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Space Station To Be Deorbited After 2020
astroengine writes "Russia and its partners plan to plunge the International Space Station (ISS) into the ocean at the end of its life cycle after 2020 so as not to leave space junk, the space agency said on Wednesday. 'After it completes its existence, we will be forced to sink the ISS. It cannot be left in orbit, it's too complex, too heavy an object, it can leave behind lots of rubbish,' said deputy head of Roskosmos space agency Vitaly Davydov."
Why don't we get a say in this?
Oh, right, I forgot; Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect have remodeled our space policy.
Why couldn't they nudge it out of orbit instead? Send it off to roam deep space? That would make a far more romantic end, rather than being designated space junk and dumped into the ocean.
Does anyone have a suggestion as to where we could land this thing? It's kinda heavy and sure to crush anything in its path. I mean we COULD land it in the ocean but wouldn't it be better to land it on someone's house that we don't like?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It was my understanding that the ISS *can't* maintain its orbit without periodic boosts (I could be mistaken there). So since when it leaving it as "space junk" even an option? If you stop maintaining it, it's going to deorbit one way or another. It's really only a question of whether or not it's a *controlled* deorbit.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Now that the Space Shuttle has been retired, is this just a political maneuver to get more funding by making a "modest proposal" of what will happen if they don't? Considering the extended time and money it took to assemble, it seems like a huge waste to deorbit it in just 9 years.
But it still makes me sad.
Agile Artisans
let's dump more garbage into our oceans. Its not like they're struggling to survive against the onslaught of man already!
Seriously, what the hell? Does the ISS really have no use beyond 2020, who are these unnamed 'partners', and do they really think they have the final say as to what happens to the billions worth of international moneys that have been invested in the ISS?
All rites reversed 2010
It's skylab all over again.
"oops, we don't have the launch capability to boost the station before it falls flaming from the sky"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Why not turn it into a broom? Cover it in aerogel, bump it into a dirty orbit, and catch all those pieces of space debris that are making planners panic. Then go for the de-orbit. Waste not, want not.
At the cost of how many billions of dollars? It's barely been completed (has it been actually?) and they are already scheduling it's destruction.
The next station we orbit needs to be permanent; otherwise this is just a disgusting waste of money. Can anyone point to any substantive technical or science benefits from this thing to-date? beyond 'practicing living and working in space'?
ffs.
How many billions of dollars were spent on this thing over the years? And what exactly were the benefits of spending it? Are those who benefited from having it there the ones who paid for it? Or, was this just another hundred billion dollars of taxpayer money down the hole to benefit corporations?
That's just sad... it should be landed on the moon. It it's too big in one piece, dismantle it and land the components. Even refurbishing as a "robot station" with just that robotic arm and the solar sails and some positioning systems for satellite repair or something would be better, than letting it all crash and burn. how about parking it in a different orbit... maybe around the moon?
Sad.. that it cant be moved out into a stationary orbit. Or into an orbit around the moon. But..
New years eve 2020 will be something to remember if you happen see this firecracker hurling across the sky.
It would make for a hell of an orbiting hotel - and I can count half dozen emerging space companies who'd bid on it.
Don't we put enough crap into the world's oceans? I mean we literally have an island of garbage floating around, why add to the pollution? Why can't we, as another poster said, thrust it off into space, or, thrust it toward the sun and let the sun's gravity suck it in and destroy it?
exactly. uncontrolled deorbit leads to debris.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
We purposely sink ships and subs to create artificial reefs.
Oh man, I sure hope Taco Bell runs that promotion again - I can taste that meat-flavored filler now!
Why not fill it with an assortment of human knowledge and history and send it off into deep space for alien archeologists? The human race may no longer exist but we can live forever as material for museum exhibitions!
It seems to me that we humans should be trying to design something that can recycle and use all those valuable raw materials for other orbital projects. After all, doesn't it cost huge amounts of money for every kilogram lifted to even low orbit? Might it not be more cost effective to create an orbital forge (for lack of a better term) to convert all that into parts for the next station? And if it needs to go to a parking orbit, it still seems cheaper to send up some orbital maneuvering engines for it than to simply dump it as waste into an already polluted ocean. I'm sure this wouldn't be easy, but it might provide some jobs for the thousands of people out of work around here (I live near Cape Canaveral, FL -- we've got a surplus of unemployed NASA/United Space Alliance engineers at the moment) and it might even save lots of money in the long run.
It should be aimed directly at the Ka'ba, preferably on Tuesday, 10th August 2021
This kind of comment is one of the main reasons why the US has such a poor reputation.
Many voters think NASA is an extravagance compared to other problems the government must solve. Although NASA is only 1-2% of the federal budget, it has been perceived as the most expensive federal program opinion polls up to a quarter of the budget! Although Bush and Obama have already done substantial cutting by eliminating the US manned space program for all practical purposes, the deficit hawks want to eliminate most of the rest of NASA. The hundred billion dollar space station for just two US astronauts at a time is a often mentioned target. The Hubble-replacement Webb telescope is defunded in the next budget, effectively terminating that. And any probe past the Juno and Curiosity launches this year are in serious danger.
I wept in 2001 when so little of the namesake movie had been implemented, but tecnologically could have been. But the US space program of 2020 looks it will be much smaller than the anemic 2010 program.
We've always said we wanted to go eventually do a permanent structure on the moon - why not the next best thing? Hook a Dragon up to it, turn on the thrusters, and aim for Luna. Let's put the ISS in orbit around the moon when its lifespan here is up, and voila, we have a permanent structure to study the moon, serve as a waystation / bathroom break rest stop for future interstellar travelers, and it doesn't cost us anything but the fuel of an unmanned rocket. Seems like a no-brainer.
Getting the amount of propellant necessary into space isn't a challenge. We did it in 1969. Yes, we're moving something a little bigger. Fortunately, nice, low gravity and no air resistance means you can move the ISS, very, very slowly, with almost no propellant needed for anything other than getting momentum started, and course corrections. If it takes a month to get there, unmanned, who cares? It took longer to build it than we're letting it run for - why destroy it now?
What a lovely person you are.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Come on, there is no use for this station in space now, so all the money is going to be burned maintaining it until 2020, there is no economic incentive to keep it going and it's just a waste of resources and energy. But it's in orbit already, so instead of doing 5 next launches to replace crews in there, they could shoot up a few boosters with fuel in them, attach them to the station, then at some point launch it into a much higher orbit, or even send it to the Moon or Mars. Who needs that station up there now? What use is it? It's a waste of money and resources and energy, it's a jobs program and nothing else.
Dump it now, but dump it with style, calculate a way to push it to an orbit around some other body in space. Mothball it and send it to Mars.
You can't handle the truth.
It should be aimed directly at the Ka'ba, preferably on Tuesday, 10th August 2021
Saudi Arabia is a major ally of the US. Why would the US attack its territory?
They ran it for 15.
You never know what will happen to the plans in the future.
Glad to see our money was put to such good use as a permanent base for scientific research for many generations to come, and totally was not a big fat trough of pork for contractors to chow down on. Then again, with costs that ballooned from $4 billion to $12 billion due to contractor greed from poor management and oversight, I guess the other choice was the same exact thing. ( For anyone who doesn't have a damn clue what I am talking about)
Moral of the story: You just can't do science in the United States anymore, because knowledge for the better of humankind simply isn't profitable.
Hell, the ISS doesn't have a purpose now. It's sole purpose was justification for the shuttle program.
Honestly, we could have spent the money on actual science. Makes one wonder if the teabaggers don't have a point about useless gubbamint waste.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You have until 2020 to claim a free space station. Think of it as the next step in space tourism.
bah.
They're already going to hook up a VASIMIR engine, so once that's done, we can just send it to orbit around the moon or whatever...
Why not drop it on Jerusalem instead? People have been fighting over that place for millennia. If I had the power, I'd have half a mind to set off a big dirty nuke there. "You can't agree to share your toy? Then NOBODY gets it."
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
And, possibly landing someplace you didn't expect.
That would be bad. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As opposed to the nice friendly things those who worship at the Ka'ba say.
Why not drop it on Jerusalem instead? People have been fighting over that place for millennia.
That would make a good secondary target
Compared to the construction of a new space station, the fuel costs of keeping the ISS in (a higher) orbit are negligible.
I really think that the space agencies around the world should consider recycling parts of the ISS:
- Solar panels (couple of tons of electricity producing silicon, producing a couple of megawatts)
- Living quarters, including water recycling toilet
- Space robot arm
- Storage modules
Maybe the labs need to be replaced because new experiments are needed... but I think that a lot of money can be saved if some major parts of the ISS are recycled for ISS v2.
Deputy head of Roskosmos space agency Vitaly Davydov said: "We will deorbit the International Space Station...unless you give us (duhn duhn da) one MILLION dollars!"
Sorry - that was the first thought in my head this morning.
Tell Elon and Robert that they can have it if they can safely keep it in orbit. Seems like that would be a perfectly cromulent shakedown mission for Salvage 1 errr, Falcon heavy.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Need to tag the discovery.com article as flamebait. The U.S. is involved in more modules than Russia.
So you want a large complex machine just floating out near the earth so that it can be hit by micro asteroids all day until it finally breaks. It could only result in Kessler Syndrome.
Islam has its #1 and #2 holy places under its direct control, and nobody else is even allowed to go there.
Islam stole the location of Judaism's #1 holy place and build the Al Aqsa mosque on it as their #3 most holy place. I think it's fair to destroy Islam's #3 so that the Jews can have their #1 back.
I have often wondered about that. There are propulsion systems that can use things other than combustible fuels... systems that use the sun's power and nuclear decay and stuff like that. Why send it crashing and burning into the planet when we can send it out into the universe?
Why couldn't they nudge it out of orbit instead? Send it off to roam deep space? That would make a far more romantic end, rather than being designated space junk and dumped into the ocean.
Because they think for the future. Even a iron-screw-sized debris, if plunged against your craft at hundreds of meters per second, can leave a hole bigger than your fist, side-to-side. Depressurization of the environment is one of the possible issues that might happen because of it.
You really, really, really want to limit the amount of debris you leave in space, or you're gambling with Lady Luck. There's a big enough mess with all the satellites we put up there. A salvage operation would cost an awful sum of money. Think about going around in space searching for some centimeters-wide, potentially-harmful waste.
Pushing it in space might be romantic (agreed), but not very clever. The only good alternative would be to have it caught by another gravity well, so that it crashes on something like Jupiter. Actually, sending everything on the moon might be nice, if you want to use some scrap metal one day tomorrow to start building shipcrafts in space (sooner or later we will need to do it, if we want to push forward with space exploration).
42.
Will they need to steam-clean the carpets and repair the blinds first?
Couldn't they attach a bunch of parachutes to it and try to drop it softly somewhere? Seems like a lot of money and work that will be destroyed.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
Is there really nothing on it that they can reuse, like those giant solar panels?
Just nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be su.... oh right.
Jesus Christ, here we go again. The International Space Station only has officially support from the entire international community through 2020. We JUST came to an agreement for the 10-year run from 2010 to 2020. As we get closer to the 2020 date, you can be sure that they will work to extend those agreements. This really is a non-story, but that doesn't stop breathless reporting like this from popping up every 6 months. Somebody else in this thread probably explained this better than I have time to, and if so please mod them up, or if no such other post then please mod me up :) And please mod down all the other yahoos kicking and screaming about the deorbiting. Worry not, it ain't happening.
One simple rule for its versus it's
I heard that man has been able to create a rainbow in the sky (Fred Stern, Ph.D. from Silver City, USA). Why don't we extend it to create some advertisements in the sky. It'll be quite effective advertisement. It'll be more effective than billboards. It can be an alternative advertisement media beside tv's, radios, newspapers, internet, billboards etc.
We can lower ISS orbit and project advertisment onto it or install giant LCD screen on it. Revenues from this could help finance exploration of space or 4th dimension, or invention of hovering vehicle.
it should be put on cinder blocks on the white house lawn.
Wouldn't the debris deorbit even faster than the whole thing? (except for the ridiculously small fraction that goes to significantly higher orbit due to going through a number of lucky collisions)
The title and subject could be spun to state. "ISS to remain in orbit until at least 2020". When we reach 2020 we can decide what to do with it. At that point we can either keep sending people to it and ships to boost it, or bring it down, replace it, or whatever. The US has already committed to keeping it up until 2020, so with both major partners it will go for that long. (Of course the US changes its policy completely every 4 years, so who knows?)
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Seriously though, why can't they sell it off to the private sector to be used as a research station or just a getaway for filthy rich oil moguls? It's a waste of effort to let it die like this.
Are you telling me all these nice butterflies and cockroaches used to run all these high-tech scientific experiments in microgravity will die? Seriously, the author is ending TFA saying serious exploration cannot be done without manned flights. About all we know about space and solar system is from probes and satellites. The science done in the ISS summarizes to toy experiments and work to maintain itself. No surprise there is no immediate plans to replace the ISS, its value is about null from a scientific point of view. And the future of man in space summarize to going to the moon for an honeymoon if you are a billionaire or die during a journey to mars.
Achille Talon
Hop!
We've always said we wanted to go eventually do a permanent structure on the moon - why not the next best thing? Hook a Dragon up to it, turn on the thrusters, and aim for Luna - why destroy it now?
According to this Dutch university page
(http://www.astro.uu.nl/~strous/AA/en/antwoorden/ruimtereizen.html):
From an orbit around the Earth to an orbit to the Moon it takes "0.3 times as much fuel as payload." So with a mass of 417,289 kg, it would take a clearly prohibitive 125,186.7 kg of fuel to set up Moon Base Alpha in orbit.
But, what about an ion drive?
With about 10x the deltaV of a liquid fuel rocket it's still looking expensive, but just maybe doable.
Anyone want to start crowdsourcing the funding for this?
I though the ISS has all kinds of odd-shaped bits sticking out of it, held together by various passageways and whatnot. Considering the forces that are exerted on objects falling through the atmosphere, wouldn't the various compartment end up sheared off on the way down, to end up falling on their own and independent of the main part of the ISS?
In other words, I don't see how you could precisely bring down something that size and shape into a specific area; even if the specific area is as non-specific as say "the pacific ocean".
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I hope the ISS can be replaced with a better low-earth-orbit space station, perhaps developed by private space-travel suppliers. My list for a better station starts with 1) artificial gravity, i.e., rotation that creates at least a minimal gravity effect so scissors fall rather than hanging in the air. And maybe it'd be better for sinus congestion?
What's on your list?
Mir was deorbited thanks to American politicians who were eager to get on with Space Station Alpha (later renamed to ISS and a couple Russian modules bolted on as a consolation prize). This is righteous retribution.
Why not boost it up to L4 or L5? That's a metastable orbit, and a great place for a research station.
Dad? I didn't know you read slashdot!
exactly. uncontrolled deorbit leads to debris.
To be fair, a controlled de-orbit leads to debris as well. It's just a matter of controlling where that debris winds up: mid-Pacific vs New York, for example.
Personally, I'd like to see them bring it down on land somewhere. It would make a great experiment. Also, any toxic material would be retrievable for proper disposal rather than polluting the ocean. The problem is that there probably isn't an empty enough piece of real estate to serve the purpose... well, the Sahara would work, but politically it's hot enough there. We don't need to be dropping tonnes of space debris on the situations there.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The ISS has some very large solar arrays, providing lots of power. Why not hook up a bank of ion drive thrusters, or even these new plasma thrusters, and very slowly boost it's orbit. It wouldn't need much propellent, a couple of scuba tanks worth of compressed nitrogen. [given the size of the propellent tanks on DeepSpace1 and relative masses].
The ISS could then be parked at L5 or L4, LaGrange points 4/5. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point ] Anything it might shed there would remain there, and it could do duty as an automated deep space observatory and comms sat with the Lunar far side., Or it could be parked at L1, halfway between the Earth and the Moon, serving as a refilling and supply dump and base camp for lunar missions.
I remember when the first crew boarded the as then under-construction ISS. I turned to a friend of mine and said:
"Maybe from this point on, for the rest of humanity's existence, there will always be a human who is off-planet. From this humble beginning we could hopefully draw an unbroken line to voyages to the planets, other stars and the eventual inhabitation of the galaxy." (or something like that ;)
It's sad to think that in 2020 this line may be broken. Hopefully, if no-one else steps up to bat, at least the Chinese will have their space station up and running. I hope they can keep it completely manned (or womanned?).
I'd just like to think I was alive at the time when humanity first became a true spacefaring civilization and didn't drop the ball.
How about deorbiting it into Texas since they already have 1 crashed space ship?
And since its mostly white nobody will notice the extra trash.
The ISS is a modular structure; the habitats were designed in such a way that they fit together, and extend each other. Why on earth give it a static lifecycle, when you can replace those modular habitats and other components as required? It seems an unintelligent and short-sighted notion to give it such an abbreviated life when it's technically not necessary. I guess the decision is all political...funny how politics is nearly always the mechanism which needlessly destroys cool and useful things :P
If we can boost it to an earth-moon Lagrange point, then holding it there would cost little in reaction mass. It would need modifications to mothball it between visits. It has an on-board robot to allow external repairs and maintenance when the thing is unmanned. Moving it would be a great testbed for low-thrust long-duration propulsion systems like an ion drive.
It seems that the biggest obstacle is the money - if we (the U.S.) don't think it is important enough to keep funding it then here's a suggestion to put it in perspective: put out a call to all of the space-faring nations and private companies of the world. "If you can move it to any earth-moon Lagrange point and hold it there for a year, it's yours" Make it a competition - it's a hell of a prize and would boost the space program and prestige of any other country or aerospace firm on earth.
What would China give to leap-frog the rest of the world and become the only nation on earth with a permanent manned presence in space?
How about private companies? Having the only "gas station" between the earth and the moon is a monopoly that's nearly impossible to break given the cost of entry to that market.
Wtf? Why not just have t crash-land in a desert or something? At least the parts could then be recovered.
how is babby formed?
Nuke it from Earth's surface. Sell lottery tickets to press the button. Fund new manned space missions. Problem solved.
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
We *should* be nearing completion of our first or second orbital construction yard. We should be well on our way to putting a man on mars (not for any real practical reason beyond "we can").
We should fire most of the MBA types at Nasa..replace them with steely-eyed rocket men. Space has risks. We should always be pushing the boundaries and we *should* be on our way to getting off of this rock.
Yes it would take a lot of energy to get to the moon's orbit and yes you'd need to expend some more to put it into orbit AROUND the moon. If you made judicious use of the "interplanetary expressway" (I think that's what it's called), you could use the chaotic nature of orbits to trade time for energy but you're still going to need a good deal of delta-V.
So why not hook up an ion engine?
Nobody will be living on the thing (it has to go through the Van Allen radiation belts) so all the power for life support from those huge solar arrays will be available. Use this power to hook up an ion engine (with a relatively modest amount of xenon fuel) and a slow spiraling orbit could take you out of LEO to almost anywhere. I'd prefer L1 because the views would be so nice but given a bit more fuel (and a lot more time) you could put it next to, say an asteroid where it could be a really useful base for scientific studies (how about the one that might clock us in 2036?).
In fact, if put into the proper position (relative to the sun) BEHIND the asteroid (very easy due to the negligible gravity) the asteroid will block out any danger from lethal solar flares! (Of course any manned mission to an asteroid should think about using this trick, might be a lot easier than digging into the soil/pebbles/hard rock/baked lava of the asteroid's surface.
NASA's been doing a good job of repurposing old spacecraft for new missions once they've completed their primary mission (like Deep Impact which went on to some more comets or Artemis which is now headed to the moon I think). Why not a whole space station?
By the way, does anyone know if (now that the space shuttle doesn't go there anymore) it can be boosted to a much higher orbit? (the space shuttle barely had enough fuel to reach it). I believe Soyuz, Falcon 9/Dragon and the European resupply ship can go considerably higher. This would make the orbital decay time much much longer and hopefully prevent a repeat of SkyLab (where NASA literally ran out of time).
Compared to 2 trillion given to banksters three years ago, 12B is a pocket change. Add another 18 trillions in more opaque forms to the same banksters 12B seems like nearly nothing. We could build both ISS and particle accelerator for tiny fraction of money we just gave away to financial institutions.
The solar panel bearing gave out on one side a few years back and a shuttle mission repaired it. Without the bearings the solar panels cannot rotate during the orbit and power is cut by 2/3rds. The ISS might have to cut back to three residents in that state.
'Cause that would be reason enough to shove it off on an interplanetary trajectory. Just fill it up, and set them free.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If a module of the ISS landed in my backgarden I'd be fairly chuffed (and I'd be calling up Xzibit to come round and pimp my ride)
How will this all end ?
In Fire
The space station is made with materials from Earth. If we send them off into space that is material that the planet will never recover. Might not seem like such an issue one time over but it's a bad habit to get into.
Did the dark ages start like this? A slow decline in critical thinking combined with a pooling of power within a minority?
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
And while different from zero gravity research i think it has a potentially higher wealth of research and practical uses; lunar geology, helium-3, low escape velocity, and probably lots of other interesting and useful things that you can think of...
However that all seems to come with much greater obstacles in terms of human deployment, stating the obvious perhaps but there is a huge difference between safely putting astronauts in a low earth orbit well bellow any of the radiation belts, in relative arms reach compared to the surface of the moon at roughly over 1000 times the distance of the ISS from earths surface. Deploying humans on the moon basically entails self sufficiency for the most part.
Robotic deployment seems far more feasible, and far easier compared to unmanned exploration to the distant planets where latency necessitates AI or painfully incremental instructions... at a transmission time of 1.36ms remote controlling anything on the moon can be done in real time.
All that said, i still think the ISS was a necessary small step, I think if you get to ambitious with research and exploration in space then you run into too many new problems at once... slightly smaller steps are less of a gamble and increase the chance of success.
Establishing a perminnant presence in space is not a reasonable goal at this time. It would cost too much, and it would not be sustainable as a result.
The ISS was an experiment in space construction and international cooperation. As such, the goal of the project was achieved when it was completed. The purpose of these expieremnts is to gain expience in such endeavors, investigate the feasibility of human space flight, and to gather any scienctific knowledge we can along the way.
These science experiments weren't meant to last for ever, and it's important that we stop spending money one them once they've run their course.
How sad. Even if the research there seemed like piddling in LOE, it was one of the first massively international projects in human history. It was certainly a major step in the "internationalization" of space, and in multilateral relations. Quoth Harrison Ford, "It belongs in a museum!"
It's doubly sad as a metaphor for America's lost, multinational space age, in this time of international suspicion and violence. If anyone remembers, the significance of Star Trek was it's vision of a future where race, creed, and color were irrelevant; where black, white, yellow, and even Russian humans worked together to explore the vast unknown of space. That was the ideal of the space age, and our generation gets to watch that ideal get classified as junk, and sent to sink beneath the waves.
Apparently it's time we set our ennobling, international past behind us, to concentrate on blowing up people of other colors. We must stop creating multi-PhD astronauts, and start creating uneducated religious extremists, so we can fight other extremists. Let us beat our ploughshares into swords, our rocket ships into rockets, and get back to doing what we've all wanted to do for tens of thousands of years. Let's blow ourselves up over ownership of scraps of earth, air, and sea.
**** You never REALLY learn to swear until you own a computer. ****
When i was a kid i built towers of wooden blocks, just so i could smash it.
It was fun. I learned nothing.
Go Russia!
It should be put into a reasonable "cold shutdown" and pushed out to a Lagrange Point between the Earth and the Moon at least. Perhaps some future and more capable program maybe able to leverage its equipment/resources.
The idea of having expended multiple billions of dollars across the space agencies of several nations, only to have the fruits de-orbited into the ocean speaks volumes about the attitudes, planning, and thus the capabilities, of human space flight.
With this sort of thinking, a "manned" mission to Mars will forever remain a fond notion and never become the reality that it should already have been. Essentially, WTF are you people doing with our collective resources and hopes? It's absurd...
We don't have to spend money to send astronauts out there, it'll be right here. They can have their experiments here, without experiencing the bone loss of prolonged weightlessness. They can still have their 'death-defying' somersaults underwater and transmit to us live (except for that bluish tint) their day-to-day activities, which may now include Domino's Pizza Tuesdays. (Think of the sponsorship oportunities) Now parts could still fall off or toilets won't flush, so think of the reality TV aspect. This might as well fund the next space venture. It's a no-brainer; I mean, c'mon, space against racial extinction?
they're going to sink it then "realise" they need a new one for "very important" experiments.
this tax money is then going to fund this new project to companies that lobbied this.
never ending taxpayer exploitation while parents cant even afford to send their children to university anymore.
Unless your back garden is enormous, the crater made from an IIS module might change your opinion.
I suspect the impact of something like that would cause one hell of a lot of damage.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
They could instead send it into an orbital path to trek through the solar system with cameras and such, to document things, but obviously without anyone inside, need to add special remote control technology like they did for any of the other probes, but this would allow us to avoid crashing it into the ocean and losing all that metal, also would avoid us having to redeploy another satellite/probe in orbit in order to document more space exploration.....just cheaper this way....
It can't be that hard. A prior poster suggested taking the ISS to lunar orbit. Other posters seem gobsmacked by the amount of energy needed to change orbits. I think the picture chages of nobody's in a big hurry.
Surely we could put an ion engine aboard that would use the plentiful electrical power available on the ISS to slowly (maybe a year or three) move the station into lunar orbit. It would take bringing up Xenon, which as I understand it is the favored propellant for ion engines. Not cheap, but not so much needed because the Isp is in the several thousands, rather than in the few hundreds that the best of chemical propellants produce.
An alternative (would require much more propellant mass, but lots cheaper stuff) would be to do a solar thermal rocket intended to slow-boost the ISS to lunar orbit. It could use water as the propellant, and thermal source could either be electric heat or direct solar heat. Basically, a low thrust, long duration steam rocket. Easy to build and reliable if you keep temperatures below about 750C. Cheap propellant. We could bring lots and lots of water up on robo-docked Soyuz supply modules.
How much propellant? I'll work out the momentum change tonight and see if I can put an estimate for te mass of Xenon needed at, say Isp = 5,000 and water at an Isp of 200. Maybe somebody who has the skill and a little time can get to it before I can?
It just seems like such a damned shame to deorbit the thing in 2020 after we've spent oogob billions to get it up there, when there's a low-cost way of putting it in storage, out of the way, for later use. Hell, if all we did was use the metal for building something else in lunar orbit later, we'd be far ahead in terms of having accessible raw materials. (I could make - and lots of people did make - similar arguments for bringing the External Tanks to orbit instead of ditching them in the IO. Nobody listened then, either.)
If you put a space junk collecting system, such as the aerogels used to collect comet dust on NASA "Stardust" project, and bullet proof fabric, and we could clean a considerable chunk of space with the same deorbit.
6000 tons = 12,000,000 pounds.
Max Falcon 9 payload it abut 58,000 pounds. That would be roughly 206 trips, each launch caost 40 million plus payload costs.
And that's to LEO.
Now maybe it can be argued it would be worth it, But in all practicality it's simply not possible. It's not really designed to mount some large chemical engines on it and shove it to the moon.
All that said, I would love for them to accept proposal for moving it to the moon. Maybe a 10 MW nuclear battery from Mitsubishi will be enough energy to mount ion drives and move it to the moon of the course of a year.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
TO: emusk@spacex.com; larry@oracle.com; pallen@microsoft.com; rbranson@virgin.com; robert@bigelow.com; burt@scaled.com
//signed//
CC: info@nasa.gov
SUBJECT: ISS deorbit
BODY: Dudes. Buy this thing and figure out something to do with it. You have a decade. Get on it.
The planet
Someday we will have manufacturing capabilities in orbit -- the ability to melt down metals and forge them into new structural components for vehicles, habitats, etc. But where will the raw materials come from?
Solution: at the end of its useful life, boost the ISS into a low-maintenence parking orbit. When the manufacturing capability finally arrives -- whether that is 15, 50, or 150 years from now -- we'll have 920,000 pounds of aerospace-grade titanium, aluminum, and steel to work with.
Remember, it costs $10,000 per pound to put "stuff" in orbit. (Hopefully the cost will decrease in the future, but it will never be cheap.) At that rate, think about how unbelievably wasteful it would be to spash all of that highly-refined metal into the drink.
I made the same argument before Mir was deorbited. Alas, nobody listened. Deorbiting ISS, 3.2 times more massive than Mir was, would be 3.2 times more of a cryin' shame!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
any toxic material would be retrievable for proper disposal rather than polluting the ocean.
If you want to experiment with this idea, take a can of a non-toxic test material (paint), set it on fire, and drop it from the top of a skyscraper. Now, how easy would the cleanup for that be?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Depends on the debris you're talking about. If you're talking about "space station stuff raining down on people's heads", an uncontrolled deorbit might change the profile of the debris slightly, changing how much gets burnt up during reentry, but the mass involved doesn't change. And once it hits significant atmosphere, I would think that chaos would limit how much control you had over the orientation. Especially since you a) don't have steering surfaces, and b) won't have communication during critical times.
If you're talking about collisions with other orbiting objects (of whatever nature), wouldn't that debris already be in the "naturally decaying orbit" zone already, in order to suffer the collision in the first place? Which I would guess means that it'll come down as well.
Liquefied Lunar Oxygen (LOX) could be collected by machine. Most of the theory, and many details, were worked out the during Apollo era. This would allow cheaper per tonne of fuel to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), than from the earth's surface. The International Space Station could be even moved to lunar orbit, at great expense, but less expensive and sooner than building a lunar orbital station any other way. It could act as a filling station for lunar fuel in orbit for future command capsules, like that of Apollo, and a place to meet with vehicles stationed on the moon to ascend to/descend from orbit, like the Lunar Module of Apollo, both of which reduce the size and price of rockets to the moon. Mounting a radio telescope array on the ISS Lunar orbiter could give us the best radio telescope yet, and the ability relay that information back to earth on a predictable schedule. Landing much of the ISS piece by piece onto the moon would create considerable value in building a habitable ground station, faster and cheaper than any other route to the moon.
Why not dump it on the moon for potential moon base raw materials?
the Sahara would work, but politically it's hot enough there
Climatalogically, it's hot enough there, too.
antipaucity
So assuming it didn't break into millions (or billions) of little pieces upon entry into the atmosphere or upon contacting the ocean, and also didn't sink in some unreachable place (all possibilities that would probably happen for all I know), would we be able to some day SCUBA dive to see the remains? Am I the only one that thinks this would be an incredible experience? I'm sure there are tons of considerations stopping this, but I'm seriously wondering if in my lifetime I'd be able to see the ISS (or parts of it) up close and personal.
Boy, what a waste. Why not boost it into a stable orbit (then there's no reboost needed), man it w\ a skeleton crew, re-purpose it as an assembly / fuel station for larger missions.
Plastics and solvents and such probably don't survive reentry heat.
The truth hurts.
That post was a statement of reality. Muslims give up nothing, ever, except by force, and they want everything. They have their #1 and #2 holy places, and would go to war over allowing Israel to have their #1.
Muslims have over a dozen countries spread over a very wide area that are under direct Sharia law that does not respect non-Muslims as equals, and even punishes the preaching any other religion. They have many more that are majority Muslim and effectively ruled as Muslim.
Yet they begrudge the very existence of one tiny country with a Jewish majority that has a basic law that dictates the equal rights of minority non-Jewish citizens, including the 1/6 Muslim population.
More accurate journalism based on comments taken out of context.
U.S Senator Bill Nelson, a former astronaut and a congressional expert on NASA, told FoxNews.com the Russian comments were intended mainly to mitigate concerns about the growing issue of space junk.
"All the Russians are saying is that when the time comes to shut the station down -- whenever that is -- it will have to be brought from orbit in a planned 'crash' so there’s no space junk left behind or debris that falls in populated areas."
It should be regarded like a wooden ship. With ships, all its structure and framing can be replaced over time while remaining the same ship. If I remember right, the U.S.S. Constitution only has about 10% of its original timbers, and yet it is still Old Ironsides.
In much the same fashion, every component unit in the ISS could be replaced, even the basic design could be changed, and yet it would remain the ISS. That is, unless there is no more need for it. But if that is so, then let us say so. We don't need to pretend it is too old or worn out.
Listen, the thing is worth several hundred billion dollars. Sell it to the Chinese, who obviously would LIKE to have their own space station, divide the money between the partners based on the percentages they spent to build it, and America gets to pay off some of its debt to China, maybe we can even figure out how to make a profit.
Seriously, how stupid is America to spend billions and billions (thanks Carl) on this thing, and in the middle of a huge debt-crisis, decide that all that taxpayer money is OK to throw away?
I say we deorbit Congress instead. Let those guys burn up. We'd be doing the country a huge favor.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Twin Ion Engines!
Stick 'em to the ISS and slowly move towards deep space. All they require are power really, and its got plenty of solar panels. If you need a bit more oomph, send up one of those small nuclear generators (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) that last 80 years (been mounted on several satellites already including Voyager I). You could even slap on a few bits of newer sensors etc...
Anyway just seems like a colossal waste after spending billions beating the gravity well, to simply let the whole thing just fall back in. Spend a bit of cash and salvage and send it off someplace.
It's orders of magnitude more expensive to put something into lunar transfer than into LEO, and the ISS is at the lower edge of LEO
That's only true if you're comparing a trip from the earth surface to LEO, to a trip from earth surface to lunar orbit. And then the reason why it's exponentially more expensive is because everything you're planning on sending from LEO to the moon also has to be lifted to LEO, and whatever you're using to lift that has to be lifted, etc.
That's why the Saturn-V had to be so huge while the return vessel could be so small -- the return vessel got to do the LEO to earth surface transition for "free".
But if you're going to lunar transfer from LEO, then you're already most of the way there! In fact, once you're in LEO, then you're almost halfway to Mars. And I don't mean Mars orbit; I meant the surface.
From Ye Olde WP, Delta-v for:
Earth surface to LEO: 9.3-10 km/s
Delta-v for LEO to LL(unar)O: 4.8
Delta-v for LEO to LM(ars)O: 6.1
Delta-v for LMO to Mars surface: 4.1
This is why Saturn-V, Constellation, and other ultra-heavy lift vehicles intended to be used to lift things from earth to some destination beyond LEO make no sense -- for the future, that is. It made sense for Apollo because they didn't want to spend the time developing infrastructure in LEO for a two-step mission.
But that's what we should be doing. When we think of going anywhere beyond high earth orbit, we should be thinking of it as two distinct steps: Earth to LEO, and the LEO to the rest of the solar system. If you can use cheap and efficient commercial lift vehicles to launch pieces of the inter-planetary mission into LEO, assemble and refuel it there, then you can have vastly expanded missions at vastly reduced prices.
That's part of what NASA's new plan involves, if it survives Congress. And it sounds like the Russians are planning to do this with their parts of the ISS.
Of course this still doesn't mean it's necessarily economical to boost the ISS to Lunar orbit... :)
The enemies of Democracy are
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=4152
SKYLAB de-orbited while we had no manned space program, we were between Apollo and the Shuttle when Skylab fell to Earth.
Now we have the ISS, and guess what? We now have no manned space program, because the Shuttle has been retired.
My guess is that we still won't have any manned space flights by 2020 (ONLY 9 years from now), so they will let it fall to Earth again.
Then, some years later (maybe 2025), they will want a space station again, and we'll have some manned flights, and then they will convince taxpayers to spend a few trillion on some other station, only to deorbit that too, after a decade or so.
We are we so foolish as to allow this over and over again?
I swear, I get more life out a car that costs $4,000 than NASA does out of a space system that costs $100 Billion. (I have a 1979 Diesel Rabbit that took to the roads before the Shuttle ever flew, and will probably *still* be on the road after Dragon/Orion has been retired).
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Defense spending (which is where the money comes from for paying for those wars...) is at 25%
Don't play their semantics game. Defense spending is at perhaps 1.3%. Military adventures and corporate welfare for "defense industry" contractors are at 23.7%.
Most people don't have a problem with the 1.3%.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Amen, brother...
I know the impuse of an ion drive is small, but it's the always on element that makes it powerful. How large an ion drive (or how many) would ISS need to keep it in LEO, or even boost it a bit higher? We gain more knowledge around ion drives, and save a valuable platform. Rather keep updating it, ala Hubble, then to toss it.
We ARE toast, and we don't DESERVE space anymore.
But some butter and jam would be lovely. Mm, yummy!
The last mission of the ISS should be a dump truck mission. Pull all the known useless bullshit out of orbit that can be gotten and then splash the thing.
I suspect the impact of something like that would cause one hell of a lot of damage.
How much is 1 hell-damage in kilo-damages?
(sorry, european -- I don't get non-metric)
We should park it in a Lagrangian points. We put entirely too much money and energy getting all that metal in to orbit to just crash it.
Why can't we recycle it in place and rebuild another structure, or just keep adding to it.
Or we can just park it in a Lagrangian point orbit.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2011/07/lagrangepoints.jpg
USOS provides power. In addition, USOS has all of the life support to sustain the current ISS. The majority of the volume is in the west. The only thing missing is the ability to push this. However, we are suppose to add a VASIMR unit next year. Once that is added, then we have it.
I seriously doubt that Russia will pull their units off and ditch them. Assuming that they are mad at us and want to pull out, they will simply move it to Chinese, though again, I doubt that they will do that.
Instead, I think that with the west having private space stations (namely Bigelows) and multiple human-rated launchers in the next 3 years, Russia will continue to work with the West. I suspect that an idiot simply misspoke.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I call BS--Fox News update:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/07/27/russia-plans-to-sink-international-space-station-in-2020/
Fill it with vittles, air, water, and the sort. Send it out to some future waypoint or destination, to wait for the team, or castaways, or whatever. A nice library might be nice. With a password phrase - or song, or twenty questions - only a real human would know. The last one, of course, being "How do you feel?" Anything resembling a detailed description of sensory apparatus or processes means its not human, or too nerdy to survive.
Only the criminally insane and negligent with humanity's legacy can even think of just trashing it. That's the work of rabid luddite. "Sabot"-age. Nothing less. Shoot the idiots for such gibbering misanthropic idiocy, and let someone at least marginally educated get on with a better decision.
Oh, sure, one hella is defined as 10^27 ... same for both metric and imperial. ;-)
So, that would be 1000x a yotta damage. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The Chinese space program should be up and running by 2020, they will be cashed up and ready to buy some second hand space real estate going for a bargain price. Combine this with other developing economies and there should be enough effort / funds to keep it going. I'm sure Virgin Galactic will be looking for a space hotel to dock to by then.
Speaking as someone who both is and works with people doing robotic exploration of the solar system, most of us did NOT get into this because it was our dream to keep making better robots to put into space forever and ever. And I can also assure you it isn't for the rock star salaries, either. Without something to inspire the kids of today, it's going to be harder to find people tomorrow to build and pilot rovers, orbiters, and landers. Yes, I just said it. A good chunk of the purpose of manned spaceflight is PR. That shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who's been paying attention, though.
I dislike this, but I will have to say the hard reality...
Good luck affording a living outside of Earth. Most Americans, one of the richest per capita nations on Earth, have trouble paying for their cheaply made ~2,000 square foot residences. ~15 percent of all energy is used for heating or cooling, with temperature gradients of a few tens of degrees Kelvin. Think of how much more would be needed for temperature gradients over 100 Kelvin. Then there is the issue of temperature sensitive, atmospheric pressure sensitive food crops. This does not even bring up the fact our civilization is struggling to live without fossil fuels. There are no fossil fuels, with nearby oxygen for combustion anywhere else in the solar system.
And, if a space colony were to be set up, what industries will it be able to do that are competitive with Earth. I'm sure there are some small ones, like tourism. This colony will be competing with cheap third world earth labor, and its free air supply, free water recycling, free pretty good temperature control, low energy consuming transportation? How will Mars colony jobs avoid getting outsourced to Earth India?
Maybe in the future, when our civilization is more economically productive and has money to blow, and we can afford to live in houses on the Moon or Mars, then the human race can consider colonization outside of Earth.
I'd prefer the international coalition boosted the ISS orbit to orbit the Moon, or even try to land it on the Moon. Or just crash it onto the Moon. We don't need the space junk in our ocean. But orbiting the Moon it could do useful service. Even crashed on the Moon it could be useful as parts or materials, or just an experiment to see what bounces from it. At least it would be out of our hair.
I mean, the US paid off Russia bigtime to build this thing together for over a decade, and after less than a decade complete Russia says it's litter? What the hell.
What would be awesome would be an international geek contingent hiring the emerging private space launchers to intercept it after it's decommissioned and sent down, reversing its trajectory into a more interesting orbit. Space salvage/piracy launches the real space biz of the 21st Century! I'm in; where do I donate money, development and management time?
--
make install -not war
Good point about the external tanks. There's speculation that future space manufacturers will have to obtain their raw materials from asteroids. But if we had collected spent tanks in orbit, we'd have a small asteroid's worth of stuff there already -- and it would be made of pure aluminum and lithium, not just unrefined ore.
Now, how can we get NASA, Russia, and the other ISS partners to start thinking in "reduce, reuse, recycle" terms?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Disposing in the atmosphere takes fuel and is crap shoot since the drag is difficult to calculate in advance. So the logical alternative is an electrodynamic drag tether, that basically converts orbital speed to electricity, and waste it spinning some motor or shining a light, or a big ass resistor. Or you could do the reverse, and pump electricity from the solar panels into the tether and boost the bastard out to L4 or the moon, slowly but surely like a tortoise. If it's being abandoned, it's not like there's a huge use of electricity onboard anyways.
Mir was originally going to be saved using an electrodynamic tether attached to a dead spacesuit as a counterweight, when they decided to mothball in space and eventually abandon it. That tether is still sitting in a clean room hangar, ready to go, somewhere in California last I heard.
...but right now, we have absolutely zero defense against asteroids. Why not keep it around as a last-ditch thing? If fired off early enough it might just give an incoming object enough of a nudge to just miss us.
Ok the radiation thing is definitely an issue, true. The thrust could be done gently with VaSIMR thrusters over a long time, but would then leave it in the van Allen belt for way too long.
But I don't even care so much about the current electronics or modules. By the time it's retired, the modules will have been thoroughly lived in, like 30 year old underwear. Deorbit anything that won't be useful.
The most important component up there, long term, is the Truss. I doubt it will be turned into a lunar transfer vehicle, but the Truss could be used as the core of a orbital construction platform for missions to mars. Moving it to a proper orbit will be much easier than moving the whole station.
I think we'd agree generally but you speak with authority in one area:
"most of us did NOT get into this because it was our dream to keep making better robots..."
That's the problem...too many people, I'd say a whole generation of potential space explorers had to comprimise too much on their (our) dreams.
We have had the technology to put a human on Mars for over 30 years...we could have had a moon base functioning since the Carter administration, and we could have had REAL space planes that took off and landed like a plane should (X Program)....but WE CUT THOSE PROGRAMS
In favor of what...the ISS and the Shuttle...yep...I contend that too many people like you were silent....the silent generation of space explorers.
Thank you Dave Raggett
This is one of the worst ideas I have heard since perhaps the rightnwing crazies started tryingnto defund and thereby destroy the US government. Seems like we used to call suchmpeople treasonous anarchists. Also, Mir was a wreck and as I recall, its plunge to earth was not inexactly controlled situation. In any case, why not start accepting bids for it right now, to privatize it for space tourism. Ultimately the companies who are getting into this business are going to want to have space hotels and I do not know why the space station could not be converted into such a facility. Perhaps it's new owners would want to gradually transform it into a more comfy five star sort of place,bit by bit, just as the space station itself was built out. why wait until 2020 to do this? Why not sell i now, with lots of specifications as to how it is and is not to be used, by whom,a nd who is to be called upon if it ever seems likelymto go into uncontrolled free fall toward earth, who is responsible for decommissioning and under what conditions. And, if the governmentnentities who are now send people up and conduction certain kinds of experiments, they could simply lease it back from its new owners whle said owners were conducting the intensive design and engineering necessary to us it for touristic purposes.