NASA Plans To De-Orbit ISS In 2016 554
NewbieV writes "The international space station is by far the largest spacecraft ever built by earthlings. Circling the Earth every 90 minutes, it often passes over North America and is visible from the ground when night has fallen but the station, up high, is still bathed in sunlight.
After more than a decade of construction, it is nearing completion and finally has a full crew of six astronauts. The last components should be installed by the end of next year. And then? 'In the first quarter of 2016, we'll prep and de-orbit the spacecraft,' says NASA's space station program manager, Michael T. Suffredini."
It'll never happen (Score:3, Insightful)
So what does that make the IRR? (Score:1, Insightful)
How much was invested in this thing, I wonder?
I am aware of the "sunk cost fallacy", and maybe the ISS has taught us everything it set out to teach... but I could've sworn that we were originally sold a much larger bill of goods than NASA now intends to deliver. Remember all the talk about a permanent space station from which to stage lunar and martian missions?
luckily for us (Score:3, Insightful)
Only 6 years after completion?! (Score:1, Insightful)
Christ, what a rathole for money that thing is.
You shouldn't even be reading this post for another ten minutes or so, because I should be writing it on Mars. Instead, yay, let's pay a bunch of underemployed Russian rocket scientists to build another Skylab/Mir, and see what happens when we blow bubbles in LEO.
Coming as it does near the anniversary of the first Apollo landing, this is a really depressing story. Idiocracy, indeed.
Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
Will find a way?
This is the way.
Step 1 - Announce over and over that your going to "De-Orbit".
Step 2 - Wait for public outcry.
Step 3 - Cash ISS Stimulus check before the government runs out of paper to print money on.
Sounds like a negotiation (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds to me like the first move in a series of negotiations.
"Give us more money, or we drop it in the ocean".
This is not the last article on the subject that we will see...
Re:W.T.F. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What gives them the right (Score:5, Insightful)
I know NASA (and inherently the USA) has put more money than all the other nations involved (possibly combined) into the ISS.
Nonetheless, I think this is an example of a political maneuver to get those in charge of the money to wake up and realize that NASA has two huge projects on it's hands that need funding. Between ISS and Constellation, the NASA budget needs a bump or both of these will end up in the doldrums because of underfunding.
Remember at the end of Apollo when missions 18, 19, and 20 transitioned to Project Skylab? I think resolving what to do with ISS will be a matter of figuring out a new function for it to serve in the 20's and 30's. Hell... I'd like to see them tether it to a geosynchronous orbit and convert the thing into a space elevator to reduce the cost of energy needed to send 1 kg of material into space to less than $10k.
I'm guessing their bluffing (Score:5, Insightful)
After reading the article, it sounds more like this is a game of chicken that NASA intends to play in order to secure more funding, either from congress or elsewhere.
Re:It'll never happen (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA is terrible with arbitrary deadlines.
I agree, but for a different reason. This is a way to get the public involved (read: outraged) and secure funding. I hope it works.
Re:What gives them the right (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:W.T.F. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Only 6 years after completion?! (Score:2, Insightful)
I assure you, that's not a coincidence; that's genius marketing. And I don't see what it has to do with Idiocracy.
Re:Why not preserve it? (Score:3, Insightful)
You gotta be kidding me! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't find the article in question at the moment, but the Economist ran an article a few months ago reporting that something along the lines of 50% of NASA's budget is devoted to the ISS alone.
Re:Next stop... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not preserve it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even then, you aren't getting too far out of Earth orbit and run the risk of dropping the thing back from an unpredictable orbit some time over the next centuries.
So, no, it's not economical in any way shape or form to escape them, and it could be dangerous.
Deorbiting into the Pacific (which is usually where they target) is much safer and easier and can be done with a fraction of the fuel (they probably have enough on board).
*Extremely rough terms
Re:W.T.F. (Score:2, Insightful)
"It's not as if those last four years will be more valuable than all of the previous years combined."
Full sized crew.
Focus on using hte station rather than it's construction.
Why shouldn't the last years be the most valuable ones?
It's Skylab all over again! (Score:3, Insightful)
I always thought that the 5 year gap of no manned craft for the US sounded dumb, I guess they always had this at the back of their minds and just want to get rid of the thing. I'd get Ares V on tap, send up a big (ion?) booster, and either move it to a more equatorial orbit, so it can be used as an assembly point for lunar/martian missions, or let it go on autopilot through the Van Allen belts and push it into high earth orbit for future use. Hell at that point you could zip it out to a Lagrange point for storage.
Re:So what does that make the IRR? (Score:1, Insightful)
And that was the other of the two reasons the ISS was built.
1) In the early 80s, "To give the Shuttle somewhere to go and something to do, so that Shuttle dollars keep getting allocated even though it's easier/cheaper to launch satellites on expendabe vehicles."
2) In the early 90s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, "To give unemployed Russian rocket scientists something else to build besides ballistic missiles for sale to the highest bidder."
Science (or staging/assembly points for future missions) were only the goal of the scientists. But scientists don't make the decisions on what gets funded, politicians do. And politicians don't know (and don't care) about science.
As someone else suggested above - if the Iraq War had been over within 6 months instead of 6 years, none of the contractors would have made any real money off it. There's no money to be made in winning wars, but plenty to be had in prolonging them.
Likewise, when you build a space station, the money doesn't get spent in space, it gets spent on Earth. From the point of view of a Congressman, a working space station's useless. There's no more money to be made from having it in orbit. So you build it - decades late and hundreds of billions overbudget - and then within an eyeblink of having completed the project, you deorbit it and build something new.
So you build it, put it in an orbit that's useless for staging or assembling future missions, and you trash it within an eyeblink of having finished the job.
Re:It'll never happen (Score:5, Insightful)
De-orbiting the ISS is an active choice, however. It's expensive to keep manned and operational. I suppose they could simply abandon it and leave it up there, but it's going to come down eventually. If I understand correctly, its orbit is so low that it experiences drag from Earth's atmosphere, which means it regularly needs a boost, and therefore fuel. I guess they prefer to have it come down in a controlled manner, so nobody gets hit on the head with the thing.
Yes, the ISS has no engines and will fall out of the sky eventually, much like Skylab. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Altitude_control [wikipedia.org]
(I may have started by expressing the hope that the ISS stays up there for a while, but I'm not at all sure that's a good idea. Critics say it's a waste of money with no scientific value whatsoever. So why did we put it up there in the first place? Shouldn't we be figuring out how to mine asteroids instead?)
You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc. My guess is to why we hear less about ISS science is that it's harder to write in a pop-culture headline. At least with the others you get pretty pictures or the ability to wildly extrapolate (liquid water, therefor aliens) or fear-monger (black holes sound scary, microscopic ones must be even more frightening). Zero gravity is so 1990, so regardless of how useful the research, your average person not interested in science will not care, and thus think it's a waste. You just can't pitch the importance to them.
There's no other location where we can do long-term scientific research in zero gravity, so we would do well to keep the ISS if we plan to keep learning from it.
Re:I didnt sign up for this (Score:5, Insightful)
We could have put people on Mars for that money.
Of course then you burn that money in an even short amount of time, but then at least we'd have put people on Mars. The amount of money you spend is irrelevant if you don't take into account what you get back for it.
So? Both would end up being short-term projects. The difference being that a Mars trip would be mostly travel, with a brief period of exploration and science. With the ISS, even 15 years before de-orbit is still 15 years of science. That puts the ISS at a full 12 years ahead on science (even estimating a full Mars mission with 1 year of on-planet exploration and experiments during a 1-year transit there and another on the way back).
Add that the ISS has a large crew, certainly more than a Mars mission, and the ISS still gets more research time per dollar, just a different kind of research.
Counterweight! Or headstone... (Score:5, Insightful)
Push the thing into an equatorial orbit, and then use it as a counterweight for the space elevator.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a avowed Space Elevator skeptic (despite my coincidental name [wikipedia.org] from a book about a space elevator), but...
This gives us MANY advantages over starting from scratch:
Without getting into the monetary expenses, we've spent too much Delta V to drop this thing.
Does anyone understand economics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Once again, Congress proves it doesn't understand the sunk cost fallacy:
"If we've spent a hundred billion dollars, I don't think we want to shut it down in 2015," Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) told Augustine's committee.
Of course, these are the same people that are pouring billions to save dying companies such as GM, so I should not be surprised.
Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Manned spaceflight should end until earth to orbit costs $100/lb or less. "
...and what, pray tell, is going to drive developing the technology to do *that* when the only things going up are light, cheap rovers and satellites? Real life isn't like "Civilization", where some offscreen God delivers complete blueprints for engineering marvels as soon as you reach some arbitrary stage of the game. The only thing that would come close to $100/lb to LEO is a space elevator amortized over a century or two of constant use. That would require decades of materials research and engineering with a budget that would make NASA's new manned rocket program look like peanuts, before we could even start arguing about whether to fund building the thing.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
The profit was for the contractors, and occurred at step 1...
Re:It'll never happen (Score:3, Insightful)
The question is, whey it has no scientific value. Then create some experiments that give it value.
You mean, now that we have a cool solution, we need to create a cool problem for it to solve? My impression was that it's not really all that suitable for a lot of experiments that scientists wanted to do in space. Or it's too expensive for what we get in return.
I fully agree the ISS is really cool, but not everything that's cool is really worth $100 billion.
Re:It'll never happen (Score:2, Insightful)
But did you notice the last line in TFA? I found it a bit chilling: "Give it to China. Let them support the damn thing."
Now I could be coming across as overly paranoid here, but the Chinese Government has its own agenda (a fact that is typically overlooked by the West as it scrambles slavishly for every trade dollar it can scavenge) and the record amply shows that does not necessarily include the welfare of anyone else. They certainly don't feel the need to recognise anyone else's laws, as we can see from the current fiasco over the detention of an Australian company executive when they didn't get the iron ore deal they wanted.
Handing them something like the ISS seems incredbly stupid to me.
Re:Compare it to your car (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that it's not rusting nor are the few moving parts on it even a fraction of the cost of the whole the way they are on a car.
A better car analogy would be that you've got vintage Bugatti with almost zero mechanical wear on it that you've been restoring and pouring money into for the last decade or so. You just sourced a brand new engine for it at massive cost last year, paid millions to have brand new titanium transmission built for it (to Bugatti factory specs) the year before.
Your future plans include similar expenditures for the next five years, after which you plan to take a ceremonial shit on it and torch it.
Makes sense, eh?
Why don't they ISS to mars? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course I would send it empty to orbit mars. It would be a first base for arriving mars expeditions. Would do you think about that?
Re:It's Skylab all over again! (Score:3, Insightful)
They're rocket scientists that have to deal with demands of people that think potato ends with the letter 'e' and that the internet is like indoor plumbing.
It came from on high that the ISS had to dock not only with the Shuttle but also the Soyuz. So the rocket scientists had to adapt.
Re:It'll never happen (Score:3, Insightful)
You could say the same thing about Hubble, the Mars Rovers, Cassini, LHC, etc.
Bullshit. All of those project significantly advanced human knowledge (or are about to - if we learn as little from the LHC as we did from the ISS, it will be called the most miserable failure in all of science).
Face it, the ISS was a make-work project for NASA. It was not a tool designed to teach us something we wanted to know. When it crashes to Earth, science will barely notice.
Re:Why not preserve it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because over long enough time it won't be just 'one more object.' It'll be 'many more objects.'
Re:Why not preserve it? (Score:3, Insightful)
That makes no sense at all.
There's tons of man-made waste discarded in space. From big pieces of Saturn V rockets to small pieces of smashed up Chinese satellite.
So NASA and and friends aren't too bothered about leaving useless bits of metal in space, but a multi-billion dollar space station of obvious advantage to future manned space flight must be destroyed?
Re:Only 6 years after completion?! (Score:3, Insightful)
The ISS is a perfectly capable space station. It isn't keeping anybody from Mars; in fact by providing a place to assemble a Mars-bound spaceship, it is helping. Certainly the Ares V, if it ever flies, cannot put up a Mars mission in one shot.
Do not blame a cheap (on the scale of government spending, not NASA spending) project for the fact that space travel is horrifically underfunded. Blame the small-minded penny pinchers demanding a tax cut for the millionaires they are convinced they shall join one day, and the politicians cynically purchasing the votes of the elderly with social spending and the campaign funds of the corporations with acquisitive wars.
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
War is welfare for military contractors. Nation building is welfare for whatever corporations scratch the leaders back. Capitalism is, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky, welfare for the uber-rich.
Judging by your signature, you would want a government that focuses on the latter; spending only on those facilities required to keep the rich, rich. I would rather world governments gave money to the kind of people who sent men to the Moon than to the kind of people who made a killing wrecking the world economy, but perhaps that is me being a pinko liberal European commie socialist or some bullshit like that.
Re:I call bullshit on this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, after all the money we've spent, I don't see them just plopping it into the ocean
Right, because that would be like spending five billion or so on disposing of nuclear waste [doe.gov] and then shutting the program down after 25 years without disposing of any nuclear waste [reuters.com] and leaving the United States as one of the few countries in the developed world without an ongoing waste disposal strategy.
Surely no government would ever do that!
Politics is probably in play here: with the shuttle phased out, there will be no big $ for American contractors to support the IIS, because launch costs are going to be the greater part of ongoing costs. So the US government would be in a position of spending a lot of money on foreign launch vehicles, which means "No pork for you!" with regard to domestic campaign contributors.
Ergo, the US government would be supporting an international effort that would not feed back much of anything in terms of pork barrel spending into the domestic economy. Since pork is one of the major means by which the Party maintains control of the state, this is unacceptable.
Furthermore, because the US is an imperial power, it can't afford to be seen as weak or second-rate, so if it ceases to participate in the ISS the station must come down, because otherwise foreigners would have "the high ground."
If something doesn't make sense, there is usually politics behind it, and behind the politics there is usually money.
Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
Is the environment at L-5 really all that much different than LEO? Redesigning the software is something trivial, and simply takes a team on the ground here on Earth to make the changes. I don't consider a software change to be (for the price of the ISS) a big deal. Give me a few million dollars, and I'll make the changes myself and hire the team to get it done.
The main environmental difference is that at L-5 you no longer have protection of the Van Allen belts (most of the time), and the day/night cycles for each orbit would give way to 24/7/365 sunlight with only minor exceptions during an eclipse that would happen roughly as often as a Lunar Eclipse. Batteries wouldn't be as critical as they are now (about half of the time the ISS is in shadow in LEO) but the radiators might have to be beefed up a little bit.
Even with all this, I don't think it would be as difficult as you would think. An ion drive like you are suggesting might be all that is necessary in order to get the delta-v to move to L-5.... and moving between L-5 and the Moon is comparatively trivial in comparison. This Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] gives a pretty good overview of how much energy is needed for moving from place to place in the Solar System. Moving from LEO to L-5 takes as much energy (actually more) than going from L-5 to Phobos. Now that is something to think about.
Re:I'm guessing their bluffing (Score:1, Insightful)
Instead they went through a decade of politically ensnarled redesigns and then years of further delays because the Shuttle proved to be inherently unreliable.
What the Orbiter proved is that replacing components chosen through good design with new "more eco-friendly" substitutes is a reliable way to spectacularly kill people (and destroy rather expensive spacecraft in the process). The original Orbiter design is possibly the most reliable construction engineers have ever accomplished.
Disclaimer: I work in for a NASA contractor. The task order that pays my salary is part of the manned spaceflight effort, but neither I nor the company I work for are involved with design, manufacturing, or maintenance of the spacecraft or flight systems.
From some of the really weird ideas expressed by the parent post, I wonder if demachina shouldn't have revealed a conflict of interest of his/her own. The Russian Space Agency hasn't produced anything on spec or on schedule despite a ton of funding being passed in their direction. Giving them more would be a huge mistake.