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No One Knows What To Do With the International Space Station (popsci.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2024 the clock will run out on the International Space Station. Maybe. That's the arbitrary deadline that Congress imposed back in 2014, at which point they'll have to decide whether or not to keep funding the ISS. And yeah, that's a whole seven years away. But then again...it's only seven years away. The ISS takes up half of NASA's human exploration budget -- half of the pile of money allotted for things like sending humans to Mars or to an asteroid. And if they want to push further into space exploration, NASA can't keep sinking three to four billion dollars a year into the ISS. Not that it's really their decision. Congress -- specifically the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology -- decides how much money NASA will get. And because politicians aren't experts in space travel, they keep holding hearings to discuss what they could possibly do with the ISS in seven years' time. Let private industry take it over? Let it crash and burn into the South Pacific? Let the program keep running? The latest hearing took place last week. These are hard questions, in part because people have very different opinions on what's valuable about NASA, and therefore about whether the ISS is still useful. Maybe you think that NASA should really be about exploration, about pushing the boundaries of what we know and where we can travel. In that case, the ISS might not be your first priority. That's a huge chunk of the budget that goes toward bringing things back and forth to low Earth orbit instead of venturing to other planets.
Science! Exploration! Uh, humans in space!
This is vitally important and innovative research!
That's the arbitrary deadline that Congress imposed back in 2014, at which point they'll have to decide whether or not to keep funding the ISS.
In all likelyhood we will continue to use it beyond 2024, that's not a "hard" retirement date, it's a "let's look at the program and funding" date. Case in point: the B-52 is well past its original retirement date.
The better question is if the money spent to continue ISS is money well spent.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
i have a dream
In 2024 the clock will run out on the International Space Station.
They just need to upgrade to a 64-bit version of Linux, right? Check the HCL, make a backup, and upgrade. Good to go!
woo hoo!
to keep aliens out.
Burn, baby, burn.
We should take money away from killing people and fully fund both the ISS and space exploration.
I think this would pair nicely with your SpaceX business, don't you?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
why not create a UN body responsible for it and allow all mankind to use it and pay for its maintenance ?
it would be a lot better than de-orbit it and let russia/china have to invest money to build their own from scratch.
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
Let's strap a couple rockets to it and move it to lunar orbit. Empty it out of personnel, let it do a nice, slow burn to lunar orbit. Slower is cheaper in space. Let it take however long it does to get there, and then we can start sending unmanned Dragon capsules back out to resupply it and lunar shuttles via SpaceX. This would be a good "next step" toward eventually building a permanent structure on the lunar service, and could eventually serve as a sort of waystation for missions on the way out to Mars.
Bear in mind: The lunar soil is full of O3 and H3, which both make for excellent rocket fuel. An unmanned refinery on the moon could turn Luna into a gas station for any interplanetary mission at a fraction of the cost of lifting all that material out of Earth's orbit.
Surely we can take three or four billion dollars from the defense budget and put it toward NASA. That's roughly half a percent of the defense budget, so they shouldn't miss it. We need to stop worshiping the military (and we sure do pretend like the military and the troops can do no wrong) and spend some of that money on worthwhile uses like NASA and the National Science Foundation (and its funding roughly 7 billion dollars per year). It's time to let Canada and European nations be more equal partners in NATO, both in terms of contributing resources and deciding what NATO does.
The purpose of the ISS was to help us learn about how people can live and work in microgravity. It isn't an assembly facility or a staging ground for large interplanetary vessels, and it isn't a permanent settlement. If it has served that purpose, then yes, let's plan to retire the station with the dignity it deserves. Perhaps it, or part of it, could be boosted to a higher "archive" orbit, and left there as a historic monument?
An extra $3B to $4B made available for manned missions to the asteroids (my first choice) or nearby moons or planets, would be a game changer for those programs. A permanent, or at least continuous, human presence on or near another celestial body would certainly be a worthy successor to the ISS, even if it takes 20 to 40 years to establish.
What's happening? I'm not in the US, cannot see article
This is why we need to start "Operation Add an A" and try to convince some sneaky congressman to insert a single letter into the budget appropriations bill, and hope nobody notices until all of the NSA's checks start getting routed to NASA instead.
Since a talking point from the space crowd is that every dollar "invested" in space returns seven dollars, there must be a line a mile long of people ready to invest?
How test pilots in rubber suits huddled in a tin can 400 kilometers up make money or indeed, "explore" anything, I don't know.
Unless we really increase the science we're getting done with the ISS, then I'd rather have more probes or a new telescope.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Use it as a staging point to build facilities that will be needed to travel to other planets. Be nice to have something already up there that can house things or people even to build other support structures.
When I first came here, this was all empty space. Everyone said I was daft to build a station in empty space, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It fell down on Canada[1]. So I built a second one. That fell down onto Austrailia[2]. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then fell into the Pacific Ocean[3]. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest space station in all of space.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Either boost it to lunar orbit and keep using it, or boost it to a parking orbit and leave it there. We spent billions to put tons of equipment in orbit, dropping it from orbit won't do anyone any good.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Even if they decide they don't have a use for it, why the hell would they crash it into the ocean. I really don't see why they wouldn't just mothball the bitch and maintain it in orbit.
Best case, it's there if they need it for something. Worst case, it's a valuable study into how an unmaintained craft holds up.
I do also like one of the previous ideas about shuttling it over to the moon. I just question how much energy it would need to overcome earths gravity and break free from it's orbit. It is a bit massive.
See Lagrange Points of the Earth-Moon System. L1 isn't actually the best choice, but it's my favorite.
Would it be economically feasible? Yes they can make ISS contractor owned and operated but what would the customer base be? I'm guessing the government, or companies reimbursed by the government. There is a website "Rocketpunk" like "Steampunk" where it implies we have dreamed of space stations since the 1950s Collier Magazine series about hundreds of people in space doing various things. However, NASA ruined all that by developments where a few kg of electronics replace people to perform duties of communications, weather, and recon satellites. Von Braun plan is to build a reusable shuttle, then a space station, and with that infrastructure in place we continue outwards. But the Shuttle was cancelled and nobody cannot come up with a compelling reason to have a space station. There are reasons... which is what everyone is arguing about. Shame though after all these years and ISS will probably go the way of Mir.
mfwright@batnet.com
Because of the idiotic failure, the Space Shuttle, the ISS was put into orbit way too low to do real science. Usually it's less than 400 km, and rarely goes above 410 km. For comparison, the radius of the earth is over 6000 km. That is if the earth was 10% bigger, the ISS would be half as deep underground as it currently is above.
If they boosted it up from Low Earth Orbit to Medium Earth orbit (2,000 km -> 35,000 km) it would be far more useful.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
send it "out there". Moon orbit, lagrange point, or mars. Equip it with a low thrust booster and send it ahead of us. When we get wherever it ends up it will be a lot of resources that are already there.
Space weapons platform.
Glorious orange leader can destroy his enemies from space!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Is this was an outpost in the Wild West, or at the South Pole, would it be abandoned to the "aliens"? Of course not. It's too important to be just abandoned so it will be funded, one way or another.
Only in America can what arguably exists as one of the most profound achievements in the history of mankind be rivaled by a private company doing the same thing and the whole thing gets funded electively from citizens' own pockets rather than theft of taxation.
Bigelow Aerospace, SpaceX and others will do this.
I'm thinking Watto.
A large part of the loudest talking heads in Washington can't see the acronym ISS without crapping themselves about ISIS in the same instant. Add to that the fact that NASA has had - since its inception - an additional mission to understand the earth's atmosphere (which includes monitoring global temperature) and it's game over. Even once President Trump's administration itself crashes and burns out early we'll be left with the same group of idiots calling the shots from 1600 Pennsylvania; there is no hope any time soon.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Besides getting the Soviet's know-how about long time survival in microgravity (the record is still held by a Mir Cosmonaut), there was the idea that a large space station could be a platform for inventing processes and applications in microgravity impossible on earth.
Alas, no valuable technology was discovered : Not in pharmacetics, or microelectronics, or anything else. Worse, the presence of humans and air and fans for forced air circulation makes the ISS a environment full of vibrations. Real science is made by satellites with no humans presence.
Currently, the only purpose of putting humans in space is learning about how to put humans in space.
As a scientific experiment, little remains to be done in the ISS.
Maybe centrifugal space stations should be tried instead of keeping the ISS afloat. Artificial gravity has huge value for long duration space travel and maybe also for space tourism (a tourist may enjoy a few hours of microgravity, but being able to sleep or pee "normally" could widen the appeal of space travel (besides cheap rockets)).
I thought that it was an international project, and that there were a lot of other stakeholders besides NASA.
The same could be said for the other international partners of the ISS. Why are the other nations not leading the charge to maintain this profound achievement? Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, and CSA could all pick up the tab to keep it operational and looking at the costs NASA has paid quite a fair share.
"can what arguably exists as one of the most profound achievements in the history of mankind"
I *do* hope you are joking. How does it compare to indoor plumbing, municipal sewage treatment, interstate highways, electrification, pain-free dentistry, survivable surgery, antibiotics, and cheap information processing?
Your test pilots in rubber underwear eating from tubes in a tin can are meaningless symbolism, and you should be ashamed for having such a skewed world-view and to be so easily manipulated by propaganda. Put down the Star Trek and NASA flyers and take a breath.
"The ability to sustain life --not just human life-- in the vacuum of space to such a degree as to be free enough to conduct space walks,"
Oh my god, who cares? Do you get excited about nuclear submarines too? Why not?
" and you thank the universe"
Space Nuttery is a religion.
*I* thank the universe that the ability to sustain life is FREE ON THIS PLANET. You fucking loon worshiping a dead vacuum!
Maybe for future space exploration they should see what materials we can produce in space? Like can you make microchips in there? can you create amorphic silicone where those microchips are manufactured after cutting it to discs... Etc... Future of Mars colony will reguire that we master ability manufacture technology in space.
.....:-)
Turn the ISS into a Trump-branded casino. The president has the necessary expertise, and it could be a big draw.
And if nobody ends up showing up and it starts losing money, well, the President knows what to do then, too.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We can rid ourselves of this $1e11 white elephant by entering a few simple commands:
Destruct sequence 1 code 1 1a
Destruct sequence 2 code 1 1a 2b
Destruct sequence 3 code 1b 2b 3
Destruct sequence code 0 0 0 destruct 0
Auction it off to the highest bidder. That way the organisation with the best use will buy and operate it.
Correction, nobody _rich_ knows what to do with it. Lots of people have good ideas that go ignored for not being rich.
Mind if I dream for a minute?
1. Build a set of solar powered soil processors that can pull the toxins out of Martial soil, including H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide), break down the H2O2 into hydrogen and oxygen and compress the H and O for storage in tanks.
2. Build a set of relay tugs capable of using H and O to launch into orbit from Mars' surface and return in one piece several thousand times without significant repairs.
3. Build a set of zero-gee drones that can handle the H and O tanks.
4. Build a set of Martial surface drones that can handle the H and O tanks.
5. Break the ISS in half. Break one half down and brace it as needed Take one half, attach boosters and a payload containing the soil processors, the tugs, and the drones, and take off for Mars. Unmanned.
[ 2 years later ]
6. Arrive at Mars.
7. Soil processors, tugs, and surface drones drop off, land on Mars near a water deposits + cliff face / lava tube / cave
8. Orbital drones start reassembling the newly relocated MSS (Mars Space Station).
9. Soil processors begin churning out non-toxic soil and shipping rocket fuel up to the MSS.
[ some time later ]
10. Humans arrive.
11. The supply part of their ship detaches, lands on Mars not far from soil processors.
12. The human transport portion of the ship docks with the MSS.
13. The finish reassembling the MSS, including attaching the human transport as a new module.
14. They hop on the tug and head down to Mars.
15. They begin using the detoxified soil to grow crops and start building an underground facility
[ some time later ]
16. Subsequent ships arrive
17. dock with MSS, drop off new modules, and
a. refuel, pick up supplies, continue outward
b. head to Mars' surface.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Somebody will rent it, now and then. It would be advisable also to make an agreement with Uber, so that people renting the ISS will have a discount for the trip.
I was going to comment what you said but then I looked into the numbers
From NASA data:
ISS astronaut 6 months 160 mSv --> 0.66 mSv/day
Apollo Mission 14 astronaut 9 day 11.4 mSv --> 1.26 mSv/day
NASA Career exposure limits at age 35 would allow 2.5 Sv or in low earth orbit 0.5 Sv/year --> 2.7 mSv/day.
Maybe the ISS could be relatively safe in lunar orbit, as long as it is used for short term missions.
And one could argue that adding a radiation shielded module might moderate radiation levels.
The ISS does not look like it should be adapted for a Mars Mission however as the long term radiation exposure would be too high.
"NASA can't keep sinking three to four billion dollars a year into the ISS."
$3 billion to $4 billion is a rounding error in our budget.
Considering the actual money we've dumped into the Middle East for the last 16 years or the trillions spent digging the economy out of a hole created by the banks, there should be a dozen international space stations in orbit and NASA administrators complaining they can't spend the money fast enough.
in 1972, when congress pretty much killed Apollo, and came up with the Space Shuttle. Oh whooppppiieeee! A "space truck" that goes? NO WHERE. The ISS is "ok" but it's not extending our reach into outer space, just around our own little planet.
Conventional liquid fuel storage and manned outposts MUST be kept separated. There is no safe scenario when the two are combined at large scales. Robotic refueling is the way to go for liquid fuels, as Musk's Mars Colonial Transporter so elegantly illustrates.
However, truly big/fast/long/far missions can't rely on liquid fuels. They need beefy ion engines and a butt load of electrical power. For anything larger than tiny missions, solar panels and RTGs won't cut it. Nuclear reactors are needed for everything larger.
The problem is getting a fueled reactor into orbit. Designing a nuclear reactor that can survive accidents during launch has proven to be extremely difficult, and combining it with a suitable mission spacecraft has proven to be effectively impossible for civilian missions (military/black missions have lofted a total of just over a dozen nuclear reactors over the years). The safe solution is to launch the nuclear fuel using a man-rated launch system, such as a Dragon, and the rest of the mission as a conventional launch payload.
Which means two launches. And a rendezvous. While automating liquid fuel transfer is relatively straightforward, installing nuclear fuel is closer to the complexity of a Hubble servicing mission. It would be very beneficial to have a servicing station in orbit to mate the fuel and the mission spacecraft.
ISS with a small crew could provide safe storage for nuclear fuel assemblies, and the existing robotic arms and EVA capabilities should prove adequate to servicing a wide variety of mission spacecraft.
Finally, the ISS itself is expensive to keep in orbit, due to the ongoing cost of feeding its station-keeping thrusters. The ISS orbit could be maintained much more easily were it to use one or more electrodynamic tethers to thrust against the Earth's magnetic field. But that requires a bunch of electricity, much more than solar panels and batteries can easily supply.
So the ISS gets a reactor, preferably located on a loooooong boom, well away from the crew. It would still need its thrusters for the rapid maneuvering needed to avoid space junk, but the propellant use would decrease massively.
That's quite a bit of up-front cost, but it should amortize quickly as nuclear-powered missions become more common.
It was shuttle launch costs, and r&d which made up the lion's share of the ISS cost for America. Actually manufacturing the components was in the single digit billions. Russia is working on a newer version of its multipurpose module for its new space station Russian Orbital Station in an 64.8 degree orbit. Just fire up a production line, and make new copies of old ISS parts, and stick them on the ROS. Let Russia run things this time.
It's ripe for exploitation for one of those reality shows.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Defund NASA. Who the fuck cares about space? We can't even manage our own planet.
a couple of EM drives onto it, put a couple of volunteers in it and launch it towards Mars. By the time they get there, technology will have advanced and a party will be waiting for them when they (or their children) arrive.
I think this plot has been used before...
Once the military hear of ISIS in space, we'll have a military budget for invading and occupying space sorted in no time.
(a) The UN has no legitimacy - it was foisted on the world post-WWII by victorious powers as a tool to prevent future wars, but no actual people anywhere ever voted on the damned thing; it was put together by politicians and diplomats, for politicians and diplomats, to make politicians and diplomats feel good and look good. There is NO evidence that anything that is currently done via the UN could not just be done by the diplomats from the effective member nations without the stupidity and overhead of the UN.
(b) The UN cannot solve any actual issues. The one war it chose to fight (Korea) never ended - the UN members only have a cease-fire in place with the NorKs and the UN is too feckless to actually enforce any actions against the NorKs (never stopped its nuke program, its ICBM program, the starving of its citizens, the kidnapping of civilians from other countries like Japan, etc)
(c) The UN always puts the worst actors in charge of things, which is how places like Cuba and Iran end up running its human rights bodies and the Jew haters always end up running the UN bodies fighting racism, etc
Then of course there's this basic concept: The UN had nothing to do with designing, building, launching, and operating the ISS. The UN cannot even keep the terrestrial BUILDING they were GIVEN in New York properly maintained. Basic rule of thumb: If you cannot keep the lights on in a building, you are not ready to be in charge of a space station.
As an American taxpayer who helped pay for the ~$100Billion dollar station, I'd sooner see it thrown into the Pacific than given to the scum at the UN.
It will be available as one of the "highest" rent districts. :P
US taxpayers are currently spending about $400 Billion per year in INTEREST PAYMENTS on the $20Trillion dollar national debt. Those payments would be a LOT lower had Obama not taken the Debt from about $10 Trillion (which he hung on Bush as "unAmerican" and "un Patriotic") the the $20 Trillion he left Trump to face.
We could have cities on the moon and mars if we were not spending $400 billion per year on interest payments that do NOTHING for us.
Send all of congress up to it. Then send it into the sun.
No significant problem with atmosphere dragging it down, and it can be used as a staging post for lunar exploration.
Orbit mars
Doesn't do much good to get up there, even cheaply unless you can actually go somewhere, when you want.
We need a for real SHIP.
1. Huge power capacity...100 megawatts.
2. Magnetic shielding.
3. Rotating living work compartments for artificial gravity.
4. Banks and banks of Ion or other drives.
5. 100% closed environmental recycling system,
6. Reusable, excursion vehicle...plant to ship and back again that doesn't need to refueled for the return trip.
Many of these technologies are available or could be with some investment. yes, it IS rocket science, but it's not magic.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Simple. Give the Defense Missile Command a practice target!
Ha ha
Just auction it off to private corp or at least some country that cares a bit more about science.
Of course, if we have any hope of surviving a trip to another planet and finding out ways of doing so, the ISS is an invaluable asset that should keep going... but as long as we have people in power who cannot understand simple concepts like that, it's just better to let other people take control and give it a better shot.
Can someone please explain... how you spend 3-4B /year on something you can't even fly to?
Is that the cost of the Russian Taxi service plus the SpaceX vacuum-friendly FedEx truck deliveries?
But that requires a bunch of electricity, much more than solar panels and batteries can easily supply.
There were plans to put the VASIMR engine on ISS, but they didn't happen. It would have used batteries charged by the ISS solar power to provide 15-minute burns.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Because of the government groups, only the russians realistically have a capability to be stewards for it, and they already said they'd break off their piece and do their own thing if pushed (which nobody knows if that can work since the modules might be cold welded together now).
Which would doom the rest since even if they left the first russian module (which the US bought out), only the russians can realistically refuel it currently (and I doubt people would want to keep paying them for fuel deliveries when they broke off their segment). Unless someone steps up to the plate and launches a new service module refuelable by non-russian cargo services and/or an electrodynamic tether to keep the damn thing from dropping altitude.
Probably cheaper to sell it as a stranded government asset at auction with limitations.
Certain vital components of the ISS are already close to their certified lifetime. Some of these, like the seals between modules that keep the station airtight, are very difficult to replace (imagine having to undock the modules in the middle of the station).
So in any new function, the station would last only a few years before a costly overhaul.
Let the crowd decide.
Since it's already up there, fly up a couple of rockets, mount them to the station, then send that sucker over to fly around Mars for a bit instead. Use it as a safe point/refueling station for all the traffic that's going to go there the next few years.
Add boosters to ISS and relocate to a Lagrangian point or Lunar Orbit.
The scientific benefit is tiny in comparison to the money invested. I would support not only using that money for other things, but explicitly using it for non-human space exploration which is scientifically much more interesting and returns a lot more results and insights for the money.
For most scientifically interesting tasks, humans are a very expensive liability. There is nearly no point of sending them into orbit and almost no point to sending them anywhere else in space.
So yes, throw it away or sell it to some billionaire who needs to compensate something.
It's the only way to be sure.
China will be the leader in space because they have the will.
use it as a transfer station that slowly orbits between earth and the moon. I forget the name of the orbit but it's a slow, low energy way to consistently get between lunar and earth orbit. you just gotta follow the schedule.
Make poptarts in space! Everything is better when space is added to it. This is a known fact, even an alternative fact!
Space ice cream? Better.
Space soup? Better.
Space lasagna? Better.
So make poptarts in space!
It is time to replace the ISS with something larger and circular that can spin and create centripal force to emulate some level of gravity equivalent. ISS has been very useful is testing methods of construction in space, but it hasn't been anywhere near ambitious enough. Too many visionless Republicans in Congress. Get rid of them. They don't even understand today, never mind the future. Climate change is still a mystery to them even when the evidence is staying them in the face. Hopeless.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Moon, Venus, Mars... a space station around any of those would be cool. Repurpose, rebuild, make a sky train to it.
Sell it. If there are no buyers, rent it out. If there are no renters, and occasional use doesn't warrant the ongoing cost, retire it "skylab" style.