Space Station To Be Deorbited After 2020 572
astroengine writes "Russia and its partners plan to plunge the International Space Station (ISS) into the ocean at the end of its life cycle after 2020 so as not to leave space junk, the space agency said on Wednesday. 'After it completes its existence, we will be forced to sink the ISS. It cannot be left in orbit, it's too complex, too heavy an object, it can leave behind lots of rubbish,' said deputy head of Roskosmos space agency Vitaly Davydov."
Where to deorbit (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone have a suggestion as to where we could land this thing? It's kinda heavy and sure to crush anything in its path. I mean we COULD land it in the ocean but wouldn't it be better to land it on someone's house that we don't like?
Substation? (Score:4, Interesting)
We've always said we wanted to go eventually do a permanent structure on the moon - why not the next best thing? Hook a Dragon up to it, turn on the thrusters, and aim for Luna. Let's put the ISS in orbit around the moon when its lifespan here is up, and voila, we have a permanent structure to study the moon, serve as a waystation / bathroom break rest stop for future interstellar travelers, and it doesn't cost us anything but the fuel of an unmanned rocket. Seems like a no-brainer.
Getting the amount of propellant necessary into space isn't a challenge. We did it in 1969. Yes, we're moving something a little bigger. Fortunately, nice, low gravity and no air resistance means you can move the ISS, very, very slowly, with almost no propellant needed for anything other than getting momentum started, and course corrections. If it takes a month to get there, unmanned, who cares? It took longer to build it than we're letting it run for - why destroy it now?
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe they could auction it off to one of the billionaire's space adventure companies. If they get any money for it and it keeps the station in orbit, that's a win/win!
Re:"Russia and its partners"?! (Score:3, Interesting)
And of course that means that we in Europe and the UK will have to protect the US. Every single war you've got yourselves into, we've had to come and pick you up and give you a cuddle when you've burned your little fingers on something too hot.
Thanks for helping in World War 2, though. You stopped helping the Germans at just the right time.
Re:Recycle some of it! (Score:2, Interesting)
One other thing that should be remembered is that the ISS was partly an experiment in how to construct stuff from multiple modules to be assembled in space. The lesson learned was basically: don't do it. Skylab had approximately the same capabilities as the ISS, maybe a bit less power available, and fewer docking ports, but it was built, launched and operated on a total cost of less than a fourtieth of the cost of the ISS. If you've got the right launch vehicle, a space station does not have to be hugely expensive.
Re:"Russia and its partners"?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, how about the completely idiotic idea of clamping some ion thrusters on the thing and moving it to lunar orbit. Mothball it, park it in orbit around the moon, then you have a place to go if you just happen to be in the vicinity of the moon.
It certainly won't generate a lot of space junk that would worry anyone.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as someone who both is and works with people doing robotic exploration of the solar system, most of us did NOT get into this because it was our dream to keep making better robots to put into space forever and ever. And I can also assure you it isn't for the rock star salaries, either. Without something to inspire the kids of today, it's going to be harder to find people tomorrow to build and pilot rovers, orbiters, and landers. Yes, I just said it. A good chunk of the purpose of manned spaceflight is PR. That shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who's been paying attention, though.
I agree that we shouldn't ignore remote and robotic systems. They are extraordinarily useful. But they are very limited. My boss is a planetary geologist and a member of the Mars Exploration Rover team, and when the nominal 90 day mission ended, I asked him how long the work we did with each rover would take a competent human geologist to do. He replied, "a hard afternoon's worth of effort."
We shouldn't send people up just for the sake of sending people up; I agree with that too. There needs to be a plan, but I think even more importantly, there needs to be a vision. In the long run, though, we will need both manned and unmanned missions to really improve our understanding.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Then there's VASIMR [wikipedia.org], which is an electromagnetic engine more powerful than ion engines. A test unit will be flown to the ISS in 2014. According to this Wikipedia article, fuel for station keeping will be cut by a factor of 20, if this works. That, plus possible improvements in the VASIMR design that may come with space testing, could make boosting it to another orbit viable. So, in principle you take up the VASIMR engine, and a couple resupply vessels containing only fuel...this engine is re-usable. So, we've got between 2014 and 2020 to test, propose, and implement this. It only took us 8 years to go to the moon, we can do this, right?
Re:People misunderstand space exploration. (Score:5, Interesting)
Establishing a perminnant presence in space is not a reasonable goal at this time. It would cost too much, and it would not be sustainable as a result.
Excuse me for being cynical here, but I do remember the fact that when the ISS was first started but before astronauts started to inhabit the thing, that it was officially proclaimed by various press releases by both Russia and NASA as "the first permanent space station and outpost of humanity". I suppose that "mission" was lost when the "Space Station Alpha" moniker was lost too.
Yes, I know that changed over the years, but I do wish those guys would have been more honest about the issue back then. In theory it could still be a permanent outpost as it was built in a modular fashion, and more to the point it was proclaimed as being so huge that it could never be sent back to the Earth like Skylab and Mir (as well as the several Almaz stations) all had been. The ISS was supposed to be something different. I really would like to know when that changed.
Re:Substation? (Score:2, Interesting)
> In this case, that opposing force is Earth's gravity,
The opposing force is atmospheric drag. Without that, orbits wouldn't decay (eccentricity would slowly increase due to geodetic irregularities, but that would take far longer to become an issue).
But the key point remains: keeping the ISS in space would require a lot of energy, either to keep it in LEO or to propel it to a higher orbit, and you don't expend that energy for the sake of it.
Russia has said that it intends to maintain some form of space station regardless of what happens to the ISS, and that they would likely transfer any of their ISS modules which were still functional to such a project. But that might just be posturing; the US is less likely to stop funding the ISS if that would mean ceding space habitation to Russia.