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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."
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.
*The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.*
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?
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luckily for us Nasa doesn't decide anything!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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...
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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.
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Bill Clinton killed the United States supercollider to fund this piece of shit. Twenty years later, we will have neither.
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.
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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.
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
"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?
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.
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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.
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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:
Without getting into the monetary expenses, we've spent too much Delta V to drop this thing.
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.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
"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.
0 1 - just my two bits
The profit was for the contractors, and occurred at step 1...
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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?
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?
Because over long enough time it won't be just 'one more object.' It'll be 'many more objects.'
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?
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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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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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.