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The International Space Station Turns 15 (time.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Today marks the 15th birthday of the International Space Station (ISS). Since Nov. 2, 2000 the ISS has hosted more than 220 people from more than a dozen countries. Time reports: "The ISS was little more than three pressurized modules, some supplies and a couple of solar wings to help keep it powered on the day the first crew climbed aboard. Today, the station is a flying piece of cosmic infrastructure the size of a football field, containing 15 pressurized modules, which afford the astronauts as much habitable space as a six-bedroom home. It weighs 1 million pounds (454,000 kg), runs on 3.3 million lines of software code and required 115 launches just to carry all of its components up to orbit."
Weren't they going to crash the ISS into the atmosphere to dispose of it at one point? That would have been incredibly stupid.
Nope, eventually that will be it's fate.... I believe that the current project only goes out to 2025 which puts the re-entry in 10 years or so unless it's been extended.
Skylab did, Mir did, the ISS will too...
We may be able to deorbit parts of it and revamp the station by replacing modules as they become too old to be supportable, but I'm guessing that eventually it's going to be easier to just start over.. The question really is HOW LONG will it take for the funding to dry up, the station to become unsupportable from age or the international coalition that controls the station dissolves. IMHO - I'm guessing that the collation will break up about the same time as funding goes away and that will happen sometime in the next 10 years, if some technical fault doesn't cause irreparable damage and render the ISS uninhabitable before then.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
LOL, like that ever stopped private enterprise when there's money to be made. You can invoke any number of bogeymen that you want, the simple fact is that if it wasn't for the government in the first place, creating an artificial market, no one would be interested in space.
No, I would suggest that most slash dotters would think they are both a colossal waste of money that should have been spent on real science. How many probes could we have sent to Mars? The Webb tellescope. Europa. The list goes on.
The put people in orbit game was over with Mir and Skylab. Putting more and more people in orbit is just a waste. There is also no point in sending people to Mars, robots rule in space. And it is not going to happen any time soon, so at least no money is being wasted on it.