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

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.

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.

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.