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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.
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.
And what's the definition of "fully fund"? Trillions? More??? Pretty open ended, I'm not sure anyone can afford that.
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.
Simple. Twice of what we spend on Airconditioning for the military. That is all that is needed.
That alone will QUADRUPLE NASA's budget.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I agree - it's really not doing a whole lot for us.
Ditching it into the pacific would be a bad idea - but donating it to privately owned space businesses like SpaceX and Bigelow who are already working with the ISS would make a lot more sense. Consider the boost to US business if those companies had free access to the ISS!
NASA did their job here - they got private industry interested in that stuff - now they can step back from doing what they already know how to do - and get on with the difficult researchy stuff.
www.sjbaker.org
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 definitely am a fan of the idea of doing space exploration in a systematic way. We should build a space station that includes a fuel depot, and use it as the hub of space operations.
I am loathe to just destroy the ISS. It was expensive to get it up there and it should be affordable to keep it going. How hard is it really to just boost it into a higher orbit? If we want to save money we might want to stop having people on board for a while... just turn off the life support and other things, but do keep boosting its orbit to keep it where it is.
We will have a real game-changer once we have a "space pickup truck", a launch vehicle that can take a relatively small amount of cargo to orbit, but can do it affordably and frequently. The biggest problem with the Space Shuttle (aside from the fact that it was only 99% safe) was that it took man-decades of labor after each flight to service an orbiter for the next flight.
SpaceX is really working on the "space pickup truck" idea. Recovering the first-stage booster to be refueled and re-used is part of making launch more affordable.
Additionally I would love to see a mass driver or other sort of "cannon" to fire inert payloads (oxygen, water, fuel, dried food, sturdy electronics) to orbit. I've read about this. The biggest problem is that anything you fire from Earth will return to Earth unless its trajectory can be altered; the two obvious ways to do that are to put jets on the cargo capsules so they can adjust their own trajectory, or to have some sort of cargo capture system (a net? a drone with grabber arms?). I favor the latter because I want the cargo capsules to be as simple and cheap as possible.
Once we have an affordable way to get fuel into orbit, all sorts of things become possible. Make a rugged and simple craft that can shuttle back-and-forth between Earth and the Moon, and Moon visits become dramatically simpler and cheaper. Re-boosting the ISS, re-boosting satellites, launching space probes, all of it becomes much simpler and cheaper. Once you are in orbit you are halfway to anywhere in the solar system.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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... ***