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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."
Isn't really permanent, eh?
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
Because it's less hazardous for future space missions to clear them out of orbit while we still can, rather than having to track new orbiting material.
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.
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.
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Bill Clinton killed the United States supercollider to fund this piece of shit. Twenty years later, we will have neither.
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
They should put some celebrities on it and have them plead for money unless people want to watch them die a horrible fiery death.
Hmm, on second thoughts that woul be awesome to watch.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.