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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.
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
exactly. uncontrolled deorbit leads to debris.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
let's dump more garbage into our oceans. Its not like they're struggling to survive against the onslaught of man already!
Get with the program: it's called "creating an artificial reef to encourage wildlife" :-)
Actually, we mammals did pretty well the last time something big dropped out of the sky and wiped out the dominant species.
Sadly, the ISS is just too tiny to make a sufficiently large bang to pass on the favor to the next up and coming class of lifeforms (although the news media will probably act like it is).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
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.
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 if we land the ISS on the island of garbage?
Then we'd have a habitable island of garbage!
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
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?
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.
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.
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 !
has nothing to do with priorities of north americans. The government of the US is in the pockets of a very small group of special interests. The wars are one of their priorities, the oil cartel another, the banking cartel yet another. It matters not who gets elected or what party "holds power".
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?
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
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!
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?
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.
Skylab
Vs.
ISS
In other news: Apples != Oranges
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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."
Yup. Just that 'give up', 'pack it in', 'it's too expensive', 'it's too hard' defeatist attitude that defines the US nowadays.
We ARE toast, and we don't DESERVE space anymore.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
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
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)
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.
Excuse me for being cynical here, but I do remember the fact that when the ISS was first started but before astronauts started to inhabit the thing, that it was officially proclaimed by various press releases by both Russia and NASA as "the first permanent space station and outpost of humanity". I suppose that "mission" was lost when the "Space Station Alpha" moniker was lost too.
Yes, I know that changed over the years, but I do wish those guys would have been more honest about the issue back then. In theory it could still be a permanent outpost as it was built in a modular fashion, and more to the point it was proclaimed as being so huge that it could never be sent back to the Earth like Skylab and Mir (as well as the several Almaz stations) all had been. The ISS was supposed to be something different. I really would like to know when that changed.