Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
That's a really interesting idea but what is this "O3" and "H3" you are talking about?
I think you're confusing "O3" with the right most term in FeTiO3, which is ilmenite, a very common rock on the moon (take a look at: https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.go...). The "O3" is simply three oxygen atoms in each molecule of ilmenite.
As for "H3", how about "He3", which is an isotope of helium with only one neutron instead of the more common He4 which has two. This has been an important part of the dream/fantasy that lunar He3 can be burned with deuterium in a clean fusion reaction.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
ISS isn't designed for Lunar orbit. Radiation shielding would be the first issue, it relies on the Van Allen belts for most of its protection. Secondly it would need quite a bit more propulsion capability for Lunar orbit, the moon has a very "lumpy" gravity field that doesn't play nice with orbiting craft. I would also imagine that its electrical and radiator systems would need some significant adjustments. It could of course be retrofit, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It would be like shipping your old junker car (ISS is almost 20 years old) to the other side of the planet at significant cost when you moved to another country that drove on the other side of the road.
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.
There is still atmospheric drag at the ISS's altitude. You have to boost it regularly to keep it in orbit.
Here's a graph of the altitude of the ISS. You can see the boosts, followed by a slow decay until the next boost.