Russia Aims Towards Mars 161
Iddo Genuth writes "Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) has announced its intentions to build a low-orbit space station which, according to the agency, will support future exploration of the moon and Mars. There's also a suggestion to extend the operational lifespan of the International Space Station by five more years, resetting its retirement date to 2020. The project proposal is already on its way for review by the Russian government. Some Russian sources also reportedly proposed the (rather ludicrous) idea of converting the ISS into some kind of an interplanetary transport vehicle, which would serve as the 'ultimate mother ship' in manned planetary missions to the moon or even Mars."
Moving ISS not a crazy idea at all (Score:5, Interesting)
Moving the ISS is not such a crazy idea at all, and it's been proposed already by some smart people as a way to increase moon mission payoffs and reduce mission risks. A series of orbit boosts could eventually lead to a transfer orbit and lunar orbital insertion. Once in lunar orbit it would be at reduced risk of damage from orbital trash. Yes, sending up resupply and crew swapouts would be more difficult, but remember we would already be doing that for manned lunar operations so it's really not that much of a stretch.
Moving it to mars... Now that's a bit of a stretch but it might be possible with a propulsion efficiency breakthrough that could be powered by existing solar arrays or a bolt-on reactor. Still though, I think the idea of using it to support lunar operations might be an interesting idea especially as an alternative to letting it die after such a slow and expensive build-up with gross under-use as a science platform since it's been manned due to problems with the shuttle program.
The big question is: Once the shuttle is out of the picture, why keep the ISS where it is? Why not just put it wherever it is the most useful?
Ludicrous? (Score:4, Interesting)
I suppose *some* people would be upset if a Russian booster rocket took the ISS out of orbit without telling anyone, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it ludicrous. If the U.S. doesn't pay Russia to boost the ISS during the shuttle's downtime, Russia may have no choice but to pull a repo job on it.
In space, no one can hear you... nevermind.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Moving ISS not a crazy idea at all (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Another bright/stupid idea... (Score:1, Interesting)
Not usefully, the specific impulse is too low.
In general you have a choice between high thrust and fuel efficiency, for the shuttle you need high thrust to boost that huge mass out of the gravity well and up to orbital velocity (Actually really two problems), once you are in orbit, you normally want maximum specific impulse even at the expense of high thrust to minimise the amount of fuel mass you have to carry.
The transfer drive is an interesting trade off between fuel mass and mission duration (with its implied life support mass issues).
The key thing to realise about any space drive is that only two numbers matter: The exhaust velocity and the initial propellant mass fraction, know those and you trivially define the maximum mission delta V you can produce.
The ISS as a ship rather then a platform also has the issue that it can only accommodate very low accelerations simply because of structural issues, I would have thought that ion drives producing small single digit newton thrust levels would be the way to do it, together with a large tank of high atomic mass reaction mass. You might want to use something relatively high thrust to move to a higher initial orbit first simply to cut down on atmospheric drag - maybe stuff an ATV full of fuel and use its thrusters for an initial boost? I don't know, I have not run the numbers.
Thinking about it, boost a series of ATVs on a set of carefully calculated trajectories and have them serve as re supply depots for in flight resupply en route.....
And yea, I know that rocket does not have the thrust to put the things where they would need to be for a mars shot!
Finally, I would note that a lunar orbiting station would inherently require quite a lot of fuel to maintain a stable orbit as all lunar orbits decay over time.
Re:Moving ISS not a crazy idea at all (Score:1, Interesting)
It is better to use ISS in any way, but destroying it burning down the Earth atmosphere.
Send around moon with full systems working and fulled with fuel etc,
it can serve as life boat or even one of the stations supporting Moon exploration.
If it could be sent to Mars orbit, it could be used upon human arrival on Mars orbit.
Russia Saves US Manned Spaceflight? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's quite ironic that it looks like the only thing that will save US manned spaceflight & planetary exploration from becoming a sacrificial lamb on the altar of pork & payoffs by short-sighted, corrupt US politicians may well be a re-emerging, hostile, and aggressive Russia.
It looks like it may be more effective for US citizens who are in favor of NOT letting our manned spaceflight capabilities die from neglect to, rather than contributing money to any US politicians or organizations, donate money to the Russian spaceflight program instead.
It seems that US politicians have so abandoned any pretense of doing the will of the people, of upholding & defending the US Constitution, and acting in the countries' best interests, that we may in future find it much more effective to donate money to our various enemies and rivals like Russia, Al Queda, and Ahmadinejad to preserve our freedom and prevent our politicians from doing things like de-funding NASA and the US military to fund their pork-filled, quid-pro-quo/payoff-laden, "bridge to nowhere" projects and social-engineering experiments designed to increase their voter-base.
Cheers!
Strat
2 things in the way (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, RSA is already not well funded. It is not likely that they will get funding for more when Russia is losing money and their economy is crashing HARD.
Re:Moving ISS not a crazy idea at all (Score:2, Interesting)
Or even this [aip.org]
Re:Moving ISS not a crazy idea at all (Score:5, Interesting)
It's just not a good idea. I can see that you value efficiency and find waste distasteful. However, you are just not considering the situation carefully.
Let's say you are some place near the U.S and Canadian border where it gets near freezing. You have an older space heater and a bunch of blankets and warm clothes. Generally, the space heater is serving you well. It's malfunctioned a couple of times, but you were able to use more blankets and some warmer clothes. In short order you were able to use some tools and some parts obtained from a local supply store and fix your "trusty" old space heater. One time you were just too tired and went over to a friend's house for the night.
Now, let's say you are are lot farther north of the equator. You are literally 1,000 miles away from the nearest warm shelter and local hardware store. If the space heater breaks down, you cannot find another heat source before you freeze and die.
In space, this situation is thousands of times worse. Reliability and redundancy are not just mission critical considerations, but life critical situations. This MUST be your primary consideration at all times. My tax dollars paid for parts of the ISS and I would want it to get the greatest amount of use before it is decommissioned. However, I don't want to risk the lives of astronauts just to keep using a piece of equipment.
AFAIK, there have been problems with the ISS where the situation could have been far more serious had it been orbiting around the Moon, or worse Mars.
Re:Russia Saves US Manned Spaceflight? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not let (extraorbital) US Manned Spaceflight die for now?
Before you reply, consider for a moment the relative gains we have gotten from things like Hubble, Cassini, the mars rovers, Japan's Hinode solar satellite, etc, to what we have achieved with the ISS and the projected goals of Orion, versus the costs of the programs.
I have a strong knee-jerk reaction against letting manned spaceflight die too; dammit, I *want* people to walk on Mars. But the fact is, we are learning a hell of a lot from unmanned missions at a tiny fraction of the cost.
We can resurrect the idea of extraorbital manned missions at any time; would it make sense to shelve them for now though?
Also, I wouldn't frame the argument for manned spaceflight as "will of the people" if I were you; what you and I want in this respect is likely quite different than the (general) "will of the people".
Re:Moving ISS not a crazy idea at all (Score:1, Interesting)
...which make getting there as fast as possible attractive.
With reasonable technology, we're not going to do much better than a Hohmann minimum-energy transfer orbit - and for that, it doesn't make much difference whether the thrust is instantaneous or delivered over several weeks. It'll still take over a year to get to Mars.
So, say that we get 5 km/s of delta-v over 5 weeks. 1 km/s/week = 1000 m/s/week = 0.001 m/s/s = 0.0001 gravities. That's pretty light thrust - the ISS should be able to stand up to that, despite how puny its structure is.
Re:Moving ISS not a crazy idea at all (Score:1, Interesting)
Why not just upgrade?
Hell, go one further, build AROUND the current space station, then when the environment around it is sealed, fill it with air, then dismantle IN space and re-use components elsewhere.
Doesn't exactly take rocket science here space agencies.
Get to work. (and employ me too, i'll get shit done!)
Re:Moving ISS not a crazy idea at all (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's some craziness:
Send unmanned craft to Mars whose mission is to stay in orbit and deploy a series of reflectors that will concentrate sunlight and keep it focused on the same spot on the surface of Mars, bringing the temperature there up to ~20C.
Then when we finally send manned craft, they will set up camp at that spot. As long as the reflectors don't fail the ground-crew won't have to worry about their heaters breaking and they can build greenhouses to deal with their food and oxygen situation.
Re:Moving ISS not a crazy idea at all (Score:5, Interesting)
Hence the complete craziness of throwing away all those shuttle primary fuel tanks.
Many of them are still in orbit, still being tracked by ground stations. But you're right, most of them are actually ditched over the Indian Ocean. The irony is that the shuttle could actually be more efficient if they knew they were going to re-use the tank in orbit, because they wouldn't have to waste the fuel necessary to perform the MET ditch maneuver.
Each fuel tank weighs more than the total shuttle payload. That's an enormous amount of raw materials that are already up in space to work with. But this is not an original idea... people have been talking about converting main fuel tanks into crew habitats for years.
The first mention was back in 1979 by a group of undergraduate students writing for a competition at the International Astronautical Congress. It was entitled, appropriately enough Space Shuttle External Tank Used as a Space Station [archive.org].
They ended up winning first prize, but naturally nothing was ever done about it.
Re:Moving ISS not a crazy idea at all (Score:3, Interesting)
Using ISS as a ship is obviously crazy, but considering that it will take some fuel to safely deorbit it anyway, I would love to see it put into a "storage" orbit someplace out of the way. Maybe somebody will have a use for it in 20 years. Maybe not. But, I'd really like to think that my great grand children would be able to come up from a Luna settlement on a daytrip to visit the old hulk and see how earlier generations lived in space.
ISS to inter-planatery craft ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Why not push the ISS out to lunar orbit? If we retire it in 2020 it will only be 30 years old max, so why not give it a fresh coat of space paint and use it as a rescue station for interplanetary missions. I am sure there are better things to do with it than let it fall back to earth and burn up.