Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's getting a Quinceañera, right?
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-05/galactic-gold-rush-private-spending-on-space-is-headed-for-a-new-record
It looks like the void is being filled rather sufficiently...
I love how Slashdot is a hotbed for people arguing that:
A) People who think that ISS, a permanent human presence orbiting our planet, is a huge financial boondoggle that we never should have done; and
B) Establishing a permanent human presence on the surface of Mars will be cheap and we should have done it long ago.
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."
http://spotthestation.nasa.gov...
Karma: Bad
Ho boy... The fight is on.. You are wise to observe this, but I'm not so sure it's wise to bring it up..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
It weighs 1 million pounds (454,000 kg), ...
Or, at least, it did. Now it's in space.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
International Space Station is one of the best projects to happen in Space since space race ended. Most people think that the astronauts just float aimlessly in a big tube. However there are so much stuff to do, that every minute is accounted for and more astronauts required to do all scientific experiments planned.
The biggest problem was and is costs of going to space. NASA should have targeted this as soon as their budget started to shrink post Apollo. Instead they stretched the timelines and cancelled some programs.
Why with time Shuttle prices went up instead of down? If they couldn't make it cheap and fully reusable initially, why it was not improved over the following decades? Every flight should have had a couple of small changes to make it better and cheaper, use new stuff at the same time as old if you are not sure of its safety for couple of flights then remove old stuff.
It will need to be scrapped. There are parts that are about impossible to replace, that decay over time and once they fail the astronauts would die. There are problems - like growing molds/bacteria - that are about impossible to get rid of now, with the station not built with removal of them in mind. There are scientific experiments that ran their course and no longer needed, and ones that can't be done on the ISS. The station is a zoo of docking port standards, with lots of adapters to connect incompatible modules. It's a sink of resources, instead of being a supply station for departing missions. It is undermanned at all times, as there's only one Soyuz escape capsule so it can't operate with the full crew. These are all significant shortcomings that can be addressed in a next space station.
It doesn't mean it needs to be disposed of whole. There's a lot of systems that will be good for another fifty years. Massive outer structures that cost a fortune to be brought to orbit and that simply don't have anything in them that could fail. They can be reused in a new space station.
Last mission to Salyut 7 was to pick up everything that would be of use on brand new then Mir. Simply, useful equipment was reused in a newer, bigger space station. So don't think about crashing ISS as "a great loss". Think of it as "a thorough upgrade".
By the way, still not all modules are in place... The Nauka module - a Russian laboratory, and NEM-1 - a support/habitat/power/storage module to supplement Nauka - are still missing.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Well, NASA might de-orbit bits of the ISS, but the Russians have already said that they will be taking their parts, which is quite a significant proportion of the whole, and building them into a new station.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
seals between the initial modules. These are necessary to keep the station airtight, and replacing them would mean disassembling half the station.
isn't that what duct tape is for?