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

[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.

luckily for us

[markringen]

luckily for us Nasa doesn't decide anything!

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: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: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.

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: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: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...

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: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.

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: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.

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: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:WTF?

[SydShamino]

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

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.