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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.
i have a dream
to keep aliens out.
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.
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.
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.
I say they stop funding the station and start funding research on a better launch mechanism, like a mass driver or whatever. The main barrier to the development of space is the cost of getting stuff up there. Once we had a launch mechanism with a tiny fraction of the cost-per-launch that we have now, a space station (and everything else) would be far more economical.
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
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
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.
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.