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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.*
luckily for us Nasa doesn't decide anything!
Isn't really permanent, eh?
I don't get it...
1. Build ISS
2. Deorbit...
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X. Profit?!?!
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
what, your laptop getting warranty repair work again?
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
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)?
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.
Build another one, then de-orbit both of them. Why build and destroy one when you can do two for twice the price?
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...
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.
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
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 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?
The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture will clearly have something to say about this!
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
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.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
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 /. and surf for porn... Might as well start planning for its decommissioning, the place will be useless in a year.
read
It will be tested heavily this month, and could give astronauts direct Internet access within a year.
Tested heavily. My point exactly.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
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.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
Not a typewriter
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.
I assure you, that's not a coincidence; that's genius marketing. And I don't see what it has to do with Idiocracy.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Bill Clinton killed the United States supercollider to fund this piece of shit. Twenty years later, we will have neither.
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.
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.
Why, she will probably need to rest it for a while anyway.
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.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
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.
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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.
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.
http://marsandmore.com - Posters of space, spacecraft, and astronomy.
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.
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.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
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.
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.
No sig today...
Maybe they have a fat policy on it...
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.
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.
"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
Why are we installing 'vital' equipment on something we're going to let burn up in the atmosphere?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
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.
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?
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.
Why not make it a hotel for those with the funds... perhaps Virgin might be interested?
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.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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).
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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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')
The US spends this much in Iraq every two and a half months.
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.
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.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
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?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
Yep, it's lumpy.
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.