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Additional Lab To Be Added To the ISS

Posted by timothy on from the heck-what's-one-more dept.

Matt_dk writes "Apparently the International Space Station is going to get bigger. NASA and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) are preparing to sign an agreement to add another laboratory to the ISS by using a modified multipurpose logistics module (Raffaello) during the final Space Shuttle mission. It will be attached in September 2010 during Endeavour's STS-133 mission. The idea had originally been rejected, but earlier this year ISS program manager Michael Suffredini said using an MPLM for an additional module was being reconsidered."

2 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why Don't They Leave the Shuttles Up There, Too by vlm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't get why we're not planning to dock the shuttles to the ISS and leave them up there, too, with their useful engines, robotic arms, and so forth.

    Duct taping the remaining shuttles to the ISS, arkansas style up on concrete blocks, has the following problems:

    1) There's not enough space on the truss to leave them bolted on and still have space for resupply missions to dock.

    2) They will rapidly permanently break down and become more or less useless. Either leave the fuel cells running, in which case they run out of H2 in about a month with no was in space to refuel and no in-orbit liquid H2 transport available (at least they "could" refill the O2 tanks, in theory), or shut them off and let the electrolyte and water exhaust freeze in place, cracking the lines. When the freon leaks out of the coolant system, no way to refill... Most of the onboard systems are like that, limited on-orbit lifetime and no on-orbit maintainability, at all.

    3) So, they're deadweight, whats the loss? Well, they need to boost the station so it doesn't reenter, and boosts are expensive. Plus it adds surface area to speed reentry so you need MORE reboosts but just BIGGER reboosts.

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  2. Re:fucking slashdot by Entropius · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sounds like a joke, but it's not -- the world is more likely to look favorably on a country that uses its wealth for cultural progress like significant science. (

    Ironically spending $10 billion on the space program would contribute *far* more to US national security than an extra $10 billion to the military.