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Who Will Pay For a Commercial Space Station After the End of the ISS?
MarkWhittington writes: While NASA is planning its road to Mars, a number of commercial interests and place policy experts are discussing what happens after the International Space Station ends its operational life. Currently, the international partners have committed to operating ISS through 2024. Some have suggested that the space station, conceived by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, could last as long as 2028. But, after that, there will still be a need for a space station of some sort, either in low Earth orbit, or at one of the Lagrange points where the gravity of the moon and Earth cancel one another out.
How's it going to protect crew (and equipment) from hard radiation? Seems to me that getting all that (lots of) extra mass to escape velocity would make it *way* more expensive than.
Would it be more practical to build a habitat in one of those caves that the Moon is supposed to have?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The Republicans are remembering a time when they could field a candidate that someone would want to elect, because they don't make lizard-man conspiracy theories seem plausible.
The Republican establishment don't want their candidate to become President, because then people might expect them to do something. Having Trump in the White House is their nightmare scenario; they'd rather see Hillary there, so they can keep telling Republican voters 'you must vote for us in Congress so we can stop Clinton!' Why else do you think they keep pushing for another Bush?
They hated Reagan for the same reason they hate Trump: they're both outsiders who could actually win.
No, you could not have done it on Mir. Mir was small, horribly kludged together and really not extensible. It was going to deorbit in a bunch of pieces by itself or more gracefully (as was done). It was beyond EOL. Well beyond. It was a testament to Russian engineering that it stayed up as long as it did.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The greatest, I think it is subjective, but a few Google searches can tell you some of the important findings.
For example there in this video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... the selected three are :
- Cosmic ray detectors on the ISS discovered particles that may confirm the existence of dark matter.
- Study on the effects that living in space has on the body. For example, they discovered that in addition to bone and muscle, the eyes were also affected.
- New generation cancer treatment using micro-encapsulation come directly from the results of research done in micro-gravity on the ISS.
I stand corrected, thanks. In any case, the point remains that Bigelow is ready and waiting to launch the "next" space station, and that wait will be over in a couple of years. I think the vast majority of people out there are unaware of how radically different the launch market will be in just a few years from now. Very likely, in about six weeks, SpaceX will "stick the landing" of the booster stage on their next launch. That historic event will bring an order-or-magnitude drop in the cost of getting to space. And that will change everything.
Right now, the "market price" for a ride to LEO is about $70 million per person, and hardly anyone can afford it. But what happens when it's $7 million? There's going to be a waiting list for bunks at the Bigelow Orbital Hotel & Resort, and the "space economy" will be off and running.
The Google Lunar X-Prize will be happening around the same time, opening the moon to private exploration and exploitation. Planetery Resources and Deep Space Industries are also gearing up for their role in that new economy. I think this tipping point is going to happen much more rapidly than most people appreciate.
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