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."
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.
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.
The ISS would be absolutely worthless as a tether for a space elevator, not enough mass to be useful. Not to mention the fact that the anchor for a theoretical space elevator would have to be well past Geosynchronous orbit. The CG of the elevator needs to be at GEO, not the end of it.
I don't fully understand why useful objects in space are discarded into the atmosphere. Isn't it feasible to send them into space, either in an extremely high orbit or just give it enough inertia to keep traveling in open space? Is it really not worth the time/fuel/effort?
It seems odd that we can't keep a consistent, physical presence in space.
Because it's less hazardous for future space missions to clear them out of orbit while we still can, rather than having to track new orbiting material.
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.
Of course, you're discounting the fact that they've been able to do experiments and science up there in it for over a decade already. It's not as if those last four years will be more valuable than all of the previous years combined. I'd imagine that a significantly greater quantity of research of greater importance would have been carried out in those first thirteen years, as compared to the last four years, given the newness of the station and the length of time it was in use.
Not to mention the fact that the ISS is not so much a station, but a learning experiment on how to construct and run a space station. Think of all the subtle things, like the problems they had with toilets and so on...
...space port? Imagine it, we build a space port in geosynchronous orbit. It would decrease the necessity to have massive quantities of fuel expended for vehicles to reach orbital velocity since you'd already be at speed at launch time. They could plan for modularized spacecraft, and then simply deliver them to the port for construction and deployment. If a space elevator were ever to be built, it could serve as the end linkage. There are a ton of possibilities, and I think its ultimately where we're headed. So why not swing for the stars (no pun intended)?
Actually, the fuel spent would be the same (if not more) because it had to be spent to get the spacecraft components and fuel up to that altitude. The same spacecraft mass is still going to the same place, so the same amount of energy is being expended. It could actually be more because these components are being brought up in other launch vehicles, thus fuel is being spent on the carrier craft as well.
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.
We could begin creating specialized vehicles. Right now we have to build vessels with many purposes in mind. They have numerous stages to get the vehicles into orbit. Then the vehicles must have parts for landing, scientific observation, satellite dropping, repair facilities, etc. By having a space port, we could build dedicated craft to deliver equipment to said port - think space barges. Likewise, the vehicles launched from orbit could have specialized purposes. It would bring an end to the current idea that vessels have to be 'jacks of all trades.' Further the stage rockets would no longer be needed for individual craft to reach orbit since they are already there. To put it mathematically... suppose you launch 4 vehicles from earth, and each costs 1 million to launch (completely theoretical numbers). However, you build a barge type vehicle which needs its own stage rockets, costing 2.5 million to launch. It is capable of delivering the modular parts to create the 4 space craft to the port. Since those craft no longer need to be launched from earth, they no longer need the stage rockets to get there (the largest parts of our current space craft). This leads to an overall savings of 1.5 million on the launches alone. I'm pulling these numbers out of my arse, but I hope you are picking up on my train of thought.
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.
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.
Now that they have this [slashdot.org] it's inevitable that productivity will begin to sink and before you know it there's nothing to do but read/. and surf for porn... Might as well start planning for its decommissioning, the place will be useless in a year.
It will be tested heavily this month, and could give astronauts direct Internet access within a year.
Yes, but look on the bright side: With the LHC being in Europe instead of here, we'll have a few extra nanoseconds to react before we're swallowed up by the resulting black hole.
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.
Yes, I am aware of the vast amount of Delta V required to do what I'm saying:
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:
303,663 kg that we don't have to lift again!
Opportunity to test pie-in-the-sky technology like solar sails, Ion engines. We can lift it to geostationary for "free". Ish.
Opportunity to test pie in the sky hopes like asteroid intervention. This thing weighs a mouse fart fraction of an incoming asteroid, has known mass properties, and even a convenient docking point. If you can't move that, what hope do you have of mitigating an asteroid threat? Let this be our "sandbox" for moving stuff.
Worst case, load the thing with lasers and start vaporizing space junk.
Worst WORST case, assume that mankind eventually goes extinct. If we push this high enough, it won't decay. It can serve as our headstone, complete with a record of what went wrong. The cephalopods will thank us.
Without getting into the monetary expenses, we've spent too much Delta V to drop this thing.
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.
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.
The question becomes - without the ISS as a destination, what does the CEV do between the deorbit of the ISS and any planned moon or mars mission in the early 2020s? Does NASA just launch this new expensive vehicle to orbit with no destination? What capacity does the CEV have for independent science while in 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.
No. The ISS is huge, so getting it into a Hohmann transfer orbit would require vastly more fuel than the Apollo missions did. And, the ISS isn't designed for more than the miniscule amount of thrust needed for station keeping. And, the ISS is designed to keep humans alive underneath the Van Allen radiation belts. Venturing above them would subject the astronauts to much more radiation. Also, lunar orbits are very unstable because of the "lumpiness" of the moon's gravity field. Only orbits with specific inclinations are remotely stable, which means the fuel requirements are even higher than a straightforward Hohmann trajectory would imply.
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.
"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.
Provided a subsidy to RKK Energia [wikipedia.org] that would ensure rocket scientists remain employed in the Russian Republic and not run off to other countries like Iran, Iraq, or North Korea where they could do a whole lot more damage.
Provide a "vehicle" where orbital construction techniques learned by the Russians in the development of the Salyut and MIR programs could be transferred to the NASA Astronaut corps.
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.
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.
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.
It's estimated that more than 12% of the global population was watching or listening to live broadcasts of the first moon walk. Or, to put it differently, about 4 times as many people as there are currently households in the US with a television. That market share would today be equivalent to about 850M people. Compare that to the roughly 500M people who speak English as their native language.
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?)
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?)
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.
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')
Guess the Permanent Interplanetary Internet Node.. (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't really permanent, eh?
WTF? (Score:4, Funny)
I don't get it...
1. Build ISS
2. Deorbit...
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.
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X. Profit?!?!
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
The profit was for the contractors, and occurred at step 1...
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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.
Re:What gives them the right (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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Re:What gives them the right (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:What gives them the right (Score:4, Informative)
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Why not preserve it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why not preserve it? (Score:5, Informative)
Because it's less hazardous for future space missions to clear them out of orbit while we still can, rather than having to track new orbiting material.
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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.
Re:W.T.F. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:W.T.F. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Next stop... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Next stop... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Wait, before you do! (Score:5, Funny)
Build another one, then de-orbit both of them. Why build and destroy one when you can do two for twice the price?
Re:Wait, before you do! (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
Operation Meteor (Score:4, Funny)
The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture will clearly have something to say about this!
Blame it on /. (Score:4, Funny)
Now that they have this [slashdot.org] it's inevitable that productivity will begin to sink and before you know it there's nothing to do but /. and surf for porn... Might as well start planning for its decommissioning, the place will be useless in a year.
read
It will be tested heavily this month, and could give astronauts direct Internet access within a year.
Tested heavily. My point exactly.
You gotta be kidding me! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You gotta be kidding me! (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Think outside the box (Score:4, Funny)
If you're going to deorbit it, why waste it on the ocean? At least drop it on a country we don't like. Or on Kenny [southparkstudios.com].
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.
Re:What a waste (Score:4, Funny)
what, your laptop getting warranty repair work again?
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Re:What a waste (Score:5, Funny)
I can't wait for my girlfriend (and her pussy) to get back from vacation
As opposed to your girlfriend leaving her pussy on vacation? I think I saw something about that in the National Enquirer once.....
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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.
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Re:I didnt sign up for this (Score:4, Funny)
That's like taking 6 months of the Iraq war funding and just burning it.
You repeat yourself.
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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.
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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.
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Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
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Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen. (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Re:So what does that make the IRR? (Score:5, Funny)
How much was invested in this thing, I wonder?
If only there were a way we could find out...
Oh wait... I know...
Maybe check the single link to the very short article where it mentions twice an "estimated" 100 Billion (US$) combined from all involved countries.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Re:It'll never happen (Score:5, Funny)
They should put some celebrities on it and have them plead for money unless people want to watch them die a horrible fiery death.
Hmm, on second thoughts that woul be awesome to watch.
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Re:It'll never happen (Score:4, Funny)
you know our culture has become so shallow that more people would watch "ISS Survivor" than the moon landings
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Re:It'll never happen (Score:5, Interesting)
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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?)
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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.
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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')
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Re:Sounds like a negotiation (Score:5, Informative)
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...
It's not exactly the first move, since this has been the publicly available schedule since before construction on the ISS even began.
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