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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?
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!!!
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.
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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.
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...
It's not exactly the first move, since this has been the publicly available schedule since before construction on the ISS even began.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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
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.
Why not make it a hotel for those with the funds... perhaps Virgin might be interested?
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 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.
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