Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
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.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
...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)?
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.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
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?
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.
moox. for a new generation.
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?)
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.
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')
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.
The ISS has done two things that were important:
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.