepting of course they bolted a spacecraft on the side of a cryo tank so its fragile heat shield could be showered with ice on every launch and that has been a disaster waiting to happen since STS-1.

Excepting of course it has hydrogen leaks ALL the time.

I seriously don't know what you are smoking to say "most reliable construction engineers have ever accomplished" unless your reliability data is for a design that was never built which tend to be extremely reliable... because they were never built. The only reliability that matters is for the ship they built, and it isn't reliable.

"The Russian Space Agency hasn't produced anything on spec or on schedule despite a ton of funding being passed in their direction. Giving them more would be a huge mistake."

Exactly how often have NASA projects been on time and on budget since Apollo and Skylab?

A) when the ISS partnership originally started the Soviet Union had just imploded in every respect, its entire economy had collapsed, people weren't getting paid, they had a couple feeble coups, it was a challenge to find basic staples let alone parts for a high tech enterprise like building a space station. I'd like to see how NASA or your company did under such circumstances. B) There is a distinct possibility they just didn't like doing NASA's outsource work and abandoning a program they controlled for one where NASA tried to make them in to a junior partner. There are a lot of areas where Russia's engineers are unmatched especially in doing a LOT with a LITTLE, while NASA struggles to do a LITTLE with a LOT by comparison.

And NO I'm not Russian and I've never worked for the RSA. I know NASA first hand though.

You seem to be forgetting that for the next 5-10 years Russian Soyuz capsules are going to be the only way NASA astronauts have to get in to space unless they can hitch a ride with the Chinese, Elon Rusk or Burt Ratan. You probably shouldn't cast aspersions on your ride....

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[x2A]

"I'm not sure it can ever be turned around"

Wow... so, given an indefinite timeline, you admit to being able to think of nothing... that your mind is so incapable of envisioning ideas that would result in a positive outcome, that you believe such a situation actually occuring lies between improbably and impossible... well, thanks for sharing, your comments have enriched us all. Seriously, I mean that without sarcasm, as now even the more stupid ideas I've read on this page shine with more merit than Mr "Nothing will happen simply because I can't think of it".

*sigh*

Re:I'm guessing their bluffing

[x2A]

"since they are already talking about deorbiting it"

Already? They've been talking about deorbiting it since before they started putting it up, this isn't new, it's part of the original plan... can't put something that big up there without a plan of what to do with it once they've finished with it.

"There was one really interesting experiment I remember reading about a while ago but I think it was killed and will never make it to the ISS. Can't remember what it was called or what it did though"

Thanks for sharing.

Re:What a waste

[JCSoRocks]

Yeah, thank God for that accidental damage protection. Those keyboard spills are ruinous!

Operation Meteor

[Allicorn]

The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture will clearly have something to say about this!

Re:Operation Meteor

[autoevolution]

The ministry of Agriculture is not responsible for gundam.

Re:Operation Meteor

[etherelithic]

OZ will surely quell those colony rebels!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I call bullshit on this...

[Mysticalfruit]

Honestly, after all the money we've spent, I don't see them just plopping it into the ocean.

Firstly, if we're going to the moon and mars, the ISS seems like a pretty damn good staging/bailout option.

Secondly, we need to start thinking long term about our survival as a species. One of those strategies means long term human space flight. Currently a space station is the only thing that's giving us that.

I'm sure there will be those people who argue that it takes money away from other projects, but right now it's the only thing NASA is doing.

Re:I call bullshit on this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not an astrophysicist, but I believe that the ISS is in a really wretched orbit wrt using it for moon or mars missions.

Re:I call bullshit on this...

[2short]

"Honestly, after all the money we've spent, I don't see them just plopping it into the ocean."
Sunk costs. You can't get the money back no matter what you do; that money should be irrelevant to your decision.

"Firstly, if we're going to the moon and mars, the ISS seems like a pretty damn good staging/bailout option."

Why? It's not in a useful orbit for such a purpose. Heck, there was considerable concern about doing the last Hubble mission, because the ISS wasn't usable as a bailout for even that orbit. (Lunar orbit is further, FYI)

"Secondly, we need to start thinking long term about our survival as a species. One of those strategies means long term human space flight. Currently a space station is the only thing that's giving us that."

The space station can't survive a week without constant massive assistance from the ground; it's not a useful part.

"I'm sure there will be those people who argue that it takes money away from other projects, but right now it's the only thing NASA is doing."

I'm going to cry. Here's a list of 70-something "current missions": http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html. One of them is the ISS. The rest do science.

Re:I call bullshit on this...

[delt0r]

The ISS provides nothing useful at all. It should have been debited before it was launched. Its a money sink and nothing more.

If you don't believe me then please point to all the publication of first class peer reviewed research that they have done there? I will then point you to the dozens more publication from other missions that have cost a fraction of the money (hubble, mars rovers and many others).

Re:I call bullshit on this...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Honestly, after all the money we've spent, I don't see them just plopping it into the ocean."

I agree, we can easily hit a hospital in Pakistan with this thing!

Re:I call bullshit on this...

[kestasjk]

Honestly, after all the money we've spent, I don't see them just plopping it into the ocean. Firstly, if we're going to the moon and mars, the ISS seems like a pretty damn good staging/bailout option. Secondly, we need to start thinking long term about our survival as a species. One of those strategies means long term human space flight. Currently a space station is the only thing that's giving us that. I'm sure there will be those people who argue that it takes money away from other projects, but right now it's the only thing NASA is doing.

By 2016 it won't be of course, and the ISS will have ended its useful life. People don't seem to understand that the ISS doesn't stay up there by itself, and it doesn't do science just by virtue of being in space.

The LHC has taken over 20 years to complete, and will only run for a few years after it has started. Should we abandon that experiment too? After all we're not paying for the research, we're paying for a giant hoop in the ground and if that doesn't last forever then why bother?

Re:I call bullshit on this...

[DerekLyons]

if we're going to the moon and mars, the ISS seems like a pretty damn good staging/bailout option.

Other than the fact it's in the wrong orbit and essentially impossible to move to a useful one for that purpose, sure. Using the ISS to stage to the Moon or Mars is kinda like assembling a fleet in St. Louis for an expedition in the Gulf of Alaska.

Re:I call bullshit on this...

[radtea]

Honestly, after all the money we've spent, I don't see them just plopping it into the ocean

Right, because that would be like spending five billion or so on disposing of nuclear waste and then shutting the program down after 25 years without disposing of any nuclear waste and leaving the United States as one of the few countries in the developed world without an ongoing waste disposal strategy.

Surely no government would ever do that!

Politics is probably in play here: with the shuttle phased out, there will be no big $ for American contractors to support the IIS, because launch costs are going to be the greater part of ongoing costs. So the US government would be in a position of spending a lot of money on foreign launch vehicles, which means "No pork for you!" with regard to domestic campaign contributors.

Ergo, the US government would be supporting an international effort that would not feed back much of anything in terms of pork barrel spending into the domestic economy. Since pork is one of the major means by which the Party maintains control of the state, this is unacceptable.

Furthermore, because the US is an imperial power, it can't afford to be seen as weak or second-rate, so if it ceases to participate in the ISS the station must come down, because otherwise foreigners would have "the high ground."

If something doesn't make sense, there is usually politics behind it, and behind the politics there is usually money.

Re:I call bullshit on this...

[hab136]

Honestly, after all the money we've spent, I don't see them just plopping it into the ocean.

Why not? That's what we did with its predecessor, Skylab

Blame it on /.

[just_another_sean]

Now that they have this it's inevitable that productivity will begin to sink and before you know it there's nothing to do but
read /. and surf for porn... Might as well start planning for its decommissioning, the place will be useless in a year.

It will be tested heavily this month, and could give astronauts direct Internet access within a year.

Tested heavily. My point exactly.

Why does this sound like the Monty Python bit?

[Anonymous Coward]

The one about building a castle in the swamp? How many more of these space station things do we have to build before they don't sink back into the swamp?

Re:What a waste

[Shakrai]

I can't wait for my girlfriend (and her pussy) to get back from vacation

As opposed to your girlfriend leaving her pussy on vacation? I think I saw something about that in the National Enquirer once.....

That was quick!

[cashman73]

Thus ending seven years of interplanetary porn,...

3drealms of science?

[Kurusuki]

What is this? Spend a dozen years creating possibly the second most sophisticated piece of scientific equipment only to blow it up on a predefined time table? Why not make that date something to the tune of, "Upon becoming too cumbersome to maintain." Or, "Becomes scientifically unecessary." Why is it you have to state ahead of time that it will only last 5 or so years? It's not like you have to state how long something is going to last, we all know how well that went with the Mars rovers. >> Okay guys, we've worked 12 years on her and she's finally done. 'aint she a beauté? Okay boys, take her down.

Re:3drealms of science?

[vlm]

Why not make that date something to the tune of, "Upon becoming too cumbersome to maintain." Or, "Becomes scientifically unecessary."

So, go back in time to 2006 when the hab module was cancelled?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitation_Module

Or back in time to 2007 when they canceled the research module?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Research_Module

Re:3drealms of science?

[AlecC]

Since the lead times for experiments on ISS are at least five years, they are effectively saying, as you want, that it is "scientifically unnecessary". If there were useful work for it to do in 2016, outline planning for that useful work would be starting round about now - and it isn't. We know what we want the Mars rovers to do - more of the same. And the incremental cost for keeping them going is minute compared to the original cost. The cost to keep ISS going is billions per year, with regular resupply, refuelling, and crew change flights. That cost needs to deliver value. Show that value, and I am sure that minds will be changed.

Re:3drealms of science?

[osu-neko]

Why not make that date something to the tune of, "Upon becoming too cumbersome to maintain." Or, "Becomes scientifically unecessary."

Because they live in the real world, where hopes and dreams don't keep things flying. In the real world, you can't keep something running when you can't pay the upkeep necessary to keep it running. They run out of money for the project in 2015. Regardless of whether it's too cumbersome or not, or scientifically necessary or not. They have to deal with reality as it is.

I didnt sign up for this

[Hadlock]

How much did this cost? $100 billion dollars? I expect it to be up there till at least 2050, even if it is the ratty garage of a much larger space station by then. Of course Mir was up for what 15 years beyond its expected lifespan? $100 billion dollars is a lot of money just to burn it up in less than 20 years, even if you count the annual upkeep costs. That's like taking 6 months of the Iraq war funding and just burning it.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like taking 6 months of the Iraq war funding and just burning it.

Exactly, thats why we had more than 6 years worth of the Iraq war just to make sure we could take in the smell of napalm and burnt currency.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[mcvos]

$100 billion dollars is a lot of money just to burn it up in less than 20 years,

We could have put people on Mars for that money.

Of course then you burn that money in an even short amount of time, but then at least we'd have put people on Mars. The amount of money you spend is irrelevant if you don't take into account what you get back for it.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Bakkster]

We could have put people on Mars for that money.

Of course then you burn that money in an even short amount of time, but then at least we'd have put people on Mars. The amount of money you spend is irrelevant if you don't take into account what you get back for it.

So? Both would end up being short-term projects. The difference being that a Mars trip would be mostly travel, with a brief period of exploration and science. With the ISS, even 15 years before de-orbit is still 15 years of science. That puts the ISS at a full 12 years ahead on science (even estimating a full Mars mission with 1 year of on-planet exploration and experiments during a 1-year transit there and another on the way back).

Add that the ISS has a large crew, certainly more than a Mars mission, and the ISS still gets more research time per dollar, just a different kind of research.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Lumpy]

We could have put people on Mars for that money.

no we couldn't. we cant even get people to the moon right now. Your $100 billion would pay for a one way suicide mission to mars, we dont even have a clue as to how to get them there safely let alone back. The detailed research into the mars mission for the return trip has not even been started.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[mcvos]

So? Both would end up being short-term projects. The difference being that a Mars trip would be mostly travel, with a brief period of exploration and science. With the ISS, even 15 years before de-orbit is still 15 years of science. That puts the ISS at a full 12 years ahead on science (even estimating a full Mars mission with 1 year of on-planet exploration and experiments during a 1-year transit there and another on the way back).

Scientific value is not a direct function of the number of years put into it. The ISS is not the first of its kind. We've had Mir and Skylab, and the ISS is basically just a bigger version of those. Sending people to Mars would be something completely new. It's an accomplishment on the scale of putting the first people on the moon. And people on Mars would be able to investigate things that all those Mars rovers never can.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[mcvos]

You might want to read some of Robert Zubrin's ideas. He claims NASA could send people to Mars for 20 million, and a more efficient organisation could do it for 3 billion. 100 billion is quite a lot of money.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Sabz5150]

That's like taking 6 months of the Iraq war funding and just burning it.

You repeat yourself.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[FlyingBishop]

Yes, and a coastguard cutter is just a bigger version of a recreational speedboat.

Clearly, attempting a trans-oceanic voyage in the speedboat is a much better use of our time than learning how to build a cutter.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[damburger]

CLAIMS being the operative word. Assuming you mean 20 billion (if it were 20 million, people would already be there) then I think its a fairly tall claim without the evidence to back it up. Basically, all Zubrins ideas are paper projects dreamed up by a single engineer. Not particularly credible next to NASAs efforts.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[kestasjk]

Why not expect it to be up there until 2090? I'm sure we can do 80 more years of valuable science in there with the same equipment that is up there now. Not like experimental instruments ever yield all their information, that's why the Tower of Pisa is still a pioneering research center on gravity.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Hadlock]

Well hey, while we're at it, let's burn harvard university to the ground. Because clearly we don't need them doing and teaching 400 year old science. Once its burnt down we can spend untold billions rebuilding the infrastructure and putting in new scientific instruments and professors. Seriously? Its not terribly difficult to add new instruments. Its unbeleivably costly to design, certify, then fly new ISS segments into space, connect them etc. If they're already up there just remodel! Burning it up in the atmosphere rather than just connecting it to a new spacestation in unbeleviably wasteful. I'd consider selling it to a private party long before burning it up.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Anonymous Coward]

How much did this cost? $100 billion dollars?

That's a lot of dollar dollars!

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[kestasjk]

Holy freaking jesus. Do you actually believe a private party would willingly buy a used experiment, but NASA would not sell the ISS out of spite?

Do you actually think a building, made of brick is a good analogy for a space laboratory, in low earth orbit?

NASA are launching a shuttle mission tomorrow to add a new module to the ISS, to get more scientific research done now. But all you morons are here whining about how it'll be gone in 2016, after the scientific data has been retrieved.

I bet half the people in here complaining about NASA wasting the ISS don't have a clue they're adding a new module to it tomorrow, it's pitiful.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[sootman]

LOL. Or, another way to look at it, is we could have put up a dozen more space stations for what we've spent on that war so far.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Anonymous Coward]

How much did this cost? $100 billion dollars? I expect it to be up there till at least 2050

Sigh

The worlds schedules do not care about your expectations.

If you cared one bit about the ISS before this over 15 year old "news", why did you never even read the original mission statement before construction on ISS was started?
You know... the one that says it would be decommissioned in 2015?

The only thing surprising about this to everyone else is that they are a year behind schedule!

But I'm sure if you would lend them the millions of dollars a year it takes to get fuel to the station to keep it in its current orbit (Thrusters must fire roughly once a month to keep it from falling into the earths atmosphere anyway), not to mention a few billion dollars for the USA to build copies of all the Russian modules, launch them, and install them...
As I'm sure you were also not aware, the Russians want their modules back so we can not have them.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Teancum]

Considering that the Ares/Constellation program has already spent about $50 billion and is projected to have spent another $50 billion before somebody new steps on the Moon, I'd have to say that the $20 billion is pie in the sky and a generous offer for a government operation.

That said, if instead NASA offered $20 billion as a sort of X-Prize type contest for the first vehicle back to the Moon and an additional $1 billion per return trip (up to say 10 trips)... and keeping the original Constellation 6-passenger requirement (5 on the surface in a lander).... you would find a whole bunch of people that would be takers on the idea. Mars might be a little harder, but not too much for a similar amount of money.

Too bad that would never happen, and several times that potential prize is going to be spent on a bureaucratic black hole that will likely not go anywhere in the first place.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Hadlock]

With the exception of the NASA experiments where they either failed before they got there (we smashed a probe into mars on accident I think, due to imperial/metric mixup) or the blew up a comet, I'm pretty sure 90%+ of NASA probes have/are currently operating beyond their original mission plan. How many years was MIR extended? 8? 15?

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Hadlock]

So what, are you saying the ISS can't be refitted? Its cheaper to start building a new space station than refit the ISS? All possible space science has already been completed on the ISS? Its not possible to expand the ISS to meet future needs? It seems more feasible to leave it up there, whatever the cost, expand it and improve it rather than build a new one from scratch. That's the point I'm trying to make with the harvard analogy in case you missed it. I don't see why they can't add/replace instruments as they go along, which you didn't answer. Some are too big to fit through a hatch, but most will fit through dissassembled.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[farble1670]

That's like taking 6 months of the Iraq war funding and just burning it.

you are correct. there is a lot of pointless killing that could be done with that money. let's not blow the opportunity.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[farble1670]

Sending people to Mars would be something completely new. It's an accomplishment on the scale of putting the first people on the moon. And people on Mars would be able to investigate things that all those Mars rovers never can.

sorry to go off topic, but the only purpose of manned space exploration is political gain. the same scientific results can be obtained at a fraction of the cost using robotic missions.

moreover, there's a point where the concept of a manned mission just becomes impractical. lock a few people in cramped capsule for 3 days? not so bad. when it comes to mars, it's more like 200 days for a fuel conserving path. jupiter? cassini took 7 years. the logistics of keeping 1 or more people alive, fed, and not insane for 400+ days (round trip) is unimaginable to me considering the current state of our technology. when it comes to anything beyond mars, well just forget it. it's robotics or nothing.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think the Iraq war won't pay off, you're seriously deluded. It will, in its own good time.

Oh, and a little concession here in case I'm unclear: You and I are not part of the group for whom it will pay off.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[shentino]

NASA - 20 million
More efficient organization - 3 billion

Um...what?

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Rayban]

I'm either not familiar with your fancy money math here or you meant that NASA could send people to Mars for "20 billion".

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Orange Crush]

A mission to Mars would require accelerating something around the size (or bigger) of the ISS into a transfer orbit, after stocking it with 2+ years of supplies, and necessary landing craft, surface habitats, suits, and exploration vehicles, a ready-made return-to-orbit craft and enough fuel for the trip back home.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[kestasjk]

So what, are you saying the ISS can't be refitted? Its cheaper to start building a new space station than refit the ISS?

Yes. Why wouldn't it be? The ISS was never meant to be permeanent, and all of its parts have an expected end of life. For it to survive past its planned end of life would require for each part to be replaced, bit by bit. Not only would that be more expensive, but more risky and less flexible.

You seem to think it's just a big room in space where science happens, but it's actually a pre-planned array of scientific experiments intended to be brought up and run in a specific order depending on the life of each experiment and the space station itself.

All possible space science has already been completed on the ISS?

It is only 80% complete right now, and soon it'll be in its prime; a massive science experiment with much to teach us, lasting almost 2 decades, and yielding useful data since only 3-4 years after the first parts were put in place.

Compare that to the LHC; 20 years in the making, will only run for a few years, and after that another one will be built. Oh no, what a waste! (If you thought they were building a permanent donut in the ground, and not a science experiment, that is)

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[mcvos]

Do you seriously believe NASA is currently as efficient as it can be? There's too much politics and bureaucracy involved. I'm not too impressed by official budget claims from NASA.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[mcvos]

sorry to go off topic, but the only purpose of manned space exploration is political gain. the same scientific results can be obtained at a fraction of the cost using robotic missions.

Some day perhaps, but at the moment we still don't have any robot that's as mobile or creative as a human.

when it comes to mars, it's more like 200 days for a fuel conserving path.

I don't think we'll be that eager to conserve fuel when we're sending humans. It's a trade-off between how much space they're gonna have, and how long they're gonna stay cooped up in that space.

In any case, Valeri Polyakov has spent over 400 continuous days in Mir, which definitely counts as very cramped.

jupiter? cassini took 7 years.

That's nice, but I'm not talking about Jupiter, but about Mars, which is quite a bit closer.

the logistics of keeping 1 or more people alive, fed, and not insane for 400+ days (round trip) is unimaginable to me considering the current state of our technology.

Unless you're a leading rocket scientist, what's unimaginable to you is hardly relevant, is it? Read Zubrin's, proposal. He deals with exactly those logistics.

Basically, the Mars base, return vehicle and food are going to be sent on an unmanned fuel-conserving path, and only once we're sure everything is in place, are the humans sent on a much faster path. It takes a bit of fuel, but they don't have to bring food, fuel or equipment for the stay on Mars or the return trip. That makes quite a lot of difference.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[mcvos]

NASA - 20 million

Billion, obviously. Fortunately others here were smart enough to figure that one out.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[mcvos]

Of course not. You generate the fuel on Mars, send the food and return vehicle on a slow, fuel conserving path, and send only the astronauts and enough food for a one-way trip on a fast trip to Mars.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[mcvos]

Are you suggesting that the ISS can travel to places where Skylab and Mir couldn't?

It's just a bigger speedboat. Cool, but hardly worthwhile when there's more interesting stuff to spend 100 billion on.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[farble1670]

Unless you're a leading rocket scientist, what's unimaginable to you is hardly relevant, is it?

it must make you very, very mad that someone said something you don't agree with. please post and provide verification for you credentials. after all you posted with an opinion also right? this is slashdot, it's where people post opinions about things. this isn't a NASA think tank.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[srothroc]

Haven't other countries also poured a fair bit of money into it? I mean, it IS the International Space Station. What do they have to say to this unilateral "plan"?

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Hadlock]

Yeah I think other countries have contributed between 500 million and 30 Billion Dollars. $100 billion is definitely the minimum we've spent on the project just coming from the USA alone. Total amount is way over $130 billion dollars.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[Hadlock]

NASA is like FEMA in terms of frugality. The difference is, one shoots cool shit into the sky that you can tell your kids about, the other shoots holes in your wallet that you can grumble about to your wife.
 
I have no problem investing more money at NASA. I'm 25 and haven't seen anyone set foot on the moon - I expect that to happen in my lifetime too, dammit!

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[x2A]

What unilateral plan??? Don't post about stuff that exists purely as a construct of your imagination as if it was real. I know this is slashdot, but still.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[BostonPilot]

I've been losing confidence in NASA manned missions for years. NASA (manned) is an organization without a worthwhile achievable goal. They need more money than the budget allows to do revolutionary work like Mercury through Apollo was. So, they cast about to and fro trying to think of something they can do within their budget. That's seems backwards. If they could commit to a worthwhile project (like, colonize [not visit] Mars) they might be able to get their budget increased to what it would take to achieve that goal. It would take the political will for the country to sign up for long term funding of the project, and an innovative not-business-as-usual approach by NASA.

As it is, seeing $100,000,000,000 blown for what seems like little return, or more likely seeing them playing a brinkmanship game for funding (give us more money or we'll be forced to burn up the space station you just built for $100B), that just makes me want to shut them down. Gut the manned space part of the agency, and give the remaining money to robotic exploration programs that will have a scientific return for the money.

Apollo ended up being a dead end (although I don't think NASA thought it would be). The shuttle and the ISS have turned out to be dead ends. NASA either needs to find a legitimate, achievable goal for manned flight, or give it up. I don't mind supporting science with my tax dollar, but I resent supporting white elephant projects which only benefit Boeing & gang, and a bunch of career bureaucrats.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[mcvos]

Are you claiming that the fact that you personally cannot imagine something is a valid argument that it must be impossible? Are the people who say that evolution is impossible because they cannot imagine how it would be possible, are correct? Are the people who believe the earth is flat because it appears that way to them, correct because they cannot imagine it to be round?

The limitations of your imagination do not make for a convincing scientific argument.

How unimaginable do you think computers, cars and airplanes would have been to people living hundreds of years ago? Much more outrageous things than a trip to Mars have been done in the past.

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[mcvos]

I have no problem investing more money at NASA. I'm 25 and haven't seen anyone set foot on the moon - I expect that to happen in my lifetime too, dammit!

Nah, we've been to the moon already. I want to go to Mars.

A permanent base on the moon would be nice, though. But what are they going to do there?

Re:I didnt sign up for this

[farble1670]

hey idiot friend, obviously ii didn't mean i can never, ever imagine man going to mars. but i can't imagine it happening in mr. bush's time frame. if you care to do any reading o nthe topic instead of cutting be down because i am stupid and have no imagination, you'll find that opinion in the majority. anything is is possible if you far enough into the future, but today's technology, and budget make robotics the logical option. again, go do some readying and you'll find that most people in the know feel the same way (including a guy named stephen).

A very familiar refrain

[GodfatherofSoul]

Translation, "give us more money or we'll drop this satellite on your heads." This is the unsubtle protest of a bureaucrat trying to use the media to get the public incensed.

You gotta be kidding me!

[seeker_1us]

Bill Clinton killed the United States supercollider to fund this piece of shit. Twenty years later, we will have neither.

Re:You gotta be kidding me!

[eln]

Yes, but look on the bright side: With the LHC being in Europe instead of here, we'll have a few extra nanoseconds to react before we're swallowed up by the resulting black hole.

Re:You gotta be kidding me!

[Hurricane78]

Yo momma will swallow you long before that!

Nothing gets between her and her food!

Re:You gotta be kidding me!

[delt0r]

The US is a big financial contributor to the LHC. The LHC should really be view as a bit of a combined effort.

Re:You gotta be kidding me!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Clinton killed the United States supercollider ...

I call BS. To quote wikipedia:

Congress canceled the project in 1993.

and

However, in 1993, Clinton tried to prevent the cancellation by asking Congress to continue "to support this important and challenging effort" through completion because "abandoning the SSC at this point would signal that the United States is compromising its position of leadership in basic science"

I'll give you partial credit because the article also states that Clinton didn't do enough to support it, but there's a whole host of other names (including two Goveners of Texas) that failed to support it.

Re:You gotta be kidding me!

[radtea]

the resulting black hole.

It's well known that the LHC will produce unicorns, not black holes. Don't you read the science news?

That's not waste in NASA world!

[blahbooboo]

Nah, that isn't wasteful! Not in NASA world anyway! A world where they have been wasting tons of cash on an ancient launch mechanism that's been around waaay too long at 1 billion per launch -- I am looking at you Space Shuttle :)

Space politics

[CopaceticOpus]

It's really difficult to do medium/long term space projects when there are changes to the budget every year, and new legislators looking to reevaluate after every election. If we're going to take on a project like this, we need the resolve (and financial commitment) to see it through.

How ridiculous is it that we have built the station, but we're not going to send up the already-built Centrifuge Accommodations Module, arguably one of the most important planned science modules?

Keeping the IIS in operation is expensive, but throwing it away would be foolhardy if it still has value for scientific research or for supporting future missions.

Re:Space politics

[Blimey85]

Not only is it never going up, it's sitting on display in Japan. NASA traded for it to be built but then didn't bother to take delivery and maybe put it on display at one of its own facilities. Tax payers really got a raw deal on that bit of equipment.

Re:Space politics

[kestasjk]

I don't know if simulating earth gravity in zero-gravity would have been one of the most important modules.. Also it'd probably cost more to get it up there than it cost to build it.

Re:Space politics

[Anonymous Coward]

Keeping the IIS in operation is expensive, but throwing it away would be foolhardy....

Aha! A closet Microsoft fan revealed!

Re:Space politics

[Xylantiel]

I don't know if you are trolling, but this is/was one of the most important science modules.

The point was to be able to generate, centrifugally, anything between 0 and 1 earth gravity. While it is nice to make the assumption that the solution to long-term space occupancy is centrifugally-generated artificial gravity, it would be nice (i.e. essential for engineering purposes) to know (a) just how much is necessary for various purposes, and (b) are there any adverse effects of the coriolis forces. I agree with the grandparent that this was one of the few really remarkable science programs on the station that logistically can't be done well elsewhere. Long-term microgravity is only available in orbit, and you need to be able to change the content of the experiments with enough flexibility that an unmanned mission (or missions) is not a good fit logistically.

Re:Space politics

[IrquiM]

The most important one is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on STS134.

And who knows what will happen in the future with regards to new launch vehicles? ISS might even get an extention if enough cheap launches are available.

Think outside the box

[Ambitwistor]

If you're going to deorbit it, why waste it on the ocean? At least drop it on a country we don't like. Or on Kenny.

Re:Think outside the box

[Anonymous Coward]

You bastard!

Re:Think outside the box

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah sure, risk having part of a space stations tech go to a hostile country intact. That's smart.
It would be better if it could be changed into an orbital weapons platform. Perhaps equipped with a Mass Driver.

Re:Think outside the box

[Ambitwistor]

Yeah, we wouldn't want a rogue nation with zero-G toilet technology on the loose.

Re:Think outside the box

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to deorbit it, why waste it on the ocean? At least drop it on a country we don't like. Or on Kenny.

Drop it on Australia again; because:

1. We could use another tourist attraction. http://www.nachohat.org/gallery/nullabor_balladonia_skylab

2. It would be nifty to have to whole set of American Space Stations.

3. Most of our wildlife already bounces nicely, so they won't be too worried about a bloody Big thump.

Re:Think outside the box

[Anonymous Coward]

How on earth was this modded 'interesting' instead of funny!

Re:Think outside the box

[forkazoo]

If you're going to deorbit it, why waste it on the ocean? At least drop it on a country we don't like. Or on Kenny.

Can we at least use the toilet to take out a blonde?

Re:What a waste

[morgauxo]

Why, she will probably need to rest it for a while anyway.

If true, NASA funding will be even harder to find

[HikingStick]

I can't believe that NASA would even float such a concept right now. As a kid, I was fed a constant stream of news that indicated we were planning a permanent space station that would orbit the earth. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. If they do scuttle it (something, imo, not likely to happen as early as 2016 given the international nature of the project), they'll simply be telling the world that they're great as throwing money into holes. Sure, we've recouped advances in science and technology from the time we've had there, but the US taxpayer won't think of it that way. NASA requests for funding will be met with more and more resistance. Money will dry up faster than a spilled gallon of water in the desert.

I guess I might hold out hope that one of the private space flight ventures might pony-up and put in a bid to buy the ISS. They could monetize it, by leasing compartments or general access to both space tourists and to scientific endeavors.

Outrageous

[Eravnrekaree]

This is outrageous, to spend billions on this thing and then deorbit it just a few years after it is complete is just pure insanity. Billions of dollars wasted. I wonder if there will be any useful scientific information to come out of ISS. More likely, it seems that ISS, manned moon and mars programs are nothing but ego trips that drain money away from more effective and productive projects such as Hubble. The idea of manned spaceflight to the moon or mars is ridiculous as most people will never be able to go into space, and you can do most things with cheaper unmanned craft than with these expensive manned systems. With technology which exists in the forseeable future, spaceflight will be little more than a gimmick or something that a few small number of people will do. Its just too expensive and costly.

I think a public space program is vital, and does things that a private company would not do. A private company would likely mainly shuttle extremely wealthy people into orbit, a few per year, and any scientific data they happen to produce would likely be sold at huge cost, instead of being available to all humanity. The public space program should be science oriented to expand knowledge and make data available to all for improvement of our knowledge of the universe.

Re:Outrageous

[kestasjk]

This is outrageous, to spend billions on this thing and then deorbit it just a few years after it is complete is just pure insanity. Billions of dollars wasted. I wonder if there will be any useful scientific information to come out of ISS. More likely, it seems that ISS, manned moon and mars programs are nothing but ego trips that drain money away from more effective and productive projects such as Hubble.

You think Hubble isn't going to be decommissioned too? They put Hubble up there, it served its time, now they're getting ready to put a new one up there and Hubble will fall out of maintenance and drop out of the sky. Same is happening for the ISS and everyone is in uproar. It's baffling.

Also you should read up on the ISS and the experiments it's doing now and has been for years, module by module. It's not like they need all the science modules in place before they can begin work..

It's Skylab all over again!

[Painted]

Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016, we'll deorbit one of the primary reasons we're building Orion.

I always thought that the 5 year gap of no manned craft for the US sounded dumb, I guess they always had this at the back of their minds and just want to get rid of the thing. I'd get Ares V on tap, send up a big (ion?) booster, and either move it to a more equatorial orbit, so it can be used as an assembly point for lunar/martian missions, or let it go on autopilot through the Van Allen belts and push it into high earth orbit for future use. Hell at that point you could zip it out to a Lagrange point for storage.

Re:It's Skylab all over again!

[vlm]

Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016, we'll deorbit one of the primary reasons we're building Orion.

Translated ... Orion will also get the boot.

Re:It's Skylab all over again!

[DavidTC]

It's amazing how NASA is supposedly full of rocket scientists, and yet none of them apparently understand that we should be putting 'space stations' in actual orbits that they stay in by themselves.

So we don't have to ship up fuel, and when inevitable budget cuts come along the solution is 'mothball the station and come back a decade later' instead of 'safely deorbit the station so it doesn't crash on a city'.

Likewise, they shouldn't be putting them at crazy diagonal orbits that are hard to match.

Re:It's Skylab all over again!

[Volante3192]

They're rocket scientists that have to deal with demands of people that think potato ends with the letter 'e' and that the internet is like indoor plumbing.

It came from on high that the ISS had to dock not only with the Shuttle but also the Soyuz. So the rocket scientists had to adapt.

Re:It's Skylab all over again!

[kestasjk]

How is the ISS a big reason for building Orion?

Re:It's Skylab all over again!

[radtea]

Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016

Here's the question, though: why are American project planners so completely incompetent? Since everyone knows that this kind of project will probably slip, and there's loads of historical data on the slip factor, predicting the correct schedule pretty accurately is a matter of simple multiplication. You'd have to be an idiot not to do it.

So the question is: why aren't project managers for the American government capable of doing it?

Any time anyone says, "Well, of course the project is late! It's new/different/big/difficult!" the question that should be asked is, "If you say that everyone should have expected to the project to be late, why didn't you apply the appropriate correction to initial schedule to start with? Are you an idiot, that you knew it would miss the original schedule, but didn't correct for that knowledge?"

Project estimation is actually an incredibly easy task, intellectually. It is a difficult task morally, as people give in to the temptation to lie--to themselves and others--far too easily, and we are far too forgiving when they do.

Re:It's Skylab all over again!

[osu-neko]

Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016

Here's the question, though: why are American project planners so completely incompetent? Since everyone knows that this kind of project will probably slip, and there's loads of historical data on the slip factor, predicting the correct schedule pretty accurately is a matter of simple multiplication. You'd have to be an idiot not to do it.

I'm not sure if you have to be an idiot to believe that, but I imagine it helps.

There's loads of historical data on the "slip factor", enough to know that no such "factor" exists. If you were a complete idiot, you might average the amount of slippage that has occurred in the past, call it the "slip factor" (ignore the fact that when you then go and apply this "factor" to all the previous projects, you end up wrong most of the time), multiply this by the estimate, and, if you're really really really stupid, actually expect this new prediction to be accurate.

Most successful project leaders aren't this stupid. That's why they don't do it. It's not that they aren't capable of doing it, it's just they aren't stupid enough to expect that would yield anything approaching an accurate prediction.

Re:Send it to orbit the moon or Mars

[dwights]

I agree with chk6 - rather than try to bring it back to earth (i assume it they are not going to attempt to actually bring it back intact), can it not be sent to the moon? The lesser gravity to minimize impact and lack of atmosphere to avoid entry burnup, might allow it to land in somewhat of a useful state. Not that I want to see humanity start littering the moon, but I would think having -some- sort of spare parts on the moon would be more beneficial than just crashing it back to earth.

Next Step

[zbharucha]

I wouldn't say that the ISS has been a whole and complete waste. Sure - it is years behind schedule, etc., etc. but one has to admit that it has taught us a lot in terms of international cooperation, waste management, construction in zero-G among a long list of others. I truly believe that the next step to maintaining a presence in space has to come in the way of building a lunar base. It will be challenging but will have huge advantages, not the least of which is a base which is permanent (won't have to be de-orbited after a number of years), a base capable of providing on-site labs to do all sorts of analysis on lunar soil, rocks, regolith and basically, a base which will extend our knowledge of our own natural satellite by many orders of magnitude. And who knows? Perhaps one day we'll be advanced enough to manufacture components from materials found on the moon and be using that very base to send heavy spacecraft to other heavenly bodies like Mars. Discuss.

Sell it on eBay

[Alcoholist]

Maybe not on eBay, but the ISS is already up there, I'm pretty sure it was designed to last longer than 16 years, why not sell it to at least cover some of the costs? I personally don't think it would be a good investment, but people pay lots of money for the weirdest stuff.

I know! The Chinese. They've got money. If we sold it to them cheap, they would be ever so grateful. They might even keep letting us use it from time to time.

Re:Sell it on eBay

[metaforest]

How about as a down payment on the interest on the trade deficit with China? Maybe they will let us rent a bungalow once in a while, and let us provide maid service....

Botany bay it!

[erroneus]

Let's send convicted criminals to the ISS then send it to Mars. Maybe they can tell us about Mars and stuff.

"Permanent Inode" not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, so we spend $$ putting up a station, a few more and put a DTN node there, and call it permanent, then deorbit the whole kit/kaboodle in what, 6 years?

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/13/0222214/ISS-Launches-First-Permanent-Node-of-Interplanetary-Internet

Deconstruction of "permanence" commencing....

Stop...

[anonieuweling]

Stop the wars in Iraq, Pipelinistan ehrm...Afghanistan, etc, pull the USAsians back and the ISS can stay afloat a nice number of extra years.

Re:Stop...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your an idiot. But hell why not us AMERICANS ,troll will be happy to pull out you mother and the ISS, if you would like to pay the bill, were more then happy to send it to you.

Give it a telescope and hi-res ground imaging

[clyde_cadiddlehopper]

A steady stream of pretty pictures seems to keep satellites aloft.

Re:What a waste

[Hubbell]

Nobody seems to get it. They only did it for the lulz of blowing it up.

International

[confused one]

They've threatened this before... And Russia, Japan and the ESA have all said they will oppose any attempt to shut it down in 2016. If you want to throw away (i.e. kill) the international partnership we've created, shutting down the ISS in 2016 would be a good way to do it.

Re:Send it to orbit the moon or Mars

[AlecC]

No. It takes huge amounts of fuel to get out of the Earth's gravity well. That would certainly cost tens of billions, and possibly as much again as has already been spent. Left to itself, its orbit will decay and it will plummet unpredictably with a very few years. Boosted, expensively, to parking orbit, it will be a useless hunk embarrassingly visible, like a redneck's chocked up car in front of the house.

Low Earth Orbit problems

[s0litaire]

If it's constantly needing a burn to keep in the correct orbit why don't they either:

1) Move it further out, above the current orbital debris region (you might keep it for an emergency "safe haven" or supply station for manned missions to the Moon or Mars)

2) Fit it with those experimental "Ion" engines they have been testing (They only have a few grams of push) but have 10 of them around the ISS constantly pushing will keep it in a stable orbit and the ION propellant is more compact and easier to store then the current propellant.

Seeing as NASA put a value of $0 on it...

[SpinyNorman]

How about selling it to the Russians for $1. Use the cash windfall to send a postcard to a random taxpayer saying "Sorry we fucked up".

The Russians kept Mir in orbit for ever, so I'm sure they can keep ISS up on a fraction of what NASA was pissing away on it, and can no doubt make a healthy profit keeping it full of space tourists. Maybe they can occasionally sell a spot to a NASA scientist if NASA can remember why they wanted to build it in the first place, and can figure anything useful to do up there.

Re:Seeing as NASA put a value of $0 on it...

[TheRaven64]

The Russians didn't have a shuttle. The orbit of the ISS is low so that the shuttle can reach it. This means there is a small amount of atmospheric drag requiring them to burn fuel to keep it in the same orbit. Now that the shuttle is out of the picture, I'm not sure why they can't move it up to a more sensible orbit.

Re:Seeing as NASA put a value of $0 on it...

[SpinyNorman]

I seem to recall reading that the automated supply vehicles the Russians periodically send up to the ISS do routinely push it back up into a higher orbit, and I'll bet the cost of this is low enough that it'd be viable to keep doing this indefinitely, paid for by space tourists.

Re:Seeing as NASA put a value of $0 on it...

[osu-neko]

Now that the shuttle is out of the picture, I'm not sure why they can't move it up to a more sensible orbit.

...

You understand the reason they're planning on deorbiting it is because it costs money to keep it in orbit, and that's when the money runs out, right? They don't want to deorbit it, they just don't have any money to keep it up after 2015.

Remember the challenge here isn't scientific, it's economic. Their plan on dealing with no money is to deorbit. Your plan on dealing with no money is to boost to a more sensible orbit? How do you do that, given that the reason you're doing that is because you have no money? You have a way to boosting it to a higher orbit with no money?

Re:If true, NASA funding will be even harder to fi

[DavidTC]

The problem is that ISS was placed by idiots. It's not in an orbit it could maintain without fuel. (It skims the atmosphere and loses speed.)

What we should do is start building space stations in, you know, actual orbit, so if we feel they've become too expensive, we can walk away and come back a decade later and, hey, it's still there. Pump more air in, check the seals, kill the space weasels, and you can use it again.

But if we leave ISS for a few years, it will eventually fall down by itself, because, like I said, it was put in orbit by morons at a dumb altitude.

And a dumb direction, while we're at it. It should be in an equatorial orbit, or a near equatorial(1), and we should build a damn equator launch pad to get to it, instead of always having to match speed and direction to catch the thing in the crazy cockeyed orbit it's in.

I'm not sure how plausible it would be to fix the orbit. The direction is probably unfixable, but I don't understand why we couldn't run thrusters and raise the orbit.

1) You don't want it exactly equatorial, because then to get through it you have geosync orbit in the way...and that's where we put all out satellites and crap. But skew it 5%, and launch from the equator to catch it at the farthest north or south skew, and you'll miss all that junk, without expending too much extra energy.

Or you can go straight through it and drop off a satellite along the way, although you'd have to change your speed back and forth.

Insurance scam?

[Degro]

Maybe they have a fat policy on it...

or do they? Here's another view of statements made

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum30/HTML/000804.html

I promise it's not Goatse. Read the post there by Robert Pearlman. Here's his key conclusion:

I think it is clear that Suffredini wasn't stating the de-orbit of the ISS as a point of fact, but rather a point of history -- what the plan had been and now we are considering ways -- post-space shuttle -- to keep the ISS tended, in regards to both its crew and supplies.

But if you believe my conclusion is incorrect, Alan Ladwig, senior advisor to the NASA Administrator, speaking at this past weekend's Apollo/Saturn reunion at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, said that it is both the current administration's and (assuming he is confirmed) Charlie Bolden's plan to fully utilize the space station. In fact, he spoke strongly against those who work for NASA who have criticized the ISS, reminding them that the American public has paid for its launch -- its now time to take full use of that investment.

It never ceases to amaze me...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that so few people grasp the concepts of the various orbital distances from the Earth's surface. Here's a rough comparison of low earth orbit where the ISS resides. It's only a couple hundred miles up from the surface, somewhat less than the distance between Minneapolis and Des Moines. Geostationary orbit is more than two orders of magnitude greater, 22,236 miles. That's like driving from the south side of Minneapolis to the north side by going south, around the planet one time via the south pole, then heading north until around the north pole until you get back to Minnesota (well not quite that far, but once you're past 20K miles, a couple thousand more doesn't matter) . Basically GEO is about a thousand times greater distance than LEO.

Another pet peave of mine is everyone calling the space just outside the Earth's atmosphere, "outer space". It ain't "outer". It only qualifies as simply "space". "Outer space" is a term reserved for space outside our solar system.

Another thing that irks me is how decompression in a spacecraft is always portrayed (in TV, movies, books, etc) as being an explosively violent event with huge winds blowing around inside a spacecraft as everything gets sucked out thru some hole or blown-out window. Few people realize that there is less than 15 PSI difference in the atmospheric air pressure at the surface of the Earth and the "vacuum of space". An air leak on a spacecraft is a very subtle (but deadly) thing. A sudden decompression of a whole spacecraft would be very little more violent than a big fart.

Re:It never ceases to amaze me...

[holmstar]

Another thing that irks me is how decompression in a spacecraft is always portrayed (in TV, movies, books, etc) as being an explosively violent event with huge winds blowing around inside a spacecraft as everything gets sucked out thru some hole or blown-out window. Few people realize that there is less than 15 PSI difference in the atmospheric air pressure at the surface of the Earth and the "vacuum of space". An air leak on a spacecraft is a very subtle (but deadly) thing. A sudden decompression of a whole spacecraft would be very little more violent than a big fart.

I'm with you there. I can suspend my disbelief of the force of the wind for the sake of the story (after all, 15 lbs/in^2 is actually a pretty significant force. If you were near a large hole when it was formed, you would certainly get sucked out if you weren't already holding onto something. ) But what really irks me is the length of time that all of those scenes seem to last. Give me a break. Unless you are in one freaking large spacecraft, all of the air would be sucked out in seconds if there was a large (ie: several feet in diameter) hole in the hull. I even remember a movie recently that had a scene where a several foot diameter hole is created in the side of a plane, and people are fighting not to get sucked out for several minutes. I mean, how much air the the writers actually think is in a plane?

Re:It never ceases to amaze me...

[FlyingBishop]

Well, for an interstellar ship, large reserve stores of air for a relatively small craft are not that strange, even assuming you have a CO2 scrubber of some sort, you want a goodly reserve should it stop working.

Re:It never ceases to amaze me...

[Maximum Prophet]

That's why on "Star Trek" they had automatic doors. If one part of the ship loses pressure, the doors keep the rest of the atmosphere in. That, and they are cool.

Re:It never ceases to amaze me...

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw the Tonight show the other day with Conan and the guests were Sir Richard Branson and Tyson Degrasse (scientist, cool smart guy). Conan started talking to Branson about his trips to 'outer space' and Tyson just kind of chuckled and said "hes only going LEO" Knowing what i know about Tyson, this just made my day. He trivialized the first real commercial LEO company so easily. Now im not saying what Branson does isnt respcteable, but it really put into perspective the common misconceptions we have regarding the difference between LEO and true interplanetary manned spaceflight.

Counterweight! Or headstone...

[starglider29a]

Yes, I am aware of the vast amount of Delta V required to do what I'm saying:

Push the thing into an equatorial orbit, and then use it as a counterweight for the space elevator.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a avowed Space Elevator skeptic (despite my coincidental name from a book about a space elevator), but...

This gives us MANY advantages over starting from scratch:

1. 303,663 kg that we don't have to lift again!
2. Opportunity to test pie-in-the-sky technology like solar sails, Ion engines. We can lift it to geostationary for "free". Ish.
3. Opportunity to test pie in the sky hopes like asteroid intervention. This thing weighs a mouse fart fraction of an incoming asteroid, has known mass properties, and even a convenient docking point. If you can't move that, what hope do you have of mitigating an asteroid threat? Let this be our "sandbox" for moving stuff.
4. Worst case, load the thing with lasers and start vaporizing space junk.
5. Worst WORST case, assume that mankind eventually goes extinct. If we push this high enough, it won't decay. It can serve as our headstone, complete with a record of what went wrong. The cephalopods will thank us.

Without getting into the monetary expenses, we've spent too much Delta V to drop this thing.

Re: Counterweight! Or headstone...

[jameskojiro]

I like those ideas, I think it would be interesting to see how many ion thrusters would be needed to park the thing into a permanently stable orbit?

Re: Counterweight! Or headstone...

[hab136]

Worst WORST case, assume that mankind eventually goes extinct. If we push this high enough, it won't decay. It can serve as our headstone, complete with a record of what went wrong. The cephalopods will thank us.

"I thought cephalopods were underwater animals!" "They played us for suckers!"

Does anyone understand economics?

[Registered Coward v2]

Once again, Congress proves it doesn't understand the sunk cost fallacy:

"If we've spent a hundred billion dollars, I don't think we want to shut it down in 2015," Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) told Augustine's committee.

Of course, these are the same people that are pouring billions to save dying companies such as GM, so I should not be surprised.

Re:Does anyone understand economics?

[DragonWriter]

Once again, Congress proves it doesn't understand the sunk cost fallacy:

"If we've spent a hundred billion dollars, I don't think we want to shut it down in 2015," Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) told Augustine's committee.

And here, "Registered Coward" reveals he doesn't understand the fallacy of composition.

Re:Does anyone understand economics?

[Skreems]

Call me crazy, but it seems that calling something a "sunken cost" is a justification for abandoning it only if there's really nothing useful to be done with the thing. When there really are some benefits to be had, using a position you're in thanks to money already spent is not unjustified.

Re:Does anyone understand economics?

[Registered Coward v2]

Call me crazy, but it seems that calling something a "sunken cost" is a justification for abandoning it only if there's really nothing useful to be done with the thing. When there really are some benefits to be had, using a position you're in thanks to money already spent is not unjustified.

A sunk cost is just that - unrecoverable costs no matter what you do. To that extent, sunk costs are irrelevant to the go - no go decision. As you correctly point out; what counts is the value going forward. That analysis is independent of the sunk costs.

It's like being in line - people will often continue to wait because they've already waited so long; when what they should really consider is how much longer will I wait and is the end result worth that time; not the total wait.

Re:Does anyone understand economics?

[MadCow42]

Sunk costs can be looked at many ways. Essentially though, they should look at the continuing running costs (starting now) versus the value paid back (harder to measure of course). However, normally you need to offset any scrapping/shutdown costs or value against those figures - depending on if those change over time or not. That's the area where "sunk costs" might mislead people - there may be some residual value to consider.

How much you've already spent is meaningless. The only question now is whether you'll lose more or not. :)

MadCow.

Re:Does anyone understand economics?

[GryMor]

It only seems that way due to parts of the argument being assumed, specifically:
That it will cost the same or more to get back to where we are now.

Given NASA's bureaucracy, this is a given without significant reforms. Given that previous reforms do not seem to have helped much, it is almost certainly a given WITH significant reforms.

This is only a good argument if we want to get back to where we are now, and the cost of maintaing this position is less than getting back here, or if we wish to go somewhere that will be cheaper if we are starting from this point rather than from scratch.

I personally believe it's a bad move to deorbit anything that we could otherwise attach to some central node (like the ISS) and eventually use as spare parts for in space tinkering. Of course, the shuttle itself is a bit of a nightmare, much better to have an SSTO with a minimal reentry vehicle so you leave most of your mass up at the node.

Re:Does anyone understand economics?

[Shatrat]

A) Future benefits > Future costs

B) We've already spent X dollars

One (and only one) of these is a legitimate reason to continue the project.

Re:Does anyone understand economics?

[osu-neko]

Of course, these are the same people that are pouring billions to save dying companies such as GM, so I should not be surprised.

Hehe. Very apropos question in the title, then, coming from someone who clearly doesn't understand economics.

Re:Does anyone understand economics?

[Registered Coward v2]

Sunk costs can be looked at many ways. That's the area where "sunk costs" might mislead people - there may be some residual value to consider.

True. I would calculate the sunk cost as investment less any value you can get from a sale, reuse, etc; essentially the non-recoverbale costs.

Re:Does anyone understand economics?

[Registered Coward v2]

Of course, these are the same people that are pouring billions to save dying companies such as GM, so I should not be surprised.

Hehe. Very apropos question in the title, then, coming from someone who clearly doesn't understand economics.

Care to explain your position?

test version of the ringworld

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the ISS as a platform to build a continuous ring around the earth.
Gravity should evenly pull on the ring, so no pesky de-orbiting.

Come on, people

[Deadstick]

...this is a Washington Monument ploy. It's how government agencies keep the money flowing. Nothing to see here.

rj

Compare it to your car

[CDS]

Let's compare the ISS to a car, for a moment.

Think about your 20 year old vehicle and the shape it's in. It's got, what? 150,000 miles on it? It's starting to rust out, the trunk leaks when it rains, the radio only works out of 2 speakers, the air conditioner works great in the winter time, the right-front door won't lock and the left-rear window won't roll down any more. Not to mention the big ole dent in the front fender where you misjudged a turn coming out of that parking ramp...

Now, compare it to the ISS. by 2016 it'll be 18 years old, and have traveled approximately 2.7 BILLION MILES! What would your old beater look like after 2,700,000,000 miles?????

Re:Compare it to your car

[SpinyNorman]

Except that it's not rusting nor are the few moving parts on it even a fraction of the cost of the whole the way they are on a car.

A better car analogy would be that you've got vintage Bugatti with almost zero mechanical wear on it that you've been restoring and pouring money into for the last decade or so. You just sourced a brand new engine for it at massive cost last year, paid millions to have brand new titanium transmission built for it (to Bugatti factory specs) the year before.

Your future plans include similar expenditures for the next five years, after which you plan to take a ceremonial shit on it and torch it.

Makes sense, eh?

Re:Compare it to your car

[JesseMcDonald]

No car analogy will work here. The ongoing, mandatory maintenance costs of a car simply aren't comparable to the costs of keeping the ISS in its current orbit, even in a deactivated storage mode, or moving it somewhere more stable. The amount of resources that have been poured into the project is irrelevant; if the projected cost of not de-orbiting the ISS is greater than the projected value to be had from keeping it in orbit, then the correct choice is to de-orbit it. Apparently NASA--and the other ISS participants--agreed during the design phase that this crossover point would be reached in 2016, and decided that the project was still worthwhile (a much easier conclusion to arrive at when it's other people's money you're proposing to spend).

Re:Compare it to your car

[SpinyNorman]

I don't think it's entirely obvious that it couldn't be run as a space hotel at a profit, maintainence included. If you had Soyuz going up weekly to fery passengers up and back, then presumably you'd not need any additional launches for maintenance. At the current $25M/week if you kept the ISS full with 4 tourists + 2 crew you'd be raking in $100M/week, which would surely more than cover expenses. It just depends on how much they could charge, and how much their per-launch costs would drop, to do this as an ongoing business.

e.g. Is there sustained demand of ~200 people (4 ISS bunks * 50 weeks) a year paying $10M/week? If so could they turn a profit on $40M/launch revenue (4 * $10M revenue for a weekly launch)?

and Mir was a case study of terror in zero g

[johnny cashed]

From the Onion: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30678

INTERNATIONAL Space Station?

[LunarEffect]

And the NASA can just say: "Sorry, rest of the world, shows over in 2016."? Don't the ESA, JAXA, RKA...etc have a say in this?

Re:INTERNATIONAL Space Station?

[osu-neko]

And the NASA can just say: "Sorry, rest of the world, shows over in 2016."? Don't the ESA, JAXA, RKA...etc have a say in this?

They have no more choice in the matter than NASA does. (You aren't under the misimpression that NASA wants to do this, are you?) Reality is what it is. They can all say "keep it up", but when the money runs out, they have no more power to keep it up than they have to repeal the law of gravity. They have to deal with the facts as they are, not as they might wish them to be.

Re:Send it to orbit the moon or Mars

[2short]

It's not a rocket designed to withstand the massive thrust needed for such a move.
It's not a lander designed to set down on the Moon.
It's not a re-entry vehicle designed to enter that Martian atmosphere.

not so much

[jollyreaper]

ISS Launches First Permanent Node of "Interplanetary Internet"

Not so much.

Re:not so much

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen your sig for years. I know what it means, but I still don't get why it's supposed to be interesting or clever. In short, it's a sucky sig. About the only thing nontrivial about it is that it rhymes. Which kind of sucks in itself...

Not a big surprise, the ISS was always a waste.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone paying attention knows that the ISS was just corporate welfare. The station was too close to Earth's gravity for any real science and having humans on board meant plenty of vibration and movement to disrupt experiments. Also having humans on board made the cost much higher.

A more useful and far less expensive solution would have been manless stations further out run by robots. Robots would also create innovation in areas that matter. But NASA has become purely about corprorate welfare so I wouldn't expect much from them anymore.

Until we get corporate welfare out of the equation NASA will produce little in the way of useful science.

Indeed, one ISS = 100 mars rovers

[Nicolas MONNET]

The ISS has barely any scientific value. It's a very expensive toy. For the same price a big ass interferometric telescope could be put in a Lagrange point which could resolve earth-like planets and possibly find life in other solar systems.
What has the ISS achieved? Nothing.
Seriously. Nothing. Especially compared to the coolness of the Mars rovers, Mars Science Lab, Galileo, Cassini, Hubble and so on.

Re:Indeed, one ISS = 100 mars rovers

[damburger]

Human habitation in space is not 'nothing'. There is still plenty we do not know about how people survive in space. A space station is a fine idea, with many many uses - it isn't the fault of the ISS that nobody has been willing to put it to good use.

Re:Indeed, one ISS = 100 mars rovers

[Teancum]

The ISS has done two things that were important:

• Provided a subsidy to RKK Energia that would ensure rocket scientists remain employed in the Russian Republic and not run off to other countries like Iran, Iraq, or North Korea where they could do a whole lot more damage.
• Provide a "vehicle" where orbital construction techniques learned by the Russians in the development of the Salyut and MIR programs could be transferred to the NASA Astronaut corps.

Both of these objectives have been crucial, and IMHO in some ways quite cost effective. Note that neither mission has anything to do with science, study of human physiology in a prolonged exposure to zero-G environments, or even being an employment program for aerospace engineers in various critical congressional districts.

This is not to say that perhaps money could be better spent elsewhere, and I would have to agree that scientific investigations may be performed better with unmanned equipment. But to say that the ISS has accomplished nothing is forgetting why, exactly, the thing was put up in the first place.

As to if it would be worth sending up even a cheap launcher (like the SpaceX Dragon capsule) with astronauts and an additional unmanned cargo ship with supplies and instruments for scientific investigation.... assuming an operational ISS..... that is something which you could debate much more effectively and likely show a robotic investigation will still be cost effective. I do think it would be a harder case to make, however, and there is something to be said for having an astronaut that can "tweak" instruments to do something different, or be able to do something as simple as running a hammer on the antenna in order to get it to work.

I would like to know why the Galileo spacecraft didn't have an astronaut do an in-space checkout of the systems before it left the Shuttle payload, to give an example of where having astronauts would have helped in an expensive scientific investigation. A minor repair to the main antenna while in space seems like it could have been a useful task.

Re:Indeed, one ISS = 100 mars rovers

[100_Monkeys_Typing]

Wouldn't it be easier to just write RKK Energia a check for a couple of billion dollars and call it done? I think we can outspend Iran, Iraq (when were they throwing around that kind of money, anyway?), and North Korea (i thought they were more into exporting their tech for some cold hard dollars).

Re:Indeed, one ISS = 100 mars rovers

[metaforest]

I think this Science/price value argument is kind of missing the point.

It was an engineering feat. The largest structure ever constructed in space. We refined material engineering, system testing, managed deployment schedules and engineering schedules that have spanned many generations of engineers to get this system in orbit. cooperated with many countries with competing interests to get this system up there?

The experience and education down here on Terra Firma has been far more valuable than the hard science executed in LEO.

Indulge me:

Building and delivering one flight ready Space Shuttle system $1.7 billion...

Building and Deploying ISS $157 Billion....

Front row seats for the whole family to the ISS Season Finale in 2016..... Priceless.

thank you, thank you.... I'll be here all week... Please.... tip your servers.

Re:Indeed, one ISS = 100 mars rovers

[GargamelSpaceman]

Indeed, the space program has done wonders to further the sciences of project management and bureaucratic masturbation.

Re:Indeed, one ISS = 100 mars rovers

[Teancum]

Prior to 9/11, Iraq was indeed throwing around huge amounts of money to hire folks to build nuclear weapons. In spite of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction that mostly turned up empty (and very debatable about what may have been found or not found), there is significant evidence that Iraq under Saddam Hussein did indeed try to build nuclear weapons, and certainly built biological and chemical weapons... as he used them. Building missiles was a major component of this effort, particularly to build a missile that could hit Israel from within Iraqi borders. Into the environment when the ISS was proposed, this was a very real concern and Iraq was certainly throwing that kind of money around (in the 1990's and earlier). Russian rocket scientists were among those who were leading the effort to make these missiles too.

As for writing a check to RKK Energia and calling it done.... I didn't make the policy or decision. Yes, in hindsight it may have seemed like a good idea, but at the same time why not get something out of them as well? Engineers like making things, which is one way to keep them happy, which was the main point. Building the ISS was one way to keep them in Russia and not even want to go elsewhere.

Could this have been done somehow in a manner much more productive than building the ISS? Perhaps, but it was one of the major rationales for building the station.

!Permanent

[kheldan]

Why are we installing 'vital' equipment on something we're going to let burn up in the atmosphere?

Re:!Permanent

[DerekLyons]

The same reason I installed a new stereo in the car that I'll junk in four years or so - because there's lot of time between now and then.

What experiments and science have been done?

[Nicolas MONNET]

Seriously. What has been done? Published? Learned? ... that couldn't have been learned for a 1/1000th of the price with automated flights?
And to be clear I believe we should invest much more in space exploration. But not that useless, dangerous and expensive crap.
Mars rovers, space telescopes, relativity probes, radar imaging of other planets, return of comet samples ... all have produced thousands of scientific results and millions of awesome images. The ISS? Meh. While costing several times more than the rest combined.

Re:What experiments and science have been done?

[Volante3192]

What has been done? Published? Learned? ... that couldn't have been learned for a 1/1000th of the price with automated flights?

Having astronauts survive in orbit for months on end?

Re:What experiments and science have been done?

[fotbr]

Done first, and IIRC, longer, by the Soviets / Russians on MIR.

Re:What experiments and science have been done?

[lordholm]

Until now, the ISS has been under manned, mostly due to safety reasons as not enough lifeboats have been installed. Crew complement have thus been limited to 3 persons when not docked with the shuttle or the Russian Soyuz capsule. This have barely been enough to run the station.

Crew complement of the ISS is now 6. This mean that there is more (hu)manpower to use for experiments. Most notable of these is the AMS particle detector. Which must be in a human controlled setting and above the atmosphere. So, the ISS is the only place that can offer a place for that experiment.

I once heard a talk by the guy behind this experiment when he was visiting the ESA facilities in the Netherlands, the experiment is one of the coolest things I've ever heard about and it can only be done at the space station where there is a permanent crew around.

Besides the AMS which will be launched next year, there is all the human space science going on. There is a lot of that, and from what I heard from some people involved, the ISS is absolutely invaluable with respect to future human long term space flight (e.g. bone loss issues, how to grow food in micro gravity et.c.).

Yeah, you may not have seen as many pretty pictures from the ISS, and people have already been there, but a permanent base in low gravity is vital for humanity in the long run. We are learning a huge amount, and for Europe (it's the International Spaces Station after all), the station has given us valuable knowledge in how to build human rated space crafts.

PS! Disclamer: I don't work or speak for the ESA DS!

Re:What experiments and science have been done?

[Volante3192]

Since when is having more data points a bad thing?

Ion drive to maintain orbit?

[tibman]

This is because of maintenance costs, right? Costs too much to resupply and refuel it. I was reading about Ion thrusters in wikipedia and they sound like an excellent way to keep the ISS from falling into the earth without the costly fuel. Ion drives do use a lot of power though.. WP says 2-140kW and the ISS generates what, 100kW? Some exact numbers on the ISSs rate of decent and how much thrust would be needed to keep it in orbit would give the no/go for an ion drive. They could even just burn off all excess solar power with the ion drive.. it would go to waste otherwise.

Re:What a waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Your girlfriends pussy goes on permanent paid vacation when you marry her.

Why don't they ISS to mars?

[Uzull]

Of course I would send it empty to orbit mars. It would be a first base for arriving mars expeditions. Would do you think about that?

Re:Why don't they ISS to mars?

[Jedi Holocron]

Interesting idea. However it would arrive burned up and riddled with holes. It doesn't have sufficient radiation or micro-meteoroid shielding.

Re:Why don't they ISS to mars?

[Uzull]

That could be taken care of. Or at least the result of the transit to mars would show what a manned mission should take care of in terms of protection.

It is also a testbed for the vasimr propulsion.

Re:Why don't they ISS to mars?

[osu-neko]

Remember, the reason they need to deorbit it is because they don't have the money to keep it up. Given that the basic problem is a lack of funds, how were you going to send it to Mars? Pray it there?

What about an ION engine?

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Small thrust for long period of time?

Re:What about an ION engine?

[2short]

So use some small-thrust engine to move the ISS to the moon or mars (for no useful purpose) over a decade or two, sending up hundreds of re-supply missions rather than using that thrust to just go where we want. Why?

Unless what you want is a small human life support environment skimming the atmosphere, the ISS doesn't provide anything that can't be had more cheaply by building the thing you want and sending it.

Hotel for the super-rich?

[NCG_Mike]

Why not make it a hotel for those with the funds... perhaps Virgin might be interested?

Re:Hotel for the super-rich?

[metaforest]

I'm sure deflowering virgins on the space station would be a better marketing strategy.

future science

[Anonymous Coward]

this is ridiculous, but not completely surprising. there could be ideas for a larger, newer space station with a more logical docking system, or even just something more modern and updated to cater to the ideals of the world's future space explorators. the ISS was mainly built for experiments in zero gravity and to study the effect of long term space exposure to the human body. while it may seem like a total waste, there is no way to get the station back to earth without completely destroying it. the destruction of the system will only lead to bigger, more useful future endeavors.

Re:Send it to orbit the moon or Mars

[compro01]

Couldn't they just package it up and send it to the moon or Mars?

I doubt it.

To move it out of low earth orbit, you would need a large amount of force. The station weights about 370 metric tonnes, and would need to accurate by about 3.5 kilometres per second to reach escape velocity.

The shuttle's orbital engines will give you 53.4 kN of force for 21 minutes. Using that to push the ISS out of orbit would take about 7 hours.

Go Up?

[PingPongBoy]

Right now the ISS can't stay up by itself too well, but why not start adding more engine power, now that all the construction is almost done, and lift it to a higher orbit, even if gradually? There may be other things at those levels such as satellites but surely space is so big there is still a good parking spot left.

Re:What a waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, when you don't go on vacation with the girlfriend and her pussy, don't expect the latter to have stayed away from stray cats.

Re:What a waste

[acehunter]

Why not? Cats need a vacation too. What are you, pro-dog?

Re:Send it to orbit the moon or Mars

[DerekLyons]

Couldn't they just package it up and send it to the moon or Mars?

No. First, there is the enormous amount of fuel required (think thousands of Shuttle launches). Second, the ISS isn't shielded for the more intense radiation environment beyond the Van Allen belts (let alone the many times worse environment inside the Belts). Third, the ISS is designed for the (relatively) warm and benign thermal environment of LEO, not the frozen hell of Lunar orbit (let alone the even colder environment of Martian orbit).
 
 

You never know when you need it and having it parked in orbit for that time you wished you had, might be wiser than destroying it.

In it's current altitude band, it will reenter within a couple of years without constant (and expensive) reboosting. Boosting it to an altitude where it will have enough orbital life to keep it around for decade or two puts it above the altitude that any current or planned manned spacecraft can reach. Lastly, due to the large fuel requirements for changing orbital planes and altitudes, ISS is (regardless of orbit) essentially unreachable except for missions launched deliberately to it.

Moon

[Polybius]

Divert the money to a permanantly manned Moon base and send up some metallurgists to play around with alloys in the low gravity and near-vacuum. Could probably just use some frensel lenses to heat the forge. Maybe they could find some new super mega alloy, produce it on the Moon then construct a ship there to send to Mars with the newly gained "how to run a moon base" knowledge.

Engines..

[drewsup]

Weren't they supposed to be testing the new VASIMIR engine on this thing eventually??

Re:If true, NASA funding will be even harder to fi

[kestasjk]

Sure, we've recouped advances in science and technology from the time we've had there, but the US taxpayer won't think of it that way.

So you're saying if NASA doesn't waste money keeping a bunch of completed experiment modules in space the US taxpayer will cut NASA's funding for wasting money?

I really feel bad for NASA..

He doesn't make it sound that way...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's the way you hear/see things. Take off your political anti-American filters.

"laws, "unlawfully", "executed"

Noam, is that you?

Re:If true, NASA funding will be even harder to fi

[HikingStick]

My point is that most taxpayers will likely have been under the same impression as was I--that this was supposed to be the permanent space station discussed in our Weekly Readers, science classes, and mainstream media since we were kids. The taxpayer will only see the outlay to date, and the fact that the project is being decommissioned. To the average citizen, it would be like watching a neighbor build a kit car, only for them to have it towed to the scrap yard a few years after finishing it. It will look like a complete waste of money. They won't be thinking about the cost to maintain it, or the fact that it is not in an ideal orbit for a permanent station.

spaceshisps aren't expensive, people are

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't we found out by now that we get a much greater return on investment (in terms of knowledge gained) with un-manned devices (hubble, rovers, voyager etc.), than with stations and craft keeping people alive in space? maybe NASA wants to think more about exploring space in an intellectual way than in a Lewis & Clark sense.

Alternate plan

[RealErmine]

Couldn't NASA just scuttle the ISS in orbit to create an artificial space reef?

Re:If true, NASA funding will be even harder to fi

[kestasjk]

Well you can place the blame for this squarely on your Weekly Readers, science classes, etc, for getting it completely wrong.

I think the LHC guys should start making it clear that their experiment won't last forever either, because people seem to believe that a scientific experiment can go on yielding information forever.

Learned nothing?

[pentalive]

With ISS we learned how to build larger structures in space.
We learned how to work together with other countries to build modules that must fit together "airtight" and must pass through the 'eye of the needle' shuttle cargo bay to get installed.
We are learning how to make a space station more and more self sufficient. (here have a nice cup of cold 'water')

Re:Learned nothing?

[drerwk]

Best case that is engineering and diplomacy. Not a lot of science return for $100 Billion.

radiation

[OrangeTide]

We haven't quite figured out how to deal with cosmic rays and solar flares with the kind of shielding we can lift to the moon. The nasty bit is the lunar surface emits neutrons from being bombarded with cosmic rays from all directions, you'll be living in an irradiated box if you can manage to build a base. Moon walks would have to be severely limited for health reasons, to the point where I don't think we could realistically build a base on the moon except purely through robotics.

Re:radiation

[cdrguru]

Lifting shielding is pointless and silly. The key, as we have known for at least fourty years is to dig into the lunar surface and use the materials there as shielding. We have tunnel boring machines on Earth that will dig huge tunnels at a rate of many feet per day. We don't need that to start out - something on the order of 3 or 4 meters in diameter would be very usable. Spray the raw rocks with a sealent and you have an airtight living chamber.

Leave the boring machines going and you have a city.

Re:radiation

[OrangeTide]

The material that you wish to use to protect you from radiation (like solar flares) spits out neutrons at you when hit with cosmic rays, it's not shielding you from much other than the various things from a solar flare or CME. The Moon is too small and the lunar rock just turns relatively benign cosmic rays (which statistically pass through your body more often than interact with it) into much more dangerous neutrons when it interacts with kilometers of matter. The neutrons bubble up under your feet when you're standing on the moon, if you dig a tunnel they'll be bubbling up under your feet and around your body too. The Earth is big enough that most of the cosmic rays that hit the opposite side interact with matter are far from the surface and the neutrons are (mostly) absorbed before getting to us (and is a tiny fraction of the radiation dose we get every day).

Your "solution" is naive. I didn't have to dig very hard to find facts around the subject, did you just read some of the wild papers on the subject that ignores some of the inconvenient science the Russians and NASA have collected about the moon in the past 15 years? There are many dozens of papers on idealistic models for building lunar bases, but I could find none that address the problems scientists have discovered in the past decade.

Also Radon is difficult to seal out of a system, even an "airtight" one. And it exists in abundant quantities in the Moon. Live in a deep tunnel or trench and it could be a significant component of the atmosphere on a lunar base.

A very short article on the Radioactive Moon that mentions at least some more current issues.

"international" space station

[pentalive]

And not all the modules are ours (the US's ), right?
What are we just gonna take our toys and de-orbit them?

How many of those complaining about this...

[kestasjk]

How many of those complaining about this realize they're adding a new module to it tomorrow, to get more scientific research done?

In 2016 will the module they're adding today still be yielding useful data? No. Does that mean it wasn't worth adding it?

Experiments finish, all good things come to an end, I wish more people here would stop focusing on when it'll be dismanted and start focusing on what's going on there now.. Why is this the story we hear today, and yet there's no story about the new module?

Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I am not surprised, USA just likes to blow up money, war on Iraq, bail outs to inefficient and poorly managed car makers, de-orbit the ISS after it's finally finish.

And then they wonder why they are in financial troubles...

Ion Drive

[Wuahn]

The ISS needs some ion propulsion units to maintain its orbit and lots of those little scented Xmas trees to keep the whole thing from smelling like old socks. :)

Re:Guess the Permanent Interplanetary Internet Nod

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Perhaps it is the Interplanetary Internet that is going to be permanent, not the node. :-)

What's the Big Deal?

[cmseagle]

The US spends this much in Iraq every two and a half months.

Bulshit! Bulshit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bulshit! The Russians already stated that their module will decouple from ISS and they will build upon a new Space Station based on their existing module!

Re:If true, NASA funding will be even harder to fi

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you should be calling NASA engineers idiots with regard to orbital mechanics, just before suggesting we drop off GEO satelites on the way to the ISS. You do realize that GEO is nearly 10 times [i]further[/i] from the earth than the ISS?

I know it's rocket science and all, but... wow. Way to miss the mark.

ISS looking worse and worse compared to the SSC.

[Anonymous Coward]

What I don't get is why they choose the ISS over the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider), and the SSC was NOT going to cost 100 billion dollars it also would have had three times the energy of the LHC (20 TeV in each beam, so 40 TeV to the LHC's 14 Tev). Not to mention all the new physics we would have discovered with it.

Really I don't get why we spend billions of dollars bailing out failed businesses when we could spend it on science instead, you pay for people to have jobs and you get fundamental knowledge from it which can lead to new industries and more jobs.

  Even the ISS has scientific importance, I just don't think it was MORE important than the SSC and we had to cancel one or the other.

If Bush Jr. counts as a celebrity...

[Anonymous Coward]

If Bush Jr. counts as a celebrity, I am all for both placing him in the ISS -AND- cut the funding.

Re:If Bush Jr. counts as a celebrity...

[roc97007]

Yeah yeah... That was so two years ago...

Re:If true, NASA funding will be even harder to fi

[Anonymous Coward]

And by 10 I clearly meant 100

Re:If true, NASA funding will be even harder to fi

[osu-neko]

I can't believe that NASA would even float such a concept right now.

You would prefer they keep quiet about it until they actually run out of money, then deorbit it without telling anyone? Or do you have some magical plan they should be following where they plan on keeping the ISS up without spending a dime on it? Alas, NASA has to deal with the real world of facts. The station can't be kept in orbit with good intentions alone. When the money runs out, the station comes down. The only question is, whether it comes down in a controlled or an uncontrolled manner. It's good that they plan to bring it down in a controlled manner.

It's about the "I" in "ISS"

[Chris Burke]

Face it, the ISS was a make-work project for NASA. It was not a tool designed to teach us something we wanted to know. When it crashes to Earth, science will barely notice.

No, it was a make-work project for multiple space agencies around the globe, working in concert on a complex project. Science may have had little use for it, but what was accomplished in terms of international cooperation is really quite impressive. Cooperation on major space projects -- between former arch-rivals no less -- is an important step in the history of space exploration and something we'd have to deal with eventually. ISS did in fact teach us something we wanted to know.

However, this aspect of the ISS has already been accomplished and just maintaining the status quo, while a challenge in and of itself, isn't particularly useful. So, much as I might like to keep it just for 'cool' factor, I too won't be especially sad to see it go.

Re:It's about the "I" in "ISS"

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Thats a broken window if i ever saw one... We got Cooperation out of something costing over 10B! This isn't a high rollers sesame street.

Getting no return is no return. This thing does nothing, and putting all that work and effort into something else would have been better for everyone except perhaps a few NASA workers that would have needed to find other work. It should have been deorbited a long time ago.

Re:It's about the "I" in "ISS"

[Chris Burke]

Thats a broken window if i ever saw one... We got Cooperation out of something costing over 10B! This isn't a high rollers sesame street.

No, it's international politics, where it takes more than a singing muppet and the promise of milk and cookies to earn cooperation.

Getting no return is no return. This thing does nothing, and putting all that work and effort into something else would have been better for everyone except perhaps a few NASA workers that would have needed to find other work.

Figuring out how to get multiple space agencies with completely different cultures, from different cultures, to cooperate on constructing a project of that magnitude, and to work together in space to operate it, is not "no return". Yes there are more practically useful things that could have been built, but this is the one that was agreed upon and accomplished and simply being able to agree on it is a feature for this kind of work. Work that is difficult and useful even if you don't appreciate or comprehend it as evidenced by repeatedly referring only to NASA involvement. It's about the "I" in "ISS", and ignoring the "I" doesn't make it go away.

Re:It's about the "I" in "ISS"

[linoleo]

Science may have had little use for it, but what was accomplished in terms of international cooperation is really quite impressive.

Maybe so. The point, however, is that this sort of thing could have been accomplished just as well by spending the same amount of money on any comparably complex international project - preferably one that, unlike the ISS, had some actual value, be it scientific, ecologic, humanitarian, whatever.

Amazing things could have been done with this kind of money and international cooperation. Instead we got a white elephant in orbit, proving nothing so much as our ability to throw good money (ISS) after bad (Shuttle) into the pockets of the aerospace-military-industrial complex.

Somebody please rewind the last 30 years of the US manned space program. It's been far worse in terms of fizzle-per-gigabuck than anyone's worst nightmares could have envisioned in 1979. It makes me weep.

Final Experiment

[T Murphy]

Why not get one last good experiment out of it and see how big of a crater it can make? If it makes enough of an impact, we can test our impact-based apocalypse theories.

Hang on a second...

[damburger]

I'm not even sure that NASA has the power to make that decision.

The ISS will fall out of orbit without a boost every so often, and can be deliberately de-orbitted with a boost in the other direction. Thing is, NASA isn't going to be boosting the station in 2016. It will be boosted by Russian Progress and European ATV spacecraft, and possibly by other supply craft from other partners or (maybe) private corporations.

What gives NASA (or more accurately, commentators on NASA) the impression, that with the shuttle retired and Orion only just getting going, they are going to have any real ability to dictate the fate of the ISS? Do Americans just assume they own and control everything without checking?

Re:Hang on a second...

[DerekLyons]

What gives NASA (or more accurately, commentators on NASA) the impression, that with the shuttle retired and Orion only just getting going, they are going to have any real ability to dictate the fate of the ISS?

Other than the fact that we own something like 60% of the station?
 
 

Do Americans just assume they own and control everything without checking?

Coming from a guy that just makes shit, demonstrates essentially zero understanding of the issue, and throws around asinine accusations based on incomplete facts without bothering to check...

Re:Hang on a second...

[damburger]

Other than the fact that we own something like 60% of the station?

Ownership isn't a natural concept, idiot. What will the US do if the other members of the ISS simply choose to keep resupplying and reboosting it? Shoot it down with people inside it? Stop trading with European allies? Get a fucking grip.

Coming from a guy that just makes shit, demonstrates essentially zero understanding of the issue, and throws around asinine accusations based on incomplete facts without bothering to check...

No, I point out facts that people like you dislike, and you get all pissy about it. Grow up arsehole.

Re:Hang on a second...

[DerekLyons]

Ownership isn't a natural concept, idiot.

Smokescreen buzzwords.. They make assholes like you feel good, but are utterly fucking meaningless.
 
 

What will the US do if the other members of the ISS simply choose to keep resupplying and reboosting it?

The other members of the ISS can have at it - once the US shuts down the 90% of the power and the 90% of the life support they provide... Not to mention that if the countries do so, then it's *they* who are in violation of the treaties they signed.
 
 

No, I point out facts that people like you dislike, and you get all pissy about it.

ROTFLMAO. Handwaving and blowing smoke isn't "pointing out facts". Well, to the ignorant it is maybe.

Move the Space Station to a Lagrange Point

[Anonymous Coward]

The low-earth orbit position of the space station was dictated by the range of the space shuttle. The larger and more massive the space station is, the more energy is required to keep it there. Even a geo-synchronous orbit requires energy, and that fuel would not have to be transported 26k miles instead of 300 miles. Another option would be to move the space station even further out, to L4 or L5, the Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system where the space station would orbit in a small region of stability. This would require no fuel to be used for station keeping. It is approximately the same distance from Earth as the Moon.

If some components of the Space Station prove to be no longer useful they should be re-used for either lunar habitats, space tourism destinations or a Mars spacecraft. Given the cost of getting any material into space it seems wasteful to let it fall back down and burn up. Even if you're only reusing trusses, solar panels, supply modules, and docking modules, those are all useful for other purposes.

I do agree though that this is just posturing by NASA, but at the same time maybe they should be looking at where the space station is, and whether something so massive is still necessary for the purpose it serves.

Mod Parent Up!

[muridae]

All of these are things we will need to know later if are to move people to other planets.
Just because these things aren't advances that civilians will see benefits from in 10 years does not mean they are useless advances.

Wrong

[ShooterNeo]

Laser launch would easily be less than $100 per kilogram. Go wiki it yourself. Basically, its a huge array of LED or other cheap laser modules that heat the underside of the spacecraft. The cheapest method uses pulse lasers, and the spacecraft can be merely an inert lump of metal bolted to the payload. In principle, the spacecraft would need absolutely no aerospace hardware at all - no computers, guidance systems, thrusters, nothing, and it could be inserted into orbit.

A laser launch system would be able to make a launch every hour, all day and all night, and as such the cost per launch would approach that of the cost of electricity for running the lasers. Using current prices from LED laser merchants, ít would cost several billion dollars for a cargo laser system, and about 100 billion worth of lasers to duplicate the per launch payload capacity of the space shuttle.

A system like this could send tens of thousands of people into space, and all the mass needed to build the habitats needed to house them.

This is where NASAs budget should go.

Is "Spaceland" threat the real reason to de-orbit?

[dublin]

Give the money in well structured grants to the private sector, like Burt Ruttan and Elon Musk, at least they are smaller, leaner and willing to think outside the box

Actually, those two guys may be the biggest reason NASA wants to bring down the entirety of a station it only barely owns half of in the first place!

Think this out a bit:

1. Once the shuttle retires, NASA will have no manned spaceflight capabilities to speak of, which the ISS requires to stay up.
2. Because of 1, NASA would have to "abandon" the ISS by leaving it unmanned.
3. Entrepreneurs and inventors really love a challenge, and a prize. And the ISS is quite a prize.
4. Getting someone aboard the ISS may well be legally "taking possession" of it. (I'm making the plausible assumption that the salvage laws in space would be found to be the same as, or largely similar to, those of the seas.)
5. The ISS cabal definitely doesn't want a spaceborne Sealand, and they'd rather torch a half trillion taxpayer bucks than let that even be a possibility. Things get worse if you contemplate unfriendly countries occupying the ISS, possibly as an orbiting recon and weapons platform. (NORK-ISS, anyone? ;-))

This may be a far more credible rationale for "de-orbit" than any bogus "safety" argument: NASA and the other ISS owners can't keep occupying it, which is the only thing that perpetuates "ownership", and they can't stand the thought of anyone else getting to own it, so they'd rather destroy it.

Destruction may even be sound policy, depending on the actual strategic risk, although once again, the taxpayers whose wealth was confiscated for this boondoggle get screwed. I love space technology, but tend to agree with Walter McDougall that a huge unintended consequence of the space race was to destroy America's private innovation and set us on the road to big government control of our lives.

Does the US own the whole ISS?

[stonewolf]

I don't think so.

I see it now, early 2016, the order is given to de-orbit the ISS. A US CEV shows up to pick up the rest of the crew and to provide de-orbit thrust. The International crew passes the US crew, bound with duck tape, through the hatch into the CEV. They then slam and lock the door. The Japanese government sends a message to the US saying that further cooperation with the US on ISS operations will be "very difficult". The EU sends 27 diplomats to the US and the UN to explain at great length in 27 different languages that they are repossessing their contributions to the ISS. The Russian crew members send a brief message to the CEV saying, basically, "Kiss My Asski". Behind the scenes China is offering pennies on the dollar for the US modules and hint, so politely, that if the US doesn't sell the dollar will lose 80% of its value tomorrow when the Chinese start selling dollars at an 80% discount.

The CEV commander notices a rather large number of manned spacecraft, mostly Russian and Chinese, closing in. The CEV undocks, backs away slooowly and returns to KSC. The name of ISS is changed to the United Low Orbit Science and Technology International Testbed (U-LOST-IT) and they start doing real science on the thing.

Stonewolf.

B5 reference

[rossdee]

Doesn't this remind you of 'Sleeping in thwe light' where JMS gets a cameo role in turning off the lights?

Re:What a waste

[Shakrai]

I don't know what's worse... the fact that I agree with you or the fact that someone with mod points agrees with you.

Explosive decompression of a jetliner

[Anonymous Coward]

I even remember a movie recently that had a scene where a several foot diameter hole is created in the side of a plane, and people are fighting not to get sucked out for several minutes. I mean, how much air the the writers actually think is in a plane?

In a plane that's flying thru the atmosphere at a few hundred MPH, it's a different story. There's still an ample supply of air around the plane, and it's the slipstream around the hole that will make the suction, but also air will be also continuously re-filling the fuselage of the plane back up thru the same hole. In other words, with a large hole in the side of a jet that's still traveling very fast in forward flight will be much like the insides of a football coach's whistle. Except instead of a little plastic ball rolling and fluttering around inside the whistle, you've got the passengers and all their carry-on baggage fluttering and flying around inside the cabin, and if the hole is big enough, some of it flying out the hole. Aloha Airlines Flight 243 was an extreme case of explosive decompression. About this time last year, a Qantas Airline 747 experienced a much less drastic, but still very dangerous hole busting open in the fuselage.

There are also numerous NSTB reports of smaller, propellor airplanes that have lost windows or doors in flight, some crashed - killing everyone on board, some landed safely, but even an unpressurized Beechcraft Bonanza 4-seat prop plane going 150 MPH will get most all small loose items such as maps, charts, etc, sucked out if it loses a window in flight.

Re:Explosive decompression of a jetliner

[holmstar]

Yeah like a whistle, I know, but that is never how it is portrayed. Everyone is always just being sucked directly toward the hole.

Re:Is "Spaceland" threat the real reason to de-orb

[demachina]

The first problem in your theory is the Russians ARE salvaging their modules out of it and they are they essential core of the ISS. Once they take their modules and go home I don't think what's left is viable. It is unfortunate all those solar panels and modules are going to end up as toast. Not sure if some enteriprising space pirate could lay claim to them and do something worthwhile with them or not.

I assume part of NASA's ploy is to sucker the European's and Japanese in to work with Russia and pony up to keep it alive. In NASA's ideal world I imagine they want the ISS to continue but someone else to pay for it since the U.S. is essentially bankrupt at this point. The Europeans and Japanese aren't entirely plussed their modules were delivered a decade late and will be trashed after only a few years in space.

Unfortunately the ISS is such a money pit and the science being done is so marginal I'm not sure anyone wants to pony up the billions to keep it going. Some parts of it will also start passing their designed life span and no telling how problematic it will be to keep it going as a whole. Mir wasn't in the best of shape when it was deorbited.

Problems with a toilet are not subtle

[Anonymous Coward]

when it's the only toilet in a few hundred miles.

Not sure why, but

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Someone was saying to put it up as a "just in case" type station. For instance, if we've got a manned mission to mars we could navigate the space station to Mars or the moon, we could put the ISS in orbit in advance, and if anything went wrong on with the vehicle they could just jet up to the station. Maybe we could use it as a remote shuttle repair station?(oversimplifying sure, but IANARS) Possibly saving the life of an astronaut.

Re:Not sure why, but

[2short]

If you want a lifeboat for a mission to Mars, build one and send it.

The ISS is not at Mars, it is not more than trivially closer to Mars than the ground is, it is not designed to travel. Without constant re-supply and maintenance it doesn't provide anything to troubled mars explorers but a can whose micro-meteor damage they might be able to repair enough to get it sealed. But they've go a sealed environment if they could "jet up" to it in the first place.

If I'm planning to make a trip to the other side of the country, I don't try to work in my broken bicycle just because it's already at the end of my driveway.

Clinton was fuckup

[Fujisawa Sensei]

At the same time the democrats have had Bill Clinton (yes he fooled around with his intern, did that really make him a worse president or were y'all just jealouse ?)

Clinton was a fuckup; but not for that reason.

Clinton canceled the SCSC; that makes him a fuckup of Bush proportions as far as I'm concerned.

How About Another Use for ISS

[LifesABeach]

Why not boost ISS to a Lagrange Point and use it as a platform for building other vehicles for Logistics, and vehicles for further exploration?

Re:Clinton was fuckup

[Fujisawa Sensei]

SCSC=SSC

My bad, just thinking about that pisses me off.

No they won't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lolzors.

Re:If true, NASA funding will be even harder to fi

[HikingStick]

There's the aspect of announcing the decommissioning so early that may have a psychological impact both on the taxpayer and the legislators who fund the programs. Let's hope a private venture may step up to the plate. The ISS has significant symbolic value.

Re:What a waste

[rossy]

The sum of all pussy equals zero.

Reminds me of an old Yiddish joke

[rkinch]

The ISS is awful. The missions there are terrible. And so short!

Why not move it to the moon?

[TomRC]

This seems really dumb, given how expensive as it is to launch mass off the Earth. Why not at least park it somewhere away from Earth, but where someone could eventually use it?

Supposedly the ISS will eventually have some VASIMR plasma thrusters attached to experiment with using that form of propulsion to keep it in orbit. Why not just take up a full load of reaction mass, for VASIMR? Shut down everything else that's drawing power (the solar panels don't provide enough energy to run VASIMR continuously). Use VASIMR's "high thrust" mode to run from LEO to above the van Allen belts as quickly as possible, and then using VASIMR's "efficient thrust" mode, shift into a highly elliptical orbit, eventually a lunar transfer orbit, and finally in a nice parking orbit around the moon?

Hey - if it survives the trip in reasonably good shape, maybe it could even be used for something for exploring the moon - an emergency orbital shelter perhaps, or at least a cheap communication relay satellite? Worst case, crash it into the moon somewhere a future lunar base could mine the scrap.

I dunno - must be rocket science, 'cause I can't understand why they'd waste all that lovely and expensive delta-V.

Re:Why not move it to the moon?

[DanJ_UK]

Good question, anyone have an answer to this? Any NASA or spacey dudes about?

Re:WTF? Such stupidity need not be allowed

[Anonymous Coward]

Many nations collaborated on the ISS. To 'de-orbit' it would be a crime, and many of our partners have to know this. We should be prevented, by force if necessary, from committing this crime. And it would be a huge crime. I hope the Russians resist this, and enlist the support of our other partners in the ISS to take over the ISS and buy out the American 'share' so that its work can go on. If nothing else it is a stop-over to higher orbit or to the Moon. It was put up for a reason, probably a number of reasons; many of them probably classified. Classified means only secret from the gullible American public. Those reasons are still just as valid in 2016 as they are today, so again there is no good reason to destroy what so many have labored on for so long. In addition there are technologies coming on line that enable more efficient station keeping for less fuel from new 'electric' and VASIMR engines. Use them! Use the place as a construction site for assembling larger craft in orbit to use in interplanetary exploration.

Re:Send it to orbit the moon or Mars

[metaforest]

seems like an ION drive and a large rack of noble gases would let you creep it into a lunar transfer orbit in a few decades.... IANAOMP...

The only issue is that it might turn into swiss cheese before it gets there. But then it would be right at home on the moon, eh?

Might be a good long-term usage test for the large format ION drives. 0.5N adds up quite nicely over years of pushing.

NASA must know about the Collapse

[SAABMaven]

...for them to just give up like that. Scuttling programs with no real replacement.

Haven't heard of the Collapse? Haven't even noticed that food prices have doubled in the past year with many nutritional items going off the shelf or being replaced with high-fructose, high-subsidy corn syrup or high-subsidy, high-pesticide soy?

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENCA260&q=peak+oil+collapse

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/

(I bet a lot of you assumed that the Internet would be there forever, as well...)

Re:Guess the Permanent Interplanetary Internet Nod

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't really permanent, eh?

Perhaps not really an ISS, huh?

Maybe an ASS...

Paging Mr. Gibson

[StarEmperor]

Maybe some plucky squatters will take it over.

Re:If true, NASA funding will be even harder to fi

[DavidTC]

I know where the fucking ISS is.

I was talking about where space stations should be.

You know, in actual non-decaying orbit. High earth orbit. Where we can use it go places, and not have to worry about geosync crap. (And, from what I understand, we've been slightly pushing things upward from geosync to fall apart, so we'd need to be at least a reasonable height above it.)

Although I'm willing to be convinced as to MEO...apparently, looking it up, there are less satellites there than I thought. I thought it was a busy place with all sorts of stuff wizzing around at different level, but apparently not. So high MEO might be a better place than HEO, especially with enough of a equatorial 'wobble' that we can launch outward and miss going through geosync from that directin.

Either way, low HEO or high MEO, it wouldn't be that far out of the way of the station to geosync, so we could actually stop having the silly problem where we can't reach both the ISS and geosync in the same launch, because the damn orbits are too different. With the right setup, we could actually launch a tiny spacecraft from the space station, to geosync, put/fix a satellite there, and wait until the station's orbit comes back around (Either we'd catch up to it, or it to us, depending on which orbit we choose.), and head right back to it, with very little fuel at all.

Considering that something like a third or more of space launches are to screw around with stuff in geosync orbit, it seems really idiotic to have placed our space station somewhere else entirely.

And under 400km was just stupid on top of that. Really, really stupid. Four times farther out, low medium earth orbit, would have still be difficult to reach the geosync from, but it would have at least not had atmospheric drag! Hell, 600km would have had noticeably less drag. We put it at literally the lowest place it could stay in orbit...if we constantly kept adjusting it.

And it should be roughly over the equator, so we don't have to randomly change directions to chase the damn thing down and match speeds.

Yes, I know the Russians won't like it, but that's why we need a damn treaty and some sort of equatorial land with guaranteed space launch capacity for all nations if they're willing to build a launch site there. (Or, even better, an international space program from top to bottom.)

Re:Is "Spaceland" threat the real reason to de-orb

[dublin]

Thanks, I didn't know the Russians were keeping their modules up there. Serves me right for not RTFA...

Regardless, I'd be really surprised if some variant of the evaluation I described didn't enter into NASA's thought and decision process.