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."
What gives them the right (Score:5, Interesting)
The first word in it's title is "International" and a lot of countries have put a lot of money into building it. Maybe they would like to start getting some returns on their payments now that it's finally almost finished, rather than having one single country decide that just because they're bored with it the whole thing should be crashed into the sea.
Why not preserve it? (Score:5, Interesting)
W.T.F. (Score:5, Interesting)
From wikipedia:
On-orbit construction of the station began in 1998 and is scheduled to be complete by 2011, with operations continuing until at least 2015. In the first quarter of 2016 unless there is a change in policy ... the space station will be de-orbited.
So, 13 years of construction and four years of (full-capacity) operation. This sets the standard for white elephants. As far as I'm concerned, they should either de-orbit it now and stop throwing good money after bad, or keep it up there for a lot longer, if only to do experiments on long-term living in space.
Next stop... (Score:5, Interesting)
Lock the doors and repel all boarders (Score:4, Interesting)
With the russians being the only people (once the scuttle is sent to the knacker's yard) who have the ability to send people to the ISS, and the europeans with their independent supply craft, it may even be possible to ignore whatever NASA wants to do. Come 2016, it may even be that there were no more americans on the station - in which case all the existing occupants would have to do would be to stop any more of them arriving. Once the high costs of construction have been met and the station enters a lower cost maintenance phase of it's life, there could well be deals to be done with other countries to keep the station supplied and crews rotated and some real work done.
Last of all, I would really laugh if the de-orbiting project threw up some show-stoppers which showed that the station was now TOO BIG to be safely taken apart, without affecting it's overall stability - and the risk of the whole thing crashing back in one large piece.
Not quite what the article implies (Score:5, Interesting)
Article implies they are planning on trashing it in 2016 unless they get more funding.. This is a political move, and the ISS will probably be kept in service longer then that.
Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:1, Interesting)
I call bullshit on this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Firstly, if we're going to the moon and mars, the ISS seems like a pretty damn good staging/bailout option.
Secondly, we need to start thinking long term about our survival as a species. One of those strategies means long term human space flight. Currently a space station is the only thing that's giving us that.
I'm sure there will be those people who argue that it takes money away from other projects, but right now it's the only thing NASA is doing.
Re:Next stop... (Score:5, Interesting)
What this does help with, though, is reliability and redundancy. Instead of throwing all your eggs in one launch vehicle basket, you're going up to GEO in bits in and pieces, so if one of the launches fails, you don't loose the whole thing. This same idea is the main concept for the F6 fractionated spacecraft [wikipedia.org] program.
Re:So what does that make the IRR? (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember all the talk about a permanent space station from which to stage lunar and martian missions?
Would have been great, and the shuttle was originally designed with that in mind, but the ISS can't do it. You need a station in orbit around the equator for that, but the ISS was put at a big inclination in order to make it easier for the Russians to get to it.
On the one hand, I'm sad to see a major space project come and go like this. On the other hand, I'm not sure what the ISS can accomplish compared to spending that money on another major space project.
I didnt sign up for this (Score:5, Interesting)
How much did this cost? $100 billion dollars? I expect it to be up there till at least 2050, even if it is the ratty garage of a much larger space station by then. Of course Mir was up for what 15 years beyond its expected lifespan? $100 billion dollars is a lot of money just to burn it up in less than 20 years, even if you count the annual upkeep costs. That's like taking 6 months of the Iraq war funding and just burning it.
Re:I didnt sign up for this (Score:0, Interesting)
That's like taking 6 months of the Iraq war funding and just burning it.
Exactly, thats why we had more than 6 years worth of the Iraq war just to make sure we could take in the smell of napalm and burnt currency.
Re:It'll never happen (Score:5, Interesting)
NASA is terrible with arbitrary deadlines. Remember how the Mars rovers were only supposed to work for 90 days? They've been at it for years now. The date will be pushed back over and over again.
I hope you're right, but de-orbiting the ISS is a somewhat different matter than a Mars rover breaking down. You can't predict when a breakdown occurs, and as long as it doesn't, it's cheap to keep using it.
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.
(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?)
Space politics (Score:5, Interesting)
It's really difficult to do medium/long term space projects when there are changes to the budget every year, and new legislators looking to reevaluate after every election. If we're going to take on a project like this, we need the resolve (and financial commitment) to see it through.
How ridiculous is it that we have built the station, but we're not going to send up the already-built Centrifuge Accommodations Module [wikipedia.org], arguably one of the most important planned science modules?
Keeping the IIS in operation is expensive, but throwing it away would be foolhardy if it still has value for scientific research or for supporting future missions.
Re:I didnt sign up for this (Score:3, Interesting)
$100 billion dollars is a lot of money just to burn it up in less than 20 years,
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.
If true, NASA funding will be even harder to find (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess I might hold out hope that one of the private space flight ventures might pony-up and put in a bid to buy the ISS. They could monetize it, by leasing compartments or general access to both space tourists and to scientific endeavors.
Outrageous (Score:3, Interesting)
This is outrageous, to spend billions on this thing and then deorbit it just a few years after it is complete is just pure insanity. Billions of dollars wasted. I wonder if there will be any useful scientific information to come out of ISS. More likely, it seems that ISS, manned moon and mars programs are nothing but ego trips that drain money away from more effective and productive projects such as Hubble. The idea of manned spaceflight to the moon or mars is ridiculous as most people will never be able to go into space, and you can do most things with cheaper unmanned craft than with these expensive manned systems. With technology which exists in the forseeable future, spaceflight will be little more than a gimmick or something that a few small number of people will do. Its just too expensive and costly.
I think a public space program is vital, and does things that a private company would not do. A private company would likely mainly shuttle extremely wealthy people into orbit, a few per year, and any scientific data they happen to produce would likely be sold at huge cost, instead of being available to all humanity. The public space program should be science oriented to expand knowledge and make data available to all for improvement of our knowledge of the universe.
Re:I'm guessing their bluffing (Score:3, Interesting)
It's called the "Washington Monument ploy" (briefly described here [wikipedia.org]). Agencies do it all the time. It takes its name from the Park Service saying that they'll have to close down sites like the Washington Monument to make the necessary spending cuts when their budget is reduced.
Re:It's Skylab all over again! (Score:3, Interesting)
Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016, we'll deorbit one of the primary reasons we're building Orion.
Translated ... Orion will also get the boot.
Next Step (Score:2, Interesting)
Sell it on eBay (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe not on eBay, but the ISS is already up there, I'm pretty sure it was designed to last longer than 16 years, why not sell it to at least cover some of the costs? I personally don't think it would be a good investment, but people pay lots of money for the weirdest stuff.
I know! The Chinese. They've got money. If we sold it to them cheap, they would be ever so grateful. They might even keep letting us use it from time to time.
Re:It'll never happen (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be much cooler to add engines to it and send it off into space. Maybe even use one of the to-be-trashed shuttles for the job.
For me, they could trash it tomorrow and divert the money they save into building more rovers to visit all the planets ... and especially some for the moon to check out the He3 content.
Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen. (Score:4, Interesting)
Could they move it into lunar orbit?
Having a station in orbit around the moon would be a lot cooler than having one a couple of hundred miles away and we could use it as a starting point for lunar mining.
You want to capture public imagination? Something like this would definitely do it (and it even has a "Save the Earth" angle - He3 to save us from global warming). The sooner the better, I say, before it starts falling apart.
Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen. (Score:3, Interesting)
Space flight is inherently dangerous, but that won't stop people from wanting it.
As far as calling manned missions useless, Sample #15415 would disagree. Rovers can do a lot, but they have limited mobility and distance, can't chip off samples, and can't decide if this sample or that sample is more important.
Re:I'm guessing their bluffing (Score:3, Interesting)
Let them play it. Until ISS starts doing useful science, which at this point it probably never will, its just a money pit. But, if NASA thinks they can deorbit a $150 billion in sunk costs and 40 wasted years and get away unscathed they are mistaken. It will make NASA's manned space office permenently damaged goods, more so than they already are.
NASA's manned space office has just been using ISS and Shuttle as a giant job's program since Apollo ended. They couldn't get funding for or think of anything useful to do so they've just been pouring money in to two failed programs, circling around in LEO doing nothing for nearly 40 years. It was just a scheme so they would get pay checks and underachieving overachievers could put "astronaut" on their resume. So far Orion and Ares aren't any better.
Either:
- Give the money in well structured grants to the private sector, like Burt Ruttan and Elon Musk, at least they are smaller, leaner and willing to think outside the box
- Give the money to parts of NASA that work like JPL for robotics missions or the great observatories
- Find someone with the ability and willingness to colonize Mars though you would have to throw a lot more money at it than NASA's current budget. Since we've thrown trillions in to the pockets of corrupt bankers, Iraq, brain dead stimulus, GM, etc. colonizing Mars seems vastly better by comparison.
You put the kind of money in to JPL the ISS and Shuttle have been sucking up for the last four decades you could do some amazing robotic missions. Robotics just wasn't there when Apollo ended. Now it is and it can do a whole lot more for a whole lot less than putting men in space, especially with the current safety obsession in the wake of the two shuttle disaster, which is pretty much paralyzing manned missions. Problem with putting men in space is it consumes vast resources and money just to keep them alive. Only value in it is if you are going to build a self sustaining colony on Mars, presuming such a thing is even possible.
Re:So what does that make the IRR? (Score:1, Interesting)
The ISS was initially intended to function as a starting point for further exploration, and was going to be built in a high orbit to facilitate this. Then the Russians came on board. They could not get a Soyuz craft into a high enough orbit for our plans, so we brought the station down to them. We gained an international partner but we lost capability. Since then its been restricted to performing experiments in microgravity and perfecting human habitation in space/hazardous environments. Lots of knowledge has been developed about space construction techniques and many countries have begun contributing and building their own space programs. I think its been a very successful part of our program and after its finished being built we might deorbit it and start anew on the moon or decide that even more can be gained from continued operation and get more funding. Having private companies develop space capability for resupply and crew changes would make the second option more likely.
Re:It'll never happen (Score:3, Interesting)
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]
Have you read that link? It says the ISS does have engines, which it needs regularly to stop from dropping out of the sky. The idea of a plasma drive on the ISS so it's cheaper to keep it up there is an interesting one.
(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.
I could but won't. Hubble has let us look further than ever before. Sure it's an expensive telescope with its share of problems, but the lack of atmosphere matters a lot. The Mars Rovers were quite cheap, especially in comparison with the ISS, but we now know a lot more about Mars than we did 15 years ago. The LHC hasn't gotten us anything yet, but it's something we need if we want to look at even smaller particles than we have so far.
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.
We could do it in a cheaper space station. We've done it in the Shuttle, Mir and Skylab. Also, I heard that the ISS isn't even all the useful for real zero g research. It's more microgravity, what with people moving about on board, atmospheric drag, regularly needing a boost to a higher orbit, etc.
Sure you can do research there, but is it the best way to do that research?
Re:Does anyone understand economics? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It'll never happen (Score:3, Interesting)
ISS is modular, short of a major problem (like modules breaking in 1/2 there is no reason to deorbit the whole damn thing. This is not like the one-big-chunk (tm) that skylab was.
Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen. (Score:3, Interesting)
Manned spaceflight should end until earth to orbit costs $100/lb or less.
Without more flights, it'll never cost any less... so this is a perfect way to guarantee that we're all stuck here till we kill ourselves.
Re:I didnt sign up for this (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Scientific value is not a direct function of the number of years put into it. The ISS is not the first of its kind. We've had Mir and Skylab, and the ISS is basically just a bigger version of those. Sending people to Mars would be something completely new. It's an accomplishment on the scale of putting the first people on the moon. And people on Mars would be able to investigate things that all those Mars rovers never can.
Re:I didnt sign up for this (Score:3, Interesting)
You might want to read some of Robert Zubrin's ideas. He claims NASA could send people to Mars for 20 million, and a more efficient organisation could do it for 3 billion. 100 billion is quite a lot of money.
Re:Seeing as NASA put a value of $0 on it... (Score:2, Interesting)
I seem to recall reading that the automated supply vehicles the Russians periodically send up to the ISS do routinely push it back up into a higher orbit, and I'll bet the cost of this is low enough that it'd be viable to keep doing this indefinitely, paid for by space tourists.
Hotel for the super-rich? (Score:3, Interesting)
Learned nothing? (Score:5, Interesting)
With ISS we learned how to build larger structures in space.
We learned how to work together with other countries to build modules that must fit together "airtight" and must pass through the 'eye of the needle' shuttle cargo bay to get installed.
We are learning how to make a space station more and more self sufficient. (here have a nice cup of cold 'water')
Re:It'll never happen (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm guessing their bluffing (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course they are screwed either way. How can you botch a program as bad as that one has been botched and salvage anything out of it.
"When the ISS was first proposed before any money was spent, the plan was to decommission it in 2015"
How many years behind schedule is the ISS? That is the crux of the problem. If they finished it on time and on budget and had a full crew on it for the last ten years it might have worked. Instead they went through a decade of politically ensnarled redesigns and then years of further delays because the Shuttle proved to be inherently unreliable. At this point they are going to finish it and then pretty much trash it. Once they killed the Centrifuge Accomodations module and all of the other specialized equipment for interesting experiments it turned in to nothing but a white elephant and a vampire sucking resources away from anything useful.
You have to hand it to the Russians that they are astute and practical enough to rip their modules out of it and go back to their Mir heritage with affordable space stations doing interesting things on a reasonable budget.
Giving NASA's manned space budget to the Russian Space Agency would also probably lead to an exciting space program. NASA's manned space program is so dysfunctional at this point I'm not sure it can ever be turned around. I'm pretty sure the only reason Russia joined ISS in the first place was because back when they agreed to it the Soviet Union had just collapsed, they were broke and desperate for money. Putin has, if nothing else, pulled them out from being a basket case, and they may have enough money to go it alone again in space again depending on where the price of oil and natural gas are at a given point in time. I wager the Russian Space Agency can't wait to escape the bureaucratic BS that is NASA's manned space division.
Re:Indeed, one ISS = 100 mars rovers (Score:5, Interesting)
The ISS has done two things that were important:
Both of these objectives have been crucial, and IMHO in some ways quite cost effective. Note that neither mission has anything to do with science, study of human physiology in a prolonged exposure to zero-G environments, or even being an employment program for aerospace engineers in various critical congressional districts.
This is not to say that perhaps money could be better spent elsewhere, and I would have to agree that scientific investigations may be performed better with unmanned equipment. But to say that the ISS has accomplished nothing is forgetting why, exactly, the thing was put up in the first place.
As to if it would be worth sending up even a cheap launcher (like the SpaceX Dragon capsule) with astronauts and an additional unmanned cargo ship with supplies and instruments for scientific investigation.... assuming an operational ISS..... that is something which you could debate much more effectively and likely show a robotic investigation will still be cost effective. I do think it would be a harder case to make, however, and there is something to be said for having an astronaut that can "tweak" instruments to do something different, or be able to do something as simple as running a hammer on the antenna in order to get it to work.
I would like to know why the Galileo spacecraft didn't have an astronaut do an in-space checkout of the systems before it left the Shuttle payload, to give an example of where having astronauts would have helped in an expensive scientific investigation. A minor repair to the main antenna while in space seems like it could have been a useful task.
It's about the "I" in "ISS" (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
No, it was a make-work project for multiple space agencies around the globe, working in concert on a complex project. Science may have had little use for it, but what was accomplished in terms of international cooperation is really quite impressive. Cooperation on major space projects -- between former arch-rivals no less -- is an important step in the history of space exploration and something we'd have to deal with eventually. ISS did in fact teach us something we wanted to know.
However, this aspect of the ISS has already been accomplished and just maintaining the status quo, while a challenge in and of itself, isn't particularly useful. So, much as I might like to keep it just for 'cool' factor, I too won't be especially sad to see it go.
Wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Laser launch would easily be less than $100 per kilogram. Go wiki it yourself. Basically, its a huge array of LED or other cheap laser modules that heat the underside of the spacecraft. The cheapest method uses pulse lasers, and the spacecraft can be merely an inert lump of metal bolted to the payload. In principle, the spacecraft would need absolutely no aerospace hardware at all - no computers, guidance systems, thrusters, nothing, and it could be inserted into orbit.
A laser launch system would be able to make a launch every hour, all day and all night, and as such the cost per launch would approach that of the cost of electricity for running the lasers. Using current prices from LED laser merchants, ít would cost several billion dollars for a cargo laser system, and about 100 billion worth of lasers to duplicate the per launch payload capacity of the space shuttle.
A system like this could send tens of thousands of people into space, and all the mass needed to build the habitats needed to house them.
This is where NASAs budget should go.