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Panel Advises Longer Life For Space Station
suraj.sun writes "A presidential panel reviewing the US space program has found that the United States needs to boost NASA's budget by $1.5 billion to fly the last seven shuttle missions and should extend International Space Station operations through 2020. The panel also proposed adding an extra, eighth shuttle flight to help keep the station supplied and narrow an expected 5-7 year gap between the time the shuttle fleet is retired and a new US spaceship is ready to fly."
The Shuttle/ISS subcommittee headed by Dr Sally Ride has presented three options:
1. Do nothing, let the shuttle stop flying at the end of 2010 and let the station be de-orbited at the end of 2016.
2. Fly 1 more mission, and still de-orbit the station at the end of 2016.
3. Extend station operations through to the end of 2020 and fly more shuttle missions to support it.
The options explain how to do it, what funding will be required, and the consequences on other programs.
The President and the new NASA Administrator will take these options and decide which to implement, depending on what funding they can get from Congress.
The committee is not chartered with making any recommendations, and the options are not final until the report is released, around Aug 31.
You can give your opinions to the committee via the website: http://hsf.nasa.gov/
How we know is more important than what we know.
If they're going to decommission a shuttle, why not leave it at the station? It would provide some redundant facilities, extra living space, and most importantly, engines to boost the orbit periodically (one of the main things the shuttles do now besides delivering supplies and new components).
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Shipping - no delivery options. Get there yourself.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The ISS is the most amazing laboratory ever built. Vast amounts of awesome science is done on it. Thing is, NASA is so completely inept at communicating this to the public that even space geeks, like myself, have no idea what the hell they do up there.
The ISS program people will occasionally say "I could talk to you all day long about the great science we're doing on the ISS" and THEN THEY DON'T. Maybe if they talked "all day" about it now and then people wouldn't refer to their project as "busy work" for the space program.
But if you don't care about science, maybe you only care about exploration, then I guess you have to go with the argument that the lessons we've learnt about maintaining space systems on the space station will be invaluable for going to Mars.. and we're definitely not ready yet.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Every space station is temporary. Eventually things start to fail (see MIR) and end up becoming very expensive to maintain or unsafe to keep sending missions.
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It has a mass of 303t.. and it is in such a low orbit that atmospheric drag is still a major effect.. so you've got to boost that vast mass back into its orbit every couple of months.
The "permanent" adjective applied to the station means that it is "permanently manned" - as in, there is always someone on-board for as long as the station is up there.
People are often talking about moving the ISS into an orbit that is more useful for exploration.. say, an orbit that crosses the inclination of the Moon now and then. Basic calculations though, show that any attempt to "move" the ISS would cost as much delta-v as launching a brand new station.. and as launch costs remain the major dominating factor in space activities, you might as well make a new station.
How we know is more important than what we know.
option 4: the US quits participating, and they leave it in orbit and other countries continue to fly to it and to use it, as they currently do.
-- Terry
particles in space will eventually destroy everything. the Russian mir was full of holes at the end of it's life. but till date it was the safest space station ever created by man, the same people also made 75% of the ISS :P (Russians yup)
Because going from "we should build a space rocket thingy" to getting into that kind of orbit is extremely expensive. We've built NASA over 50 years of continuous research and have veterans running the administration that have worked there their entire career. You can't just stuff a bunch of engineering grads in a building with calculators and piles of money and let them cook like we did, unless you want to give them 50 years and several horrible disasters. And once you have the thing designed and built, it has to be extensively (expensively) refitted and repaired after every launch.
And what are the material gains? Nothing, because you could have just let America pay for it and give you the research for free anyway.
Every space station is temporary. Eventually things start to fail (see MIR) and end up becoming very expensive to maintain or unsafe to keep sending missions.
This is not how commercially viable megastructures work though! and that's my point!
Modern commercial structures are bipartite, consisting of a permanent shell and a modular interior. Think of any modern office building or strip mall. When one company moves out its a matter of simple retrofitting to get the next tenant company at home and functioning.
This is how a space station SHOULD work. It should have a permanent shell capable of containing life support, modular, easily replaced apparatus for essentials (air and water supply/purification), and an interior which is easily fitted and re-fitted as necessary.
Doubleplusgood points for artificial gravity through rotation to prevent bone loss of employees for future commercial tenants.
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Everything starts to fall, except those things that aren't actually falling. Geosynchronous Orbit is incredibly stable, e.g. Satellites that fail in GEO are just pushed higher, simply because it'd cost so much in the way of energy to push them down into the atmosphere.
Which leads us to the real reason we aren't aiming for permanency yet. Those orbits are very high. While other vehicles could reach it reasonably, our main space construction workhorse, the Space Shuttle, couldn't. It's too heavy and doesn't have a way to propel itself to such a high orbit, and most likely would never survive it.
So great, you can stick a space station way up there. Just don't expect the people in it to be coming home any time soon (or on the other side of things, be prepared to spend a new hundred billion to half trillion dollars over twenty years developing a vehicle that can get you there and back).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Well, vast amounts of science, as you say, could possibly be done on it. Thing is, not much of the possible science really started. The substantial delays in construction meant that the crew required to do the science, and many of the modules, didn't arrive until recently. That's why dumping the thing in a few short years is such a crime. $100 Billion, twenty years, and the lives of seven astronauts were given to build the ISS, and NASA wants to dump it to make room in their budget for an unfunded Mars stunt. The very plan is criminal.
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Nice idea, but it won't get off the ground. Literally. Too many payload constraints to really do that sort of thing. Everything pushed into space has to be really thought about, weighed, tested and re thought about.
You're reading too many Science Fiction novels again. No Russian scrubbers piloted by stoned Rostas. No shuttle tanks parked in orbit.
At least for a while. Let's get Mr. Fusion working and then look at these issues.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I think all the people who's lives have been saved by the medical research done on the ISS would disagree.
You've gotta understand.. every scientist will say that the research of every other scientist is unworthy of being funded, because they want the funding for themselves.
There's vast amounts of work being done on the ISS.. and on the Shuttle for that matter.. but you've gotta dig to find it. Why? Because the media has repeatedly told NASA that it is boring and they don't wanna hear about it.
Science is boring.. yeah.. that's the society we live in.
How we know is more important than what we know.
and as launch costs remain the major dominating factor in space activities, you might as well make a new station.
Piffle.
There are dozens of ways of moving the ISS into a higher orbit. Let's start experimenting with them today.
The only reason for decommissioning it in 2016 (or 2020) is the routine inability of the American government to actually do anything, coupled with the imperialist need to prevent anyone else from doing anything.
Launch costs are spread nicely across the various states, giving a political incentive to support the ISS while the shuttle is flying. Once it isn't, the political incentive dies and with it the support of the dysfunctional American government.
Oh, and does anyone believe that that same dysfunctional government is going to get a shuttle replacement flying with a 5 - 7 year gap? I'd like to hear RIGHT NOW from every self-righteous asshole who is waiting to tell us seven years from now that OF COURSE EVERYONE KNOWS that EVERY PROGRAM goes VASTLY over-schedule. If you know it right now, then put the correction factor in now. I'm betting 13 years for the shuttle replacement to fly, based on past NASA incompetence. Anyone who knows different, speak now or shut the fuck up in seven years when the program is still seven years from flight.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Couldn't they attach an ion engine and let the solar panel's power keep it in orbit if by chance it becomes unmanned for a while?
Table-ized A.I.
That's one of the major problems with the current Constellation / Orion / Aeries I / Aeries V / Moon / Mars plan. Although it's likely to be quite a bit more reliable (e.g. safer) to fly, the Constellation program doesn't do much to increase access to space. Constellation re-uses the Apollo/Shuttle launch infrastructure, with only two launch pads and two (or possibly 3, there is an unfunded plan to build one more) crawlers, and the constraints of the Vertical Assembly Building (with a limited number of assembly bays, one of which is used for storage of rocket parts). This means the flight rate to orbit tops out at something like a dozen or 18 launches a year, maximum. Flight rates for the heavy lift Aeries V are likely to be so low that the vehicle will never achieve a reasonable per-flight cost, because too few vehicles will be built to get the cost of flight hardware down.
NASA has abandoned the goal of building a reliable, cheaper transportation system. They were hot on the trail with the X-33 / VentureStar program. Like nearly all R&D programs, it went over the original budget and behind schedule. However, the program had the right goals, and the right basic plan for getting to them. If NASA had stayed on course, we would have had a replacement for the Shuttle by now. The planned VentureStar production flight vehicles would be flexible enough to sustain the ISS. It would have a capacity high enough (in terms of payload per flight, which was similar to the Shuttle) and flights per year (which could scale with the addition of vehicles, without the constraints of the expensive and limited Apollo-era launch systems). The modernized vehicle design (lifting body airframe, engines with fewer moving parts, substantially more durable thermal protection system, simplified container-paradigm-based payload integration) would yield shorter turn-around of a single vehicle, from days to a couple weeks, compared to a few months to several months for the Shuttle).
Instead, NASA dabbles in scramjets, with a million here and a million there in loose change. Scramjets are a technology with great potential, but even if aggressively funded (which they are not) they won't be ready for a long, long time. A more modest program like the X-33 / VentureStar could get us to higher flight rates with Shuttle-like capacity and reduction in cost of payload delivery which would be substantial enough to stimulate the space economy. We could get to the Moon and Mars a lot cheaper, and go there more often with a rational approach to building a transportation system. (NASA needs to rethink the in-space transfer vehicles, too. VASIMR is a technology within our reach, and if developed as the inter-planetary engine, can dramatically reduce flight times to Mars, from many months to 1 month.)
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This isn't an issue of sunk costs. It's an issue of entirely failing to capitalize upon the investment made, failing to do the science that the ISS was designed to do, the science that the public expected to happen when they funded the construction of the science platform. I merely enumerate the costs to demonstrate the magnitude of the crime that NASA and the Bush administration committed when they suddenly announced, without consulting their international partners, that the ISS would be de-orbited in 2016, far short of its original planned lifespan as a research platform. It was originally intended to be operational for 10 to 20 years, not four or five years, after it was completed.
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Near the end of 2008, Ad Astra and NASA signed an agreement to build a 200kw flight article and test it at ISS.
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I suspect it will cost insignificantly more. The launch is usually the expensive part, not the construction of whatever it was that broke.
The Space Shuttle was designed to be able to capture and to return to Earth satellites in orbit. It even did so a couple of times. Just enough to demonstrate that it wasn't worth doing, and that it was far more cost-effective to let dead satellites go and just put up a new one.
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the incremental cost for a shuttle launch is ~$60M.
NASA says the cost per shuttle launch is $450 million.
For those interested, the third and final meeting will be broadcast Thursday, running from 8am - 4pm EDT:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/NASA-TV-HD
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I think the Thursday meeting will be the most interesting one, as it'll include the presentations from the "Exploration Beyond Low Earth Orbit" subgroup. Some options the subgroup is studying include not just the "Moon Base" plan, but also plans for going directly to Mars ASAP, as well as a "Flexible path" option which would involve manned trips to destinations in shallow gravity wells, like L1, asteroids and Phobos.
The videos from the Tuesday and Wednesday meetings aren't available yet, but you can find out much of what's been discussed already at the following links:
HSF Committee Public Meeting in Alabama - Reviews
HSF Committee Public Meeting in Houston - Reviews
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=17962.0
Why no other country had succeeded yet in developing technologies that could mimic what the space shuttle could do in order to supply the "International" Space station after the United States retire the shuttles. (with the exception of Russia)
Sally Ride mentioned this in her Augustine Committee presentation, but other countries do have this tech, and will have it ready to service the ISS in a few years. There's also the COTS options as well. I thought it was kind of bizarre when Sally Ride immediately said afterwards that she didn't think they would be able to reduce the gap, without explaining her rationale.
Anyways, here's the options:
* Russian Soyuz
* ESA's ATV
* Japan's HTV
* SpaceX Dragon
* Orbital Taurus II
There's also the EELVs (Delta IV and Atlas V), but the designs for delivering to the ISS haven't been funded yet. The estimates are that those would be ready for delivering humans to the ISS in 3-4 years, and could presumably deliver cargo much earlier.
The modular approach you describe is more-or-less what Bigelow Aerospace is doing with their private space stations. It'll also be flying at a higher orbit than the ISS, so should suffer less from atmospheric drag problems.
The ISS is the most amazing laboratory ever built. Vast amounts of awesome science is done on it. Thing is, NASA is so completely inept at communicating this to the public that even space geeks, like myself, have no idea what the hell they do up there.
Your post got me wondering.. I had no idea either. A little google search gave me this interesting list.
"wahts woring iwth my tyoping?"
You dropped a word from the phrase you were replying to; "cost" and "incremental cost" are not the same thing.
Example: the cost to produce 10,000,000 DVDs might be $10 per DVD, because the blockbuster movie cost $100,000,000 to make. But once the movie is made you don't have to make 10% more movie to make 10% more DVDs, you just have to print more disks; the incremental cost would be less than $1 per DVD.
With the shuttle things are even more complicated. Do you want the total cost per flight; the amount of money spent on the whole program divided by the number of flights? That's well over $1 billion per launch. What about the operating cost per flight? If the R&D is considered "sunk cost" and you just consider the current budget per flight, that varies widely from year to year depending on how many flights are made, and NASA's $450 million might come from one of those calculations. And the incremental cost is less still. If you cancel a shuttle flight and only fly 3 in a year when you'd planned 4, you save a bit of fuel costs, some operations costs, you don't have to manufacture another external tank... but you don't get to put all your employees on leave for 3 months, you don't get to mothball your facilities for 3 months, and so you don't save nearly as much as you might hope. I thought even the incremental cost was over $100 million per flight, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it was $60 million.