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)
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: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.
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
Re:It'll never happen (Score:5, Interesting)
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?)
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: (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: (Score:3, Informative)
Once the Shuttle is no longer required to visit the ISS, they can consider boosting it to a higher orbit that requires fewer reboosting visits. That 220 mile limit is an artifact of being the highest the Shuttle can reach with maximum cargo.
Re: (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
Re: (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.
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')
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.
Re: (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: (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.
luckily for us (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
.
.
.
X. Profit?!?!
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
The profit was for the contractors, and occurred at step 1...
Re: (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 perh
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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)
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.
Re:What gives them the right (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What gives them the right (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: (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: (Score:3, Informative)
That takes way too much energy. It'd be a very big mission in itself, and it's not something that ISS is designed to do. A higher orbit might be an option, but still costs a lot of energy. De-orbiting is cheap.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because over long enough time it won't be just 'one more object.' It'll be 'many more objects.'
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (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
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)
Re:W.T.F. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Wrong, almost no manned science has been happening on the ISS so far, only automated experiments (and no manufacturing). This is because the ship needs a three-person crew to run it. Only now, with six astronauts, is there crew available for science.
I sure hope so.... (Score:2)
Of course, they have to bring it down , so they can get a new budget, or keep the old one, and then resend the new ISS up to space, instead of reusing/recycling parts, have a full forge up there, so you can melt down steel to then reshape it, etc...
There has to be many ways of doing certain things, even if we leave it up there and start building a second newer version, then the newer version with its smelt, can add to itself by taking apart the old one, and so on, and so on...sort of like the replicators fr
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.
Re:Next stop... (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
The first rule of goverment spending: "Why build one when you can build two for twice the price?". It's a great quote out of "Contact"
Re:Wait, before you do! (Score:4, Informative)
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!
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: (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
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)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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].
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.
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: (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.
Re: (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.
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.
International (Score:3, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
!Permanent (Score:3, Informative)
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?
Hotel for the super-rich? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hang on a second... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not even sure that NASA has the power to make that decision.
The ISS will fall out of orbit without a boost every so often, and can be deliberately de-orbitted with a boost in the other direction. Thing is, NASA isn't going to be boosting the station in 2016. It will be boosted by Russian Progress and European ATV spacecraft, and possibly by other supply craft from other partners or (maybe) private corporations.
What gives NASA (or more accurately, commentators on NASA) the impression, that with the shuttle retired and Orion only just getting going, they are going to have any real ability to dictate the fate of the ISS? Do Americans just assume they own and control everything without checking?
Re:What a waste (Score:4, Funny)
what, your laptop getting warranty repair work again?
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.....
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: (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.
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.
Re: (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: (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: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.
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.
Re:Unfortunately, it will never happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
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:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
An ion drive is currently being used with the Dawn Mission [nasa.gov], where the delta-v requirements are certainly as comparable to going from LEO to L-5. That mission started in 1997 (yes, it is in space right now and flying with the engine running and producing thrust right now) and it will ultimately last until at least 2015, reaching Vesta in 2011. Using that as a rule of thumb, I would expect at a maximum of a similar duration of time to get the ISS to L5... about 3-4 years if you use this comparison. I would
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (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: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.
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 abl
Re: (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: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.
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.
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: (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: (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
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: (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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, ideally you want an orbit in the plane of the ecliptic to do that, not the Equator.
The Equator is inclined 23.44 degrees from the ecliptic, so a station orbiting at the Equator would have just as much trouble as the current ISS for a launch to Mars, the Moon, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, I remember all that talk - because that's all it was, talk among people who haven't kept up with the times or don't know what they are talking about.
Being a base for staging missions was an early feature of Space Station Freedom. That feature was deferred during one of the rounds of redesign/down scoping (in the late 1980's) and removed completely when Freedom became ISS in the early 1990's. T
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.
Re: (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 inclu
Re: (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,