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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.
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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.
It'd stop working about about a month or two and that'd just be more facility for the Russians to spend time repairing.
The Shuttle simply isn't speced for long term exposure to space. The fact that it doesn't fall apart for the 14 days that it is typically on-orbit is a result of constant care and attention on the ground.
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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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why not just guide it to hit the atmosphere upside down?
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.
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?
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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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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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Soyuz capsules, of course. Same way everybody else on the station gets back to Earth.
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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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Why deorbit it at all? They could attach an ion drive to the station and slowly raise the orbit until it won't decay for another 500 years or so. The station can withstand that much acceleration. There's certainly space enough up there, it's not like it takes up valuable room... also, lifting all that mass into orbit has been so stupidly expensive, they should at least reserve the option to use it at some point in the future. Anything else is irresponsible.
At the very least, it would be an interesting machinery longevity experiment. Re-visit the station in 50 years or so, just to see how it has stood up to the environment up there. Also, at some point in the future it will be an archaeological artifact, and valuable to future historians.
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the incremental cost for a shuttle launch is ~$60M.
NASA says the cost per shuttle launch is $450 million.
I mentioned this in another post (or two):
1. There's no ion engine that can do the job.
2. The US put it up, they're legally required to bring it down.
And finally:
3. The station barely functions now, it will not function after even 2 years of neglect, let alone 50.
Smarter people than you are working on this program, give em some credit.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=14237
http://twitter.com/search?q=%23nasahsf
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
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.