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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 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.
'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, and those blasted Americans on-board periodically broadcast Vogon poetry,' said deputy head of Roskosmos space agency Vitaly Davydov."
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
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
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.
Engineers are pretty much trained to have an end-of-life plan for everything they design and build nowadays. Doesn't mean it will happen that way. In my company we are still using equipment that we planned on scrapping years ago.
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?
That's an interesting idea.
You'd first have to remove anything that would get broken very easily, and depressurize the station, so it didn't contribute to the mess if something were to go poorly.
Then you'd need to maneuver it all over the place over a fairly long time, because that "shell" is... forgive the expression... astronomically large. Think about the volume of that space you want to clean up, and compare to the volume of the space station. That's an awfully small broom for an awfully big place. Car analogy? Okay. It's kind of like trying to clean a four-lane highway using that little tiny broom that comes with a dustpan, complete with traffic whooshing past.
So...logistically, it's a nightmare, but it could possibly be done if you really worked hard at 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.
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?
Sure, we'll put it in orbit around the moon. You work out how to get about 6,000 tons of propellent up there and I'll take care of the rest.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
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.
Why doesn't the US get a say in it? Because the US either agrees to Russia's demands, or they get denied passage on the Soyuz, plain and simple.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
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?
Hey, I know they're just VB developers, but it's still not cool to talk about them as if they're objects that you can just scrap.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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.
As an American, I know I am. I don't like how many steps back we are taking. Decommissioning the ISS doesn't bother me as much as the rally against intellectuals. I find it terribly frightening when the term "elitist" is used in a derogatory fashion. I would hope for all of our leaders to be elitist. I want our best to be in charge. Maybe some day in the future a nice country can come along and liberate us.
They ran it for 15.
You never know what will happen to the plans in the future.
Sure, we'll put it in orbit around the moon. You work out how to get about 6,000 tons of propellent up there and I'll take care of the rest.
Two passes with the Falcon 9 rocket would just about do it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9
-- "The Price of Freedom of Speech, of Press, or of Religion is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish."
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.
Folks, try not to look at this as the end of USA's dominance in space. The silver lining in all this is that Bigelow and SpaceX will pick up where our government is leaving off. And future Senators and Presidents can't de-fund private industry led efforts to explore space. It's classic trickle-down. Exploring space will be more secure in the hands of private industry. Elon Musk's (SpaceX) goal is to die on Mars. The visionaries are private citizens now. It's a new promising age.
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.
And, possibly landing someplace you didn't expect.
That would be bad. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
With all the effort that has gone into building it up, it would be a shame not to get a much longer lifetime out of it. We've given many power plants life extensions, why not this? Is there some bigger threat from extending the life of the space station or is it just about money? I bet many around the world would be willing to make donations to keep it going. Learning how to produce things that last for extended periods and that approach or become self-sustaining, seems like an important mission in itself. Sure they've managed to recycle some pee, but what about things like producing food in space? Can the biomass be recycled efficiently enough to be self-sustaining. How well can plants and people do longer term with the elevated radiation? Much attention has been paid to locating frozen water on the moon (some was found in an always cold area), Mars maybe even an asteroid. A colony on the moon or elsewhere would have to cope with occasional things that might poke holes. Maybe we should be experts on coping with that.
They've got quite a bit of electrical power from the solar panels at the station. Couldn't there be enough energy for recycling and manufacturing of other (non-organic) goods? As time goes on, people of Earth will increasingly need to recycle more and more do it from sustainable energy sources. Maybe practice in space where supplies are little or limited is good practice? I doubt anyone will suggest that they grow corn for fuel...
The world needs things that excite young people to learn and become highly skilled scientists. If they rarely hear of activity in the space program, what will they get interested in?
I'm not sure if an interest in games and robots is a good combination... what usually happens in those games?
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
The irony is that for many of us the thing we most need protecting from is the USA...
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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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.
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?
And of course that means that we in Europe and the UK will have to protect the US. Every single war you've got yourselves into, we've had to come and pick you up and give you a cuddle when you've burned your little fingers on something too hot.
Thanks for helping in World War 2, though. You stopped helping the Germans at just the right time.
As an American, I know I am. (...) Maybe some day in the future a nice country can come along and liberate us.
Bougez pas, on arrive !
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
elitist != elite
Usually those that believe that they are "The Elite" are in fact, not.
The leaders I wish for are intelligent, motivated people with the ability to lead and enough humility to listen.
They should be proud of what they represent and be willing to make it better.
They should understand that all governments use their power badly and should work to empower individuals and use the government only to protect people from other people. Never to "Make" them equal. Only to give equal opportunities.
The people who lead us should NEVER see themselves as "The Elite".
Our leaders should be servants filled with gratitude that they are trusted enough to be chosen to represent their fellow man and striving always to be worthy of that trust.
I know that some believe that to be "crazy thinking". It is though what I believe.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
it should be put on cinder blocks on the white house lawn.
Why don't we get a say in this?
Because America "won the space race" of course, which is why they no longer have a manned space program and no longer have any say in the decisions. But don't worry there are many expensive Mars rover projects that are almost ready to be cancelled.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Even as a child I instantly understood "Trickle down Economics" as "Sh!t rolls downhill".
In the US at least, we live in a world that is ruled more and more by corporations. Basically thugs in nice clothing, are more powerful than the government. What do you think is going to happen when they get in space?
First one to space with an fully armed and operational battle station will rule the entirety of the human race.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
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.
I meant "trickle down" in terms of high-tech. Not economics. Governments and Corporations are just collections of people. No wonder they both have a tendency to want to take over the world and control everyone's lives.
My point is that private industry isn't at risk of getting cancelled with the stroke of the president's pen the way so many NASA programs have. In that regard, our space ambitions are more secure in the hands of private industry.
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!
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 don't see your point - the announcement was made by a spokesperson of the Russian agency, it seems quite logical from his POV to say "we and our partners". I'm sure a press release by the NASA or ESA would use a similar wording.
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.
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!
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.
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
don't forget the point of view, it depends on the sender of the message.
compare those two statements:
In the first quarter of 2016, we'll prep and de-orbit the spacecraft
Right now we've agreed with our partners that the station will be used until approximately 2020
I don't see anything disrespecting in both sentences, but the second one is evil because a Russian said it? And the first one great as it was spoken by an US American?
I read that last sentence in my head as the Emperor.
Such battle stations are banned by treaty already. They would be really easy to shoot down (target moving in a routine and predictable orbit), and are kind of unnecessary when you have ICBMs.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
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.
Many of the modules were designed for short term use, and simply were never intended to operate for well past 2020. One of the first Russian modules is actually planned to be detached and de-orbited later this year, replaced by a newer module. The solar panels are very expensive, very high efficiency arrays, however the same lack of atmosphere which gives them a boost versus ground based plants, also causes them to degrade from radiation faster.
The station is not going to be scrapped entirely. This new Russian module being installed later this year, and a few others, will be detached from the ISS before the ISS gets scuttled, and will be used as the basis of a new space station called the OPSEK. It is to be the first orbital dockyard in support of extra-planetary missions, where deep space craft will be sent up in individual modules, and then assembled on site, rather than being sent up in one big shot.
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?
that is a bad move... instead they should push it to a Lagrange point or put it to an orbit around the Moon where it could orbit for centuries without any problems, those are cool solutions, why wreck something so precious and expensive? Yay, do you remember? Russians did this to their own MIR station.. nobody remembers they even have one now.
It's called the 'above average effect'. Everyone thinks they are above average, which statistically speaking can't be true....
Well, how about the completely idiotic idea of clamping some ion thrusters on the thing and moving it to lunar orbit. Mothball it, park it in orbit around the moon, then you have a place to go if you just happen to be in the vicinity of the moon.
It certainly won't generate a lot of space junk that would worry anyone.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
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.
As others have pointed before and probably after me, boosting it out of the decaying orbit it's in is too expensive, while leaving it there to crash is too dangerous. Hence the controlled deorbiting.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Vaporizing? If we wanted to vaporize brown people, it wouldn't have cost nearly as much money.
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).
Usually those that believe that they are "The Elite" are in fact, not. The leaders I wish for are intelligent, motivated people with the ability to lead and enough humility to listen. They should be proud of what they represent and be willing to make it better. They should understand that all governments use their power badly and should work to empower individuals and use the government only to protect people from other people. Never to "Make" them equal. Only to give equal opportunities.
The people who lead us should NEVER see themselves as "The Elite".
Our leaders should be servants filled with gratitude that they are trusted enough to be chosen to represent their fellow man and striving always to be worthy of that trust.
I know that some believe that to be "crazy thinking". It is though what I believe.
Oh, I agree. I would be very skeptical of a person who claimed to be the best of the best. The thing that bothered me was the title of elite being used to say that a person is bad. The whole "average Joe knows best" mentality frightens me. Average Joe is average for a reason. It is important to listen to him, but it is not the best idea to act directly for him. I need my leaders to make the difficult decisions that I cannot make. I don't see elitism as a bad thing. If I pick a leader, not only do I want them to be the best, but I want them to surround themselves with the best. Just as I am very cautious around people who think they are the best ever, I am also skeptical of people who push those attributes onto others to make themselves look better.
"exploring the stars" has nothing to do with the ISS. The ISS and manned space program are a relatively expensive dog and pony show. Shoot ex-senator John Glenn into orbit to research the effects of weightlessness on octogenarians. Study the behavior of honeybees in zero gravity. Seriously?
Real space exploration involves telescopes and astronomers. Budgets for deep space astronomy (and high energy particle physics) have suffered since the early 1990's when the ISS started sucking away all the funding from basic research. We used to call it the International Waste Station because it sucked money from so many other worthy research projects which promised to reveal more of the universe's secrets for far fewer dollars than the manned space program.
Yes the shuttle program and ISS are nice for entertaining imaginative little kids, but I think even if your goal is to get to a "Star Trek" future for mankind, the manned space program, sending people up for no good reason, is not the way to get there. Better to do more physics and astronomy on the ground first, and then after someone invents the magic impulse engine or warp drive, send people and experiments into space later.
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.
Get a say in it?
The way things are going right now, by 2020 we'll be lucky to still be putting satellites in orbit, let alone be worrying about the ISS. All around us I see humanity devolving back into mysticism and ignorance, and the greedy bastards of the world have fucked up the world economy so bad that it will take well beyond 2020 for it to recover, and in the meantime the general populace, who in the best of times has been difficult to convince that anything space related has any sort of intrinsic value, would likely form lynch mobs if you tried to convince them of it now.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I agree with your idealism, but consider this,
Its hard enough to impose jurisdiction on vessels sailing international waters, to be dammed with treaty enforcement. If a private corporation were to start lobbing Volkswagon sized Meteorites from out of orbit, or threaten to detonate a nuke at range, washing the entire Earth with an EMP blast that fries all circuitry. How would you get there to stop that private corporation? A security corporation? The treaty you refer to prevents Military in space.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
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...
Let me see if I have your argument right... sending people into space for long periods of time in order to study the effects of having people in space for even longer periods of time is not the best path to long term space exploration... instead, we should just sit on the ground and look at space while trying to imagine what it might be like up there.
Life has many choices. Eternity has two. What's yours?
Budgets for deep space astronomy (and high energy particle physics) have suffered since the early 1990's when the ISS started sucking away all the funding from basic research....sending people up for no good reason, is not the way to get there. Better to do more physics and astronomy on the ground first, and then after someone invents the magic impulse engine or warp drive, send people and experiments into space later.
Sadly, after spending my 20's and 30's defending the manned space program and seeing nothing useful come of it but wasted tax dollars, I'm forced to agree. There doesn't seem to be any point because we don't do anything up there. Colonizing or visiting any other planet/moon/asteroid seems like it will cost too much to ever be funded. So I've given up. We'd be better off spending all that shuttle and ISS money on telescopes, probes, and rovers. Until we can overcome the cost to orbit problem, people will have no significant presence in space....period.
1. We have nothing that could boost it. We could hire the Chinese to load some rockets to boost it, maybe, but then what?
2. Once boosted, we have no way of reaching it. It would be like storing your beer in the top of a tree. You have beer, but it's not doing you any good.
3. We don't even have a way to reach the station on our own any more, and no plans on building anything to get there in the future. Maybe SpaceX will be able to reach it, but why should they bother unless someone pays them to? It's a business, and needs to make a profit. Since the US government isn't going to pay NASA to go there, why would they pay SpaceX to go there?
4. The ISS doesn't vote. Why pay for the ISS when you can pay Mexicans to illegally cross the borders and vote for you? Mexicans are a lot cheaper than scientists. You can even sell them cut-price guns to deal with any border patrol agents (fast-and-furious).
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
How expensive is to put it out of LEO to Moon's orbit for example ? I mean it is already speeding at blistering 25km/h in easy to depart trajectory, one bigger rocket might do it, no? of course I am not a rocket scientist here, but again, why crash this multi-billion project of such a huge importance back to earth when we have the whole Space out there...
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.
So they could grow up to live on subsistence wages as postdocs while spending most of their time begging for grant money to do politically correct research on officially approved subjects?
"Elitist" are people who think they are better then the rest of us. And when ever something complex comes up they go "Trust Us" or "You wouldn't understand". If they do try to explain it, they will either get too much in the details, using accronyms and concepts that the average person who isn't in that field wouldn't ever use. or talk down to the public and give a cartoon version that a 5 year old might understand.
I like the old 1950's and 1960's educational material. Sure we poke fun at it for being corny now, but really it is a good mixture, of teaching the subject without making the person seem like a school child. Back in the 1950's and 1960's before there were nerds and geeks (Nerd use to be spelled knurd, or drunk spelled backwards, to represent people in college who were studying vs. out drinking) They were educated but were also the average person. Then when Geek and Nerd subculture came out the Geeks and Nerds isolated themselves from the community thus adding to the rift.
If we can get rid of this "Elitist" view and realize that people in general are smarter then you think. Then they won't revolt against the intellectuals as this subversive group.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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. ****
Sometimes "you wouldn't understand." It has become very clear in the discussion of the debt ceiling that the average jamoke doesn't realize that this isn't like running your household.
however the same lack of atmosphere which gives them a boost versus ground based plants, also causes them to degrade from radiation faster.
Degradation is mainly caused by minuscule asteroids in space hitting the plastic that is shielding the solar arrays. As they are practically in a vacuum (at least if we discard the gas in space, and the numerous dense spots), they can be anywhere between barely moving to traveling at the speed of light - ie scratch it or penetrate through the array altogether. If you examine any solar cells brought back from space, you will find it like this.
We could send it to mars, attach a VASIMIR Ion Thruster which pushes at about ~5000 mN against the 420,000kg mass of the ISS at an acceleration of about 1.1 * 10^-5 m/s^2. Might take about 16 years to get the delta V to get to low Mars orbit, but it will do it eventually...
Because America "won the space race" of course,
I detect some sarcasm there, but I didn't know until recently after clicking around for a while on Wikipedia, that the USSR not only sent the first man, satellite, and space stations into space, but still holds the record for longest solo flight (Bikovsky I think?(which was apparently cut short due to toilet malfunction)), first woman in space (who made a whole career of the space program and is still involved in space today), and that Mir was their final space station (before the end of the political entity) after some dozen launched since the 1970's.
It's impressive: look what they did, even in the midst of Brezhnev's cronyism and Gorbachev's dismantling of soviet power (nevermind the geriatrics in between).
Seems like for us Obama and the current congress can be our Gorbachev: take a state that (though waning) was still capable of monumental cultural achievements and set the stage for complete collapse so that a handful of powerful people can become astronomically wealthy picking over the corpse of a failed state.
The few times I've trusted people in general to be intelligent they lowered their own bar.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again.
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...
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....
How expensive? VERY!
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, where it can only stay up with regular boosting. It would take one rocket most likely bigger than the Saturn-V (going by the seat of my pants and allowing for the generous margins NASA loves(d)), and even that one was almost twice the size of the Shuttle assembly...
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Sure it is you have,
Income(taxes), fixed expenses(mortage, car payments,insurance, more insurance) variable temporary expenses( credit card bills, and other short term loans), regular expenses ( food,
Every day consumables), and funstuff.
The problem is the last adminstration, maxed out our credit cards to pay forthings that wont help us out much. Now that same party is trying to cut income whilepaying off that excess debt, and using the whole thing to cut our saftey insurances to nothing. Because they dont need insurance because they are rich, so no one else needs it either.
All of this is made wirse by the fact for last forty years we have quietly been taking money out of our retirement account(socialsecurity) and now we want to retire but find that the money is still gone.
We spent stupidly for forty years. Now vicent the loan shark wants his money in full.
This mess will take another 40 years to fix. Since we wont do it right for the next 5 tries either. Remember it was Bush who maxed out the credit cards, pushed for higgher limits on them and then cut income.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
First one to space with an fully armed and operational battle station will rule the entirety of the human race.
Until that so-called battle station is fully operational they'll be vulnerable. The Rebel Alliance is too well equipped. They're more dangerous than you realize.
No, Vincent doesn't want his money in full. The tea party fraction of the republicans just have declared a routine move of fiscal policy to be a make or break moment for the US and they are perfectly willing to break it, just to avoid one part of the reasonable answer to a budget deficit, which is increasing the tax revenue. This has nothing to do with the actual financial situation of the US, this is pure ideological trench warfare. This, by the way, is an outside view. I am not American, so I have no horse in the race, except, of course, for the fact that some people are willing to take the US economy and thereby the world financial system down for their ideological goals.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It sure as hell isn't the way I run my household !
I would run for congress, if I weren't such an elitist.
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.
And, as a side effect, we will never again be the best.
Terrific.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
Plastics and solvents and such probably don't survive reentry heat.
ROFL. Projects in the corporate world aren't cancelled at the stroke of a pen. Right! And corporations are never taken over and the assets sold off. Long term planning is how things work in the corporate world, and the whims of the few are never acted on.
Riiiiight.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
It's called the 'above average effect'. Everyone thinks they are above average, which statistically speaking can't be true....
It could be true that everyone was above average except one person who is so bad it drags the average below the level of everyone else. They would have to really suck though. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
The irony is that for many of us the thing we most need protecting from is the USA...
And we'll protect you from that, too, for a reasonable price. ;)
The enemies of Democracy are
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."
The station is not going to be scrapped entirely. This new Russian module being installed later this year, and a few others, will be detached from the ISS before the ISS gets scuttled, and will be used as the basis of a new space station called the OPSEK. It is to be the first orbital dockyard in support of extra-planetary missions, where deep space craft will be sent up in individual modules, and then assembled on site, rather than being sent up in one big shot.
Oh fuck yes. Awesome. I pray that they follow through and build it. Then even if the U.S. scraps its plans for developing in-orbit assembly of vehicles, at least someone will be taking the next logical step in expanding the reach of mankind.
Lifting everything needed for a mission all at once is simply a dead-end. The exponential growth of the rocket as payload size increases puts serious practical limits on missions depending on this strategy. To the point where even remotely-feasible-in-the-future Mars mission plans would have to be either boots-and-flag mission or a one-way trip for the astronauts involved. An argument for either could be made, but why when we can just remove the fundamental restriction that makes these our choices?
OPSEK looks awesome. I hope NASA is allowed to develop its plans too. But with the JWST on the chopping block and the dead-end Pork Rocket still funded, I'm not exactly hopeful. :(
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
The question is how do you raise tax revenue? A substantial argument is that taxes in America at least are high enough that raising them further has the opposite of the intended result, which is that tax revenue actually decreases due to less economic activity, or that lowering taxes actually increases tax revenue.
This is all based upon the Laffer Curve, where there certainly is an "ideal" tax rate upon which tax revenue can be maximized. The question is which end of the curve is the current tax rate? It may even be at that "ideal" tax level, but it is hard to find out without experimentation or making stuff up out of your behind.
Regardless, even if tax revenue is maximized, there is also the issue in terms of how to spend that money, and if we should be borrowing additional money at the moment to "sustain" the economy at least in terms of government expenditures keeping people busy. There are many (including myself) who feel that the U.S. federal government has likely gone past the point of no return in terms of deficit spending, and that it is just a matter of time before the whole system collapses. In this sense, this push to hold fast to the debt limit is just a way to try and keep the system from collapsing altogether.
Perhaps it would be better to simply push the whole thing over the edge, give the U.S. Treasury a $1 quadrillion credit limit, and then genuinely spend like drunken sailors like there is no tomorrow. The problem with that approach is that tomorrow will come. Which way would you like to see the financial system collapse?
The difference is that many of these companies are essentially sole proprietorships where the founder/owner of the company is making the key decisions here in terms of if these vehicles or programs are going to be built or kept alive. They also have additional sources of income that in theory could help to sustain these companies in the event there is a cash flow problem, not to mention some close friends with similar supplies of personal wealth that also support the goals of the company at the moment.
You are correct that businesses do make decisions that sometimes are arbitrary and they are often more interested in profits than other motives. Still, they don't work on the same four to eight year cycles that seem to infect the NASA budget together with nearly complete change overs of the political leadership due to changes in the ruling political party and thus cancellation of the previous political group's pet projects.
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
How would you stop a private corporation?
A great many ways, starting with seizing all corporate assets in a given country or even collective countries. Corporations exist at the will of the national sovereign powers through which they are chartered. They may have influence, but once somebody starts to lob weapons of mass destruction from above, they will be treated as "non-persons" and become the enemy of the planet. Treaties be damned, those guys would become public enemy #1 and be part of an organized effort to be destroyed, likely being one of the few ways to militarily unite the nations of the Earth.
While corporations love to help supply weapons to various countries, they don't like having their assets being taken or destroyed. That is the one power that a country can have, and doing something so raw like killing people or threatening countries is the one thing that will unite the countries of the Earth. War is the power of a sovereign and they guard that power jealously.
The reason Al Qaeda has been successful is precisely because they have the support of sovereign governments. That those governments are such wusses that they try to have their cake and eat it too in terms of both supporting and denouncing Al Qaeda simultaneously is merely another problem. If there weren't governments which supported those radicals, they would have disappeared a long, long time ago.
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.
Seizing assets? You missed the part about aerial bombardment...
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
First one to space with an fully armed and operational battle station will rule the entirety of the human race.
Too late!
The Soviet Union with their Almaz space stations were the first fully armed and operational space stations in orbit around the Earth. The guns were a precaution in case the Americans had some sort of idea of trying to board their vehicles. While technically a violation of the Outer Space Treaty, it is one of those things where nobody really cared except for the Russians.
Well, no one says that cutting spending is not necessary. The Laffer curve argument is moot, though, because every time I see it come up, I only see the extremes brought up - zero revenue at 0% and 100% tax. That, however, are the trivial cases. No one ever presents a decent discussion on how the curve is actually shaped. Personally, I am hard pressed to believe that the current, historically low tax rates in the US are the optimum point on that curve. I, too, do believe in a collapse, but ultimately not because of the current financial system, but rather because of thermodynamic factors - the fact that the energy and resources we run our physical economy on need more and more energy invested for energy returned. Tomorrow will come in any case. I acknowledge the problem, but I don't see how raising a usual debt ceiling increase which happened yearly for decades suddenly to a make or break scenario does help in any manner.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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...
Why doesn't the US get a say in it? Because the US either agrees to Russia's demands, or they get denied passage on the Soyuz, plain and simple.
*Bzzt* Wrong!
There are several ways for American astronauts to get to the ISS besides the Soyuz spacecraft. The Soyuz is the only one that has any sort of substantial track record and can be relied upon to meet deadlines, but there are other ways to get up there, from the Dragon and Cygnus capsules being developed for CCDEV to the ESA's ATV that could in theory be upgraded and up-rated to manned spaceflight. The Shuttles could in theory be hauled out of mothballs and be flown again (at least in the near short term). Boeing is building their CST-100 vehicle too. And those are just options that could be available within a window of one to two years, especially if there was a major national priority to make sure that the vehicle had to get there.
By 2020 or later? There are a dozen potential vehicles that could in theory make the cut. America isn't nearly so dead in the water as is implied here.
It could be true that everyone was above average except one person who is so bad it drags the average below the level of everyone else. They would have to really suck though. :)
If 100 people take a test and 99 people score 100%, it only takes the one person left to score 99% to drag down the average slightly, but enough to make everyone else "above average".
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
As others have pointed before and probably after me, boosting it out of the decaying orbit it's in is too expensive, while leaving it there to crash is too dangerous. Hence the controlled deorbiting.
I seriously can't believe that pushing the ISS to one of the Lagrangian points would be more expensive than replacing the thing. If you are really trying to come up with a way to pay for moving the ISS to some other place than LEO, I would propose the following legislation:
The first company to come up with a way to move the International Space Station to an altitude of at least 10,000 km above the Earth in one piece will receive simultaneously $1.5 billion USD tax-free and 100% of the salvage rights to the said station with ownership granted in perpetuity, also tax-free.
The price of $1.5 billion is roughly the cost of a typical Space Shuttle mission, just to establish where the amount came from. I certainly think that a single mission by the Space Shuttle would be worth the expense and effort to "save the ISS" if that was indeed a national goal. Certainly saving the Hubble Telescope was worth that price. Opening it up to private individuals would not only have a huge cash payoff, but the salvage rights would be a huge prize in and of itself.
Where would the downside of such a "spacestation prize" be? Please explain to me either why this couldn't work, or why the $1.5 billion would be too expensive?
Yes, there are many ways the US can get into space sooner or later. Right now, there's only the Soyuz. So if there's trouble brewing up there, and they need an American crew, stat, the only way is to kiss the Russians' ass and beg for a quick ride while the US finishes their manned capsules.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
and how much fuel was already wasted to get the crap up where it is now?
my point is reusing what was already achieved. *everything* other than dropping it into the ocean is better.
I appreciate the sentiment, believe me. It's really wrenching to think of all that effort, money, and material burning up in reentry, but it's not as simple as "let's send it to the moon". It might -just- be feasible, though, to move it to a higher, more stable orbit and "park" it there until we can do something else with it. We wouldn't be able to shuttle crews to it any more, but I bet we could pack it full of science goodies and remote waldos so it could continue to serve us in some capacity.
Hell, install a small nuclear reactor in it, attach a few more arms and an ion drive and maybe we could use it as a remote repair bay for other satellites.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
One difference is that the ISS is already in orbit and technically in space. You can afford to think differently when you are in space as opposed to trying to launch from the ground resisting a constant 9.8 m/s^2 acceleration pulling the vehicle down plus trying to get past the roughly 100 kPa of atmospheric gasses getting in the way of the vehicle. Yes, to get the ISS off of the ground would have required several Saturn V rockets, and it did take several shuttle missions. But you don't need cryogenic rocket fuels pushing with a huge amount of thrust to move out of LEO once you are up there.
There are several high ISP engines that you can work with, and even a modest thrust that has an acceleration of even 1 m/s^2 or even 0.1 m/s^2 would be sufficient to move the ISS out of LEO and to almost anywhere else in the solar system you cared. Since the ISS has a massive power supply you can tap into (about 100 kW at full capacity, with a generally available power supply of about 10 kW with battery back-up when in the Earth's shadow), there are some really cool things you could do with that sort of energy and some sort of ion propulsion or something like the VASMIR engine. As a result, the size of the engine doesn't have to be all that big and could be carried by a Delta IV-Heavy or a Falcon Heavy.
We are talking years right now before the ISS is going to be splashed. Yes, some of these technologies are experimental, but the ion drive is currently being used by the Dawn spacecraft.... all that is needed is to scale the drive to something that could push the ISS. As long as we get to the ISS and "rescue it" before 2020 with this engine, we could take a year or longer to push it up to a much higher altitude or even to a Lagrangian point. With the right incentives, I don't think the cost would be more than a billion dollars, perhaps less unless you run it through a typical cost-plus procurement model. If I was given a crack at it, I certainly would try and pull together a team to "save the ISS" for that amount of money. Yes, I'm being completely serious here too.
I wouldn't trust the Chinese to deliver a bottle of water to the ISS. I'm sorry, but the Chinese space program just isn't that good and they are far too overrated. Perhaps in a couple more decades, but not at the moment. I certainly would trust SpaceX over the Chinese, or even the ESA for that matter.
We don't even have a way to reach the station on our own any more, and no plans on building anything to get there in the future. Maybe SpaceX will be able to reach it, but why should they bother unless someone pays them to? It's a business, and needs to make a profit. Since the US government isn't going to pay NASA to go there, why would they pay SpaceX to go there?
Why not simply give the entire space station to SpaceX if they can figure out how to move it somewhere else? I'm pretty certain that Elon Musk or somebody else could make some money off of the station if they cared to. The only think that would keep them from trying is if the cost of operating the ISS would be more than paying Robert Bigelow to build an entire space station from scratch. That may even be the case, but I'm sure that at least some parts of the ISS could be salvaged.
It was politics that killed MIR, as there was at least one company (MIR Corp) who not only had the money but even started to fork it out to save MIR from a similar fate. It was NASA that insisted Russia splash MIR that essentially closed the business opportunity for MIR to be used by private individuals. MIR Corp even paid for a Soyuz mission to refurbish the station and prepare it for tourists that never came, and had at least one paying customer, Dennis Tito, who ended up going to the ISS instead. I'm pretty certain that a similar business model could be worked out for the ISS if the partner countries are willing to simply abandon the station. After all, what good does it do for anybody sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?
*chuckle* wish I could have modded that 'funny'
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
The only problem I see with an ion drive is that we need to blast up a whole lot of xenon or other gas to use as thrust medium. A Bussard ramscoop would be cool and useful, but it can't start itself, nor is the magnet feasible :D
I'd be all for saving the ISS too, if the political climate wasn't overwhelmingly against it right now...
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
It actually seems to me that the cycles in corporate are shorter; I've never seen a '10 year plan' last more than 2.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
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.
Sure but that just flies in the face of reality. I was trying to stick with the previous observation that people cover a wide range with many being well below average, but thinking they are above. This could be if the previously-calculated average didn't take into account one really sucky person.
That's a lot more likely than everyone being identical, except for one person. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
If you are in a publicly traded corporation where nobody has a majority of the shares (worse still, if no single person or group owns more than 10%) those companies live by the fiscal quarter. If it takes more than 3 months to develop, it might as well not exist.
Private companies are a bit different, and I have seen some "10 year plans" work out. It is rare, but they can if leadership in that company is driven and focused. Those tend to be smaller companies with either investors who share the vision or completely owned by one person. SpaceX has been one of those companies, but I'm not sure it will survive that way much longer, especially if Elon lets it "go public" like he plans on doing in the near future.
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.
I'd be all for saving the ISS too, if the political climate wasn't overwhelmingly against it right now...
Couldn't Argon be used as a thrust medium instead? It would seem like other gasses besides Xenon could be used although I do understand that particular element has some interesting properties that particularly makes it quite suitable for the task. I'm not sure what Dawn is currently using, although I do think they are using Xenon on that spacecraft. They are going to perform a maneuver equivalent to moving from LEO to the equivalent around Mars by going from Vesta to Ceres. That should be quite interesting to see when/if NASA pulls that one off.
A Bussard Ramscoop would be nice, but the fusion reactors necessary to keep it sustained have yet to be invented, not to mention that you need to be traveling at a fairly decent fraction of the speed of light in order to get it to be useful. That has little or nothing to do with moving something out of LEO.
BTW, I agree that even if the finances were in place, the political situation with the ISS is a complicated mess that might just be easier to start from scratch doing something else.
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.
Usually those that believe that they are "The Elite" are in fact, not.
And often those who are accused of believing they are "The Elite", in fact, do not.
The US has already talked of deorbiting the station circa 2020. Russia was the loudest voice against the idea a short while back and started talking about how to take its pieces away from the US pieces and use it as the basis for a new station.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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?
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make install -not war
Unfortunately, a "Fox News update" posted by an Anonymous Coward, that cites its counterspin as:
From an anonymous source in Congress who talks to Fox News (therefore certainly Conservative/Republican) who has no facts, just their "gut", merely denying something they don't like.
That all sounds like the most total BS possible. Even if it's true, that Fox story has as less credibility than a stopped clock that's right twice a day - at least it's a consistent source.
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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.
...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
OK. So now we've had the words "Space Station" and "Elite" in this post. The sounds of The Blue Danube played on the SID is haunting my memories. Time to get the Commodore 64 dusted off...
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.
Attendez ! On mange du fromage! Deux cent different fromages!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I think you'll find it's a thousand different cheeses. Or at least that's what the ads say :-)
But Britain probably has 200 local cheeses too. Or pushing it.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"