Because like any company they'd much rather be able to charge $65m per rocket rather than $30m per rocket;) They want the Falcon 9 series to be seen as dependable and thus worthy of higher-value payloads - even if they haven't refined relaunch yet. It's particularly important because they plan to use it for humans, so it needs to be seen as safe - at least for the new rockets fresh off the line.
Is it Godwin's law to compare Hitler to Trump, aka in reverse? You know, something like "I was reading about Hitler's rise the other day.... wow, that guy was a total Donald Trump!"
You forgot something: the Falcon Heavy, which begins launching next year, is basically two Falcon 9s hooked to an extra-long Falcon 9. Here's a video of the concept - basically, the side boosters simultaneously return and land, then the center booster returns and lands, while the third stage (which is the 2nd stage on the Falcon 9) isn't recovered. The design really stresses the SpaceX line of thinking - use as much duplication of parts as you can so that you can get economies of scale on production as well as and gather test data faster. Thankfully they don't take it as far as the OTRAG concept did!;)
SpaceX is of course taking this incrementally. Right now they need to prove that they can reliably land the boosters and refurbish them. Only once they can show that returning and refurbishing them is a profitable activity will they need additional landing pads.
It was a structural failure from a third-party part that didn't even approach its claimed specs. And it's not like SpaceX never tested the struts - they did, just not every single strut. The third party (which has reportedly had their contract terminated) clearly had process consistency problems.
SpaceX has never had a problem with its turbopumps.
Oh, sure, no question. Pretty much anything that's large and what you would call a "technology demostrator" (solar sail, experimental reentry system, large tether experiments, inflatables, anything of that nature) would go crazy for a cheap, even if high risk, rocket - when your spacecraft only costs a couple tens of thousands of dollars to build (or less) but launch costs are in the tens of millions, who cares if you lose the craft if it can save you a relevant chunk of the launch price? No question that SpaceX will find a market for reused rockets even during the high-risk initial phase.
Again: "Atlas is the 7th generation of a rocket family that's been around since 1957. One would hope that they'd have gotten most of the kinks by now. By comparison, Falcon 9 is a 2nd generation of a rocket family that's been around since 2006." Not sure how you missed that part. When the Atlas family was 9 years old, it was still undergoing regular failures. Atlas LV-3A, which was used from 1960 to 1968 (and would thus be the development-time equivalent of the Falcon 9) had 49 launches and 38 successes, or a success rate of only 77%.
Now, of course, that was a different time. The had less knowledge and technology base... although contrariwise they had far larger inflation-adjusted budgets. But let's just say that the technology issue means that Falcon 9 should prove itself much faster than the Atlas family did. Okay, so maybe the comparable level is to how Atlas was performing in the 1970s? The two Atlas rockets active in the 1970s (Atlas SLV-3C and Atlas SLV-3D) had a success rate of 84%. Okay, let's say the 1980s. The Atlas SLV-3D extended into the 80s, and there was also the atlas G, with a 67% success rate. It wasn't until the 1990s that they got up to a nearly 95% success rate - decades after the creation of the family.
You want perfection in under a decade of the creation of a new orbital rocket family. Please point me to a single case where that's happened, with a statistically significant number of launches under their belt. Proton? Nope. Soyuz? Nope. Delta? Nope. Arianne? Nope.
Not to mention Falcon Heavy planned for around April to May of 2016 - which probably means "summer". I'm so looking forward to that one... 55 tonnes to LEO for somewhere around $100m... can you imagine what sort of probes we could launch with that kind of launch economy? Picture any probe we've launched thusfar and imagine what the designers could have achieved on that mission if they'd been given five times the mass budget.
Unlike during the last Falcon 9 launch, I hope that they don't get impatient and turn on time warp again - everyone knows that it makes the physics unstable.
It makes you wonder why they don't always spend 2 1/2 times more per launch? Really, that's something you don't understand?
Atlas is the 7th generation of a rocket family that's been around since 1957. One would hope that they'd have gotten most of the kinks by now. By comparison, Falcon 9 is a 2nd generation of a rocket family that's been around since 2006.
Indeed... really they just need to land one successfully for now before going onto the next stage, which is working to prove that they can demonstrate and refine a process for refurbishment and return to flight in an affordable manner. One first stage returned intact gives them something to work with.
Turnaround is much easier when the stage is nearly empty. First off you have air resistance killing off part of your lateral momentum for you, and you already have altitude. Your stage is vastly lighter as well, having used up most of its propellant and separated from the second stage and payload. Your last kilogram of propellant delivers about 23 times more delta-V than your first (in a way it's kind of problematic - even with just one engine operating and throttled all the way down (70%) it can't "hover", it still has way too much thrust). So turnaround is actually quite doable, if you have a little margin left over. It depends on how heavy your payload is and what sort of trajectory it's being launched to.
I can think of a couple examples of spacecraft where it's been used that way (the Planetary Society's writeup mentions MESSENGER and MRO), but not many. Most of the designs I've seen use separate systems, for simplicity and supposedly extra reliability (the irony here being that the lack of separation on the systems is what saved Akatsuki). Cassini, for example has fully independent systems - like Akatsuki its main engine is hydrazine/N2O4 and its RCS is monoprop hydrazine, but the RCS has its own separate tank.
... all of this trouble happened, the Planetary Society blog had a nice detailed writeup a while back. The "short" of it? Akatsuki has a new type of primary thruster based on ceramics to withstand the heat rather than exotic materials like dicilicide-lined niobium as are normally used on these sorts of small hypergolic thrusters; they wanted to prove the new technology. You generally run thrusters a bit fuel-rich and inject it in such a manner as to try limit combustion near the chamber and nozzle walls to keep the temperature down. Well, the pressurant valve to the fuel tank didn't open all the way (they think it corroded) but the oxidizer pressure valve opened all the way. So the burn kept getting more and more oxidizer rich, meaning hotter chamber and nozzle walls way past the design limits, until they cracked and the nozzle simply flew off.
The only reason they were able to salvage this was because another unusual choice they did: to save mass, they implemented a more complicated hydrazine (fuel) feed system, allowing them to use the same hydrazine suppy for the main engine as for the small monopropellant RCS thrusters (tiny, low-efficiency maneuvering thrusters). Because they did this, they were able to take the fuel that was planned for the main engine and route it instead to the RCS engines. While they're less efficient and much lower thrust, they had enough excess fuel to pull off the maneuver (after first making the craft lighter by dumping the now-unneeded oxidizer, of course!)
You don't have the slightest idea what life is like there, and you hardly even have the experience required to imagine it.
Oh that's rich. You have no clue what life is like in Iceland but you see fit to lecture me on it. And most of your whole bloody nation sees fit as well when most of them couldn't even point to Iceland on a map.
And you're bitching because people in Reykjavik can't buy whale meat at the supermarket.
Where'd you get that idea? You absolutely can. It's just not that commonly eaten, due to price and health reasons.
Icelanders shouldn't have hunted whales to near-extinction
Icelanders have never hunted any whale species to near extinction. That was Americans who did that. *coughs and stares in your general direction* Learn your whaling history. At one point 735 of the world's 900 whaling ships were American.
Icelanders primarily hunt minke whales, which are an incredibly abundant species (rated LC/"Least Concern")
The whale population in Northern Alaska is substantially bigger than the human population
As is the Icelandic minke population.
But hey, come on, lecture me some more about not talking about places I know nothing about!
Not igloos, but the buildings do look a little silly what with the stilts
The money from the government doesn't make up for the insane costs of food and fuel
Oh PLEASE, you're going to lecture someone in Iceland about expensive prices? You know that half of all children's clothing here was bought overseas because it's cheaper when parents are expecting to take an overseas trip and come back with a suitcase full of clothe then to buy them here? I recently bought a printer that retails in the US for $200. I had to buy it from Europe for $250, pay $40 to have it shipped overseas, then $70 in customs fees. But that still saved me $100 over buying it locally. A month ago I bought a small item on ebay. The purchase price was $1. Shipping made it $5. Customs charged me $11 on top of that. $17 for a $1 item. Don't lecture me about "high prices".:P
And the key point is you get money from the government *and* you don't pay state taxes. You only pay US federal faxes. Do you know what the tax rate on a person working as a contractor is here? It's about 60%. As a salaried employee I pay over 40% of my salary in income tax. Now factor in those purchase prices / customs fees on top of that. Oh yeah, those poor impoverished natives and us rolling-in-the-cash volcano dwellers...
And it is subsistence hunting -- the meat obtained cannot be sold.
That's not what "subsistence hunting" means. Look up the definition of subsistence in the dictionary. Subsistence hunting means "hunting for survival". Nobody in Barrow is going to starve if they don't get whale.
And FYI, Americans in general don't give a rat's arse whether whale is sold or shared, they just care whether it's "indians" doing it or not, because only indians have "cultures" and "history", everyone else is just white devils or evil japs or the like out to destroy the world. If they actually gave a rat's arse about sharing then they wouldn't be raising such a fury over the Faroese whale hunt (they share it too).
Congrats, you went to a podunk, middle of nowhere village, even more remote and podunk than Barrow Alaska, which is the example in my links above (northernmost city in the US, 11th northernmost in the world, 4k people). We have impoverished (some to the point of near abandonment) podunk towns with no grocery stores and rip-of prices in mini-mart type stores here as well.
The difference between your example and mine? Your town didn't hunt whales. Barrow actually does, and is even famous for it. So you demonstrated precisely the opposite of the point you were trying to make.
It is not "subsistence whaling" any more than it is here - they have perfectly modern grocery stores and first-world per-capita incomes - not to mention subsidized transport and no state taxes. And even if it was, would the whales be any less dead?
Third, the total amount of whales taken by nine tribes in the US: 40-60 whales per year.
Alaskans natives kill about 75 per year. Icelanders kill about 150. Not a huge difference, and there are a lot more icelanders than inuit and yupik. Plus the Inuit and Yupik eat a lot more per capita because the whales they kill are significantly larger. If you'd like we could switch to hunting larger whales so that fewer have to die, how does that sound? Maybe we should hunt blues?:P
Lastly, some people in the US have a problem with this whaling despite the low impact.
Then get the thorn out of your own damned eye before getting all high and mighty about someone else's.
So, to recap your argument, we have an industrialized nation with a modern whaling fleet that wants to use what amounts to a ship to ship missile to catch and harvest an endangered species about the rights granted to an aboriginal tribe that uses a row boat to catch one of the few food sources available.
Oh for god's sake, do you even read?
1) Alaskans eat as much whale per capita as Icelanders. Alaskans of native ancestry significantly more.
2) Alaskans also use modern equipment. It's a complete myth that they're out there in rowboats hunting whales with wooden spears - they're chasing them in motorboats, shooting them with huge caliber pistols and spearguns, and hauling them ashore with backhoes and carrying them around with forklifts.
3) Minke whales are not even remotely close to endangered species, they're "LC" (Least Concern).
4) They have perfectly modern grocery stores stocked with a wide range of food just like anywhere, and not only do they not have any state taxes, they get a regular stipend from the state government on top of their salaries. And Alaska is by far the biggest net-positive state in terms of per capita subsidy vs. tax paid federally as well.
You're living in a fantasy world if you're picturing Inuit and Yupic indians as being some sort of primitives out freezing in igloos. Or that the scene there is anylessbloody than in the Faroes. But the latter are white devils trying to destroy the world and the former are just poor natives preserving the cultures, you see!
Also they can't tail everyone one of the Yushin Maru (harpoon boats), so it makes more sense to try to interfere with the Nisshin Maru (factory ship), since there's only one.
You know what would "blow my mind"? No "state" taxes, free money every year from government oil revenues and massive subsidies from the US government. "Less access to alternative foodstuffs"? Try again, here's a grocery store in Barrow. Stop the BS, these aren't some sort of impoverished people living in igloos, they're perfectly modern people, just like we are. Here's their football field for example - isn't "Whalers" such a nice touch?:P
And again: are the whales any less dead because they're killed in Alaska?
I searched and didn't find anything talking about them currently degrading.
Clearly ISS's lifespan isn't unlimited. But they're also clearly not in "constant desperate patch" mode like Mir was in near the end of its days. There seems to still be plenty of life left in it. At the very least it could be cannibalized - I mean, to pick one example among thousands, 110kW of solar panels in LEO is no trivial thing.
ISS really isn't a bad station. It's no luxury hotel but it's a pretty capable facility - all questions of whether it was worth the expense aside. Now that it's there it'd be a shame to just let it deorbit like Skylab. If Bigelow's concepts actually work out and such a "space hotel" comes to fruition I could easily envision ISS as sort of a service wing / rentable research space (the Cupola module would probably also be popular among tourists). NASA could probably justify giving away such a massively expensive facility by means of a contract that Bigelow bears responsibility for all ongoing costs and NASA retains the right to conduct experiments aboard ISS at no cost, or something of that nature - "see, everybody wins!"
If Bigelow's plans don't work out there still might be others in the future, or other NASA missions that could benefit from cannibalizing the station. So again, I really hope it's reboosted (I wouldn't put all my eggs in the VASIMR basket, but that is another possibility... although it should be added that while VASIMR is very efficient, it's not fuelless, so they'll still need to give it a sizeable fuel stock and put ISS into a high parking orbit to minimize losses). Its day will some day come, but I see no reason to think that that day is just around the corner... unless people willingly make it so.
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Because like any company they'd much rather be able to charge $65m per rocket rather than $30m per rocket ;) They want the Falcon 9 series to be seen as dependable and thus worthy of higher-value payloads - even if they haven't refined relaunch yet. It's particularly important because they plan to use it for humans, so it needs to be seen as safe - at least for the new rockets fresh off the line.
Is it Godwin's law to compare Hitler to Trump, aka in reverse? You know, something like "I was reading about Hitler's rise the other day.... wow, that guy was a total Donald Trump!"
Yup. ;)
You forgot something: the Falcon Heavy, which begins launching next year, is basically two Falcon 9s hooked to an extra-long Falcon 9. Here's a video of the concept - basically, the side boosters simultaneously return and land, then the center booster returns and lands, while the third stage (which is the 2nd stage on the Falcon 9) isn't recovered. The design really stresses the SpaceX line of thinking - use as much duplication of parts as you can so that you can get economies of scale on production as well as and gather test data faster. Thankfully they don't take it as far as the OTRAG concept did! ;)
SpaceX is of course taking this incrementally. Right now they need to prove that they can reliably land the boosters and refurbish them. Only once they can show that returning and refurbishing them is a profitable activity will they need additional landing pads.
It was a structural failure from a third-party part that didn't even approach its claimed specs. And it's not like SpaceX never tested the struts - they did, just not every single strut. The third party (which has reportedly had their contract terminated) clearly had process consistency problems.
SpaceX has never had a problem with its turbopumps.
Oh, sure, no question. Pretty much anything that's large and what you would call a "technology demostrator" (solar sail, experimental reentry system, large tether experiments, inflatables, anything of that nature) would go crazy for a cheap, even if high risk, rocket - when your spacecraft only costs a couple tens of thousands of dollars to build (or less) but launch costs are in the tens of millions, who cares if you lose the craft if it can save you a relevant chunk of the launch price? No question that SpaceX will find a market for reused rockets even during the high-risk initial phase.
You realize that what's in the tank is liquid oxygen, right? And that it's pressurized by helium? More to the point, hot helium?
So saying that SpaceX schedules will inevitably slip makes me the SpaceX PR department?
Again: "Atlas is the 7th generation of a rocket family that's been around since 1957. One would hope that they'd have gotten most of the kinks by now. By comparison, Falcon 9 is a 2nd generation of a rocket family that's been around since 2006." Not sure how you missed that part. When the Atlas family was 9 years old, it was still undergoing regular failures. Atlas LV-3A, which was used from 1960 to 1968 (and would thus be the development-time equivalent of the Falcon 9) had 49 launches and 38 successes, or a success rate of only 77%.
Now, of course, that was a different time. The had less knowledge and technology base... although contrariwise they had far larger inflation-adjusted budgets. But let's just say that the technology issue means that Falcon 9 should prove itself much faster than the Atlas family did. Okay, so maybe the comparable level is to how Atlas was performing in the 1970s? The two Atlas rockets active in the 1970s (Atlas SLV-3C and Atlas SLV-3D) had a success rate of 84%. Okay, let's say the 1980s. The Atlas SLV-3D extended into the 80s, and there was also the atlas G, with a 67% success rate. It wasn't until the 1990s that they got up to a nearly 95% success rate - decades after the creation of the family.
You want perfection in under a decade of the creation of a new orbital rocket family. Please point me to a single case where that's happened, with a statistically significant number of launches under their belt. Proton? Nope. Soyuz? Nope. Delta? Nope. Arianne? Nope.
Not to mention Falcon Heavy planned for around April to May of 2016 - which probably means "summer". I'm so looking forward to that one... 55 tonnes to LEO for somewhere around $100m... can you imagine what sort of probes we could launch with that kind of launch economy? Picture any probe we've launched thusfar and imagine what the designers could have achieved on that mission if they'd been given five times the mass budget.
Here's the 10-day forcast - hope that that "chance of rain" on the 19th turns into "thunderstorms and strong upper level winds" ;)
Unlike during the last Falcon 9 launch, I hope that they don't get impatient and turn on time warp again - everyone knows that it makes the physics unstable.
It makes you wonder why they don't always spend 2 1/2 times more per launch? Really, that's something you don't understand?
Atlas is the 7th generation of a rocket family that's been around since 1957. One would hope that they'd have gotten most of the kinks by now. By comparison, Falcon 9 is a 2nd generation of a rocket family that's been around since 2006.
Indeed... really they just need to land one successfully for now before going onto the next stage, which is working to prove that they can demonstrate and refine a process for refurbishment and return to flight in an affordable manner. One first stage returned intact gives them something to work with.
Turnaround is much easier when the stage is nearly empty. First off you have air resistance killing off part of your lateral momentum for you, and you already have altitude. Your stage is vastly lighter as well, having used up most of its propellant and separated from the second stage and payload. Your last kilogram of propellant delivers about 23 times more delta-V than your first (in a way it's kind of problematic - even with just one engine operating and throttled all the way down (70%) it can't "hover", it still has way too much thrust). So turnaround is actually quite doable, if you have a little margin left over. It depends on how heavy your payload is and what sort of trajectory it's being launched to.
Word salad crunches gracefully over pineapple sunsets.
I can think of a couple examples of spacecraft where it's been used that way (the Planetary Society's writeup mentions MESSENGER and MRO), but not many. Most of the designs I've seen use separate systems, for simplicity and supposedly extra reliability (the irony here being that the lack of separation on the systems is what saved Akatsuki). Cassini, for example has fully independent systems - like Akatsuki its main engine is hydrazine/N2O4 and its RCS is monoprop hydrazine, but the RCS has its own separate tank.
... all of this trouble happened, the Planetary Society blog had a nice detailed writeup a while back. The "short" of it? Akatsuki has a new type of primary thruster based on ceramics to withstand the heat rather than exotic materials like dicilicide-lined niobium as are normally used on these sorts of small hypergolic thrusters; they wanted to prove the new technology. You generally run thrusters a bit fuel-rich and inject it in such a manner as to try limit combustion near the chamber and nozzle walls to keep the temperature down. Well, the pressurant valve to the fuel tank didn't open all the way (they think it corroded) but the oxidizer pressure valve opened all the way. So the burn kept getting more and more oxidizer rich, meaning hotter chamber and nozzle walls way past the design limits, until they cracked and the nozzle simply flew off.
The only reason they were able to salvage this was because another unusual choice they did: to save mass, they implemented a more complicated hydrazine (fuel) feed system, allowing them to use the same hydrazine suppy for the main engine as for the small monopropellant RCS thrusters (tiny, low-efficiency maneuvering thrusters). Because they did this, they were able to take the fuel that was planned for the main engine and route it instead to the RCS engines. While they're less efficient and much lower thrust, they had enough excess fuel to pull off the maneuver (after first making the craft lighter by dumping the now-unneeded oxidizer, of course!)
Oh that's rich. You have no clue what life is like in Iceland but you see fit to lecture me on it. And most of your whole bloody nation sees fit as well when most of them couldn't even point to Iceland on a map.
Where'd you get that idea? You absolutely can. It's just not that commonly eaten, due to price and health reasons.
Icelanders have never hunted any whale species to near extinction. That was Americans who did that. *coughs and stares in your general direction* Learn your whaling history. At one point 735 of the world's 900 whaling ships were American.
Icelanders primarily hunt minke whales, which are an incredibly abundant species (rated LC/"Least Concern")
As is the Icelandic minke population.
But hey, come on, lecture me some more about not talking about places I know nothing about!
Really, you're going to lecture someone who lives in Iceland about silly-looking buildings?
Oh PLEASE, you're going to lecture someone in Iceland about expensive prices? You know that half of all children's clothing here was bought overseas because it's cheaper when parents are expecting to take an overseas trip and come back with a suitcase full of clothe then to buy them here? I recently bought a printer that retails in the US for $200. I had to buy it from Europe for $250, pay $40 to have it shipped overseas, then $70 in customs fees. But that still saved me $100 over buying it locally. A month ago I bought a small item on ebay. The purchase price was $1. Shipping made it $5. Customs charged me $11 on top of that. $17 for a $1 item. Don't lecture me about "high prices". :P
And the key point is you get money from the government *and* you don't pay state taxes. You only pay US federal faxes. Do you know what the tax rate on a person working as a contractor is here? It's about 60%. As a salaried employee I pay over 40% of my salary in income tax. Now factor in those purchase prices / customs fees on top of that. Oh yeah, those poor impoverished natives and us rolling-in-the-cash volcano dwellers...
That's not what "subsistence hunting" means. Look up the definition of subsistence in the dictionary. Subsistence hunting means "hunting for survival". Nobody in Barrow is going to starve if they don't get whale.
And FYI, Americans in general don't give a rat's arse whether whale is sold or shared, they just care whether it's "indians" doing it or not, because only indians have "cultures" and "history", everyone else is just white devils or evil japs or the like out to destroy the world. If they actually gave a rat's arse about sharing then they wouldn't be raising such a fury over the Faroese whale hunt (they share it too).
Congrats, you went to a podunk, middle of nowhere village, even more remote and podunk than Barrow Alaska, which is the example in my links above (northernmost city in the US, 11th northernmost in the world, 4k people). We have impoverished (some to the point of near abandonment) podunk towns with no grocery stores and rip-of prices in mini-mart type stores here as well.
The difference between your example and mine? Your town didn't hunt whales. Barrow actually does, and is even famous for it. So you demonstrated precisely the opposite of the point you were trying to make.
It is not "subsistence whaling" any more than it is here - they have perfectly modern grocery stores and first-world per-capita incomes - not to mention subsidized transport and no state taxes. And even if it was, would the whales be any less dead?
Alaskans natives kill about 75 per year. Icelanders kill about 150. Not a huge difference, and there are a lot more icelanders than inuit and yupik. Plus the Inuit and Yupik eat a lot more per capita because the whales they kill are significantly larger. If you'd like we could switch to hunting larger whales so that fewer have to die, how does that sound? Maybe we should hunt blues? :P
Then get the thorn out of your own damned eye before getting all high and mighty about someone else's.
Oh for god's sake, do you even read?
1) Alaskans eat as much whale per capita as Icelanders. Alaskans of native ancestry significantly more.
2) Alaskans also use modern equipment. It's a complete myth that they're out there in rowboats hunting whales with wooden spears - they're chasing them in motorboats, shooting them with huge caliber pistols and spearguns, and hauling them ashore with backhoes and carrying them around with forklifts.
3) Minke whales are not even remotely close to endangered species, they're "LC" (Least Concern).
4) They have perfectly modern grocery stores stocked with a wide range of food just like anywhere, and not only do they not have any state taxes, they get a regular stipend from the state government on top of their salaries. And Alaska is by far the biggest net-positive state in terms of per capita subsidy vs. tax paid federally as well.
You're living in a fantasy world if you're picturing Inuit and Yupic indians as being some sort of primitives out freezing in igloos. Or that the scene there is any less bloody than in the Faroes. But the latter are white devils trying to destroy the world and the former are just poor natives preserving the cultures, you see!
Also they can't tail everyone one of the Yushin Maru (harpoon boats), so it makes more sense to try to interfere with the Nisshin Maru (factory ship), since there's only one.
You know what would "blow my mind"? No "state" taxes, free money every year from government oil revenues and massive subsidies from the US government. "Less access to alternative foodstuffs"? Try again, here's a grocery store in Barrow. Stop the BS, these aren't some sort of impoverished people living in igloos, they're perfectly modern people, just like we are. Here's their football field for example - isn't "Whalers" such a nice touch? :P
And again: are the whales any less dead because they're killed in Alaska?
It's such rank hypocrisy.
I searched and didn't find anything talking about them currently degrading.
Clearly ISS's lifespan isn't unlimited. But they're also clearly not in "constant desperate patch" mode like Mir was in near the end of its days. There seems to still be plenty of life left in it. At the very least it could be cannibalized - I mean, to pick one example among thousands, 110kW of solar panels in LEO is no trivial thing.
ISS really isn't a bad station. It's no luxury hotel but it's a pretty capable facility - all questions of whether it was worth the expense aside. Now that it's there it'd be a shame to just let it deorbit like Skylab. If Bigelow's concepts actually work out and such a "space hotel" comes to fruition I could easily envision ISS as sort of a service wing / rentable research space (the Cupola module would probably also be popular among tourists). NASA could probably justify giving away such a massively expensive facility by means of a contract that Bigelow bears responsibility for all ongoing costs and NASA retains the right to conduct experiments aboard ISS at no cost, or something of that nature - "see, everybody wins!"
If Bigelow's plans don't work out there still might be others in the future, or other NASA missions that could benefit from cannibalizing the station. So again, I really hope it's reboosted (I wouldn't put all my eggs in the VASIMR basket, but that is another possibility... although it should be added that while VASIMR is very efficient, it's not fuelless, so they'll still need to give it a sizeable fuel stock and put ISS into a high parking orbit to minimize losses). Its day will some day come, but I see no reason to think that that day is just around the corner... unless people willingly make it so.