Panel Advises Longer Life For Space Station 237
suraj.sun writes "A presidential panel reviewing the US space program has found that the United States needs to boost NASA's budget by $1.5 billion to fly the last seven shuttle missions and should extend International Space Station operations through 2020. The panel also proposed adding an extra, eighth shuttle flight to help keep the station supplied and narrow an expected 5-7 year gap between the time the shuttle fleet is retired and a new US spaceship is ready to fly."
No they didn't. (Score:5, Informative)
The Shuttle/ISS subcommittee headed by Dr Sally Ride has presented three options:
1. Do nothing, let the shuttle stop flying at the end of 2010 and let the station be de-orbited at the end of 2016.
2. Fly 1 more mission, and still de-orbit the station at the end of 2016.
3. Extend station operations through to the end of 2020 and fly more shuttle missions to support it.
The options explain how to do it, what funding will be required, and the consequences on other programs.
The President and the new NASA Administrator will take these options and decide which to implement, depending on what funding they can get from Congress.
The committee is not chartered with making any recommendations, and the options are not final until the report is released, around Aug 31.
You can give your opinions to the committee via the website: http://hsf.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
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Umm.. that's all 3 options. Even if the shuttle gets extended, it will only be extended up until Orion is flying. And if COTS-D comes along, that will change things too.
Re:No they didn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course, designing and assembling the modules is nothing compared to the cost of getting thousands of kilograms more than 300km straight up against gravity and accelerated to 7700 meters per second...
Wow. Even LEO spaceflight is interesting when put like that.
Re:No they didn't. (Score:4, Informative)
space shuttle cost (Score:5, Informative)
the incremental cost for a shuttle launch is ~$60M.
NASA says the cost per shuttle launch is $450 million [nasa.gov].
Re:space shuttle cost (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sure, you can massage the numbers all you like, but money taken from the tax payers and given to NASA is how we should be looking at it.
That's strange. I always looked at it as money given by the tax payers to invest in the future of mankind.
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Well, this is a rational stance to take towards sunk costs ... if you have a time machine.
Suppose you buy a very expensive car, and figure out that it costs an average of $1.00 per mile to operate it over its lifetime, half of which represents the investment in the car itself. You look at a hundred mile trip, which you can take by bus or car, and the bus costs $60. Is it rational to take the bus because the averaged cost of the car trip is forty dollars more? No, because taking the bus doesn't magicall
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And which cost is that? (Score:3, Interesting)
You dropped a word from the phrase you were replying to; "cost" and "incremental cost" are not the same thing.
Example: the cost to produce 10,000,000 DVDs might be $10 per DVD, because the blockbuster movie cost $100,000,000 to make. But once the movie is made you don't have to make 10% more movie to make 10% more DVDs, you just have to print more disks; the incremental cost would be less than $1 per DVD.
With the shuttle things are even more complicated. Do you want the total cost per flight; the amount o
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Re:No they didn't. (Score:5, Informative)
Without Shuttle to provide the cargo upmass and reboosts - there isn't a fourth option. Soyuz and Progress can't do it, ATV won't fly often enough, and HTV is still largely in the vaporware category (and even if it was flying, wouldn't add sufficient performance).
Re:No they didn't. (Score:4, Informative)
Without Shuttle to provide the cargo upmass and reboosts - there isn't a fourth option. Soyuz and Progress can't do it, ATV won't fly often enough, and HTV is still largely in the vaporware category [...]
Except that actually most ISS reboosts are done by Progress, and the Shuttle in fact is pretty useless for them. :
Quoting http://www.thespacerace.com/forum/index.php?topic=1476.0 [thespacerace.com]
"Most reboosts use the Progress attitude control thrusters, however larger burns are done using the Progress main engines.
When there is no Progress docked to the Service Module (SM) aft, the SM's two (or just one of the two) main engines could also
be used to perform a reboost. Finally, the Orbiter [i.e., the Shuttle] does generally perform a reboost of ISS during a docked
mission. Due to the fact that a majority of the Orbiter's thrusters cannot be used when docked (due to concerns of plume impacts
on ISS), they don't really get much more delta V out of the Orbiter than they do the Progress or SM. The largest benefit is
that it uses Orbiter propellants, not the limited supply that is maintained on ISS."
Or, if you don't like that source, nasaspaceflight.com [nasaspaceflight.com]:
"Generally ISS reboosts are performed by the Progress resupply ship thrusters"
So no, a lack of Shuttle flights will not result in a lack of ISS reboosts. And now that they can recycle their water,
fresh water isn't that high a priority for cargo flights any more either. It'll mean a couple more transporter flights (and,
someone will have to pay for those of course) but the ISS can survive without any Shuttle flights at all without any problems.
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"Progress" can deliver enough fuel for station-keeping, they don't require that much of it.
Consumables and spare parts are another matter. But if number of people on the station is decreased, then it can be supported long enough for Shuttle replacement.
option 4: the US quits participating (Score:3, Informative)
option 4: the US quits participating, and they leave it in orbit and other countries continue to fly to it and to use it, as they currently do.
-- Terry
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The US has the responsibility to deorbit it. Whether they do that in 2016 or 2020 is a question of budget. The only way to not deorbit it would be transfer ownership and the new owner would have to be ITAR-compatible and be able to prove that they could deorbit it when they are done with it.
Re:option 4: the US quits participating (Score:5, Interesting)
Why deorbit it at all? They could attach an ion drive to the station and slowly raise the orbit until it won't decay for another 500 years or so. The station can withstand that much acceleration. There's certainly space enough up there, it's not like it takes up valuable room... also, lifting all that mass into orbit has been so stupidly expensive, they should at least reserve the option to use it at some point in the future. Anything else is irresponsible.
At the very least, it would be an interesting machinery longevity experiment. Re-visit the station in 50 years or so, just to see how it has stood up to the environment up there. Also, at some point in the future it will be an archaeological artifact, and valuable to future historians.
Re:option 4: the US quits participating (Score:4, Insightful)
I mentioned this in another post (or two):
1. There's no ion engine that can do the job.
2. The US put it up, they're legally required to bring it down.
And finally:
3. The station barely functions now, it will not function after even 2 years of neglect, let alone 50.
Smarter people than you are working on this program, give em some credit.
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We spent billions on the parts and on putting the thing up there. If nothing else break apart the truss and stick smaller motors (ion, rocket, or otherwise) on the individual pieces and boost them up to a higher orbit.
Maybe the first stage of a Mars mission would be grabbing a spare module or two and a couple of big solar panels.
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What part of this don't you understand? The space environment is hard. Anything stored up there for too long deteriorates. Parts are made to last a certain amount of time. In the case of the ISS, the parts were made to last until the end of the program.
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well, the russians seems to think that one can be dealt with as they want to keep their parts up in orbit [bbc.co.uk] after the US deorbit theirs.
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Ya, and if you'd like a glimpse of the future, read Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir by Bryan Burrough.
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Great idea! Ah... got a spare ion drive on you? I left mine at home.
One has to wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
In reality the United States space programs are still quite advanced than most of the world (even with such old technologies) and yet you guys are neglecting it.
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getting to orbit cheaper, X-33 (VenturStar) (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA has abandoned the goal of building a reliable, cheaper transportation system. They were hot on the trail with the X-33 / VentureStar [wikipedia.org] program. Like nearly all R&D programs, it went over the original budget and behind schedule. However, the program had the right goals, and the right basic plan for getting to them. If NASA had stayed on course, we would have had a replacement for the Shuttle by now. The planned VentureStar production flight vehicles would be flexible enough to sustain the ISS. It would have a capacity high enough (in terms of payload per flight, which was similar to the Shuttle) and flights per year (which could scale with the addition of vehicles, without the constraints of the expensive and limited Apollo-era launch systems). The modernized vehicle design (lifting body airframe, engines with fewer moving parts, substantially more durable thermal protection system, simplified container-paradigm-based payload integration) would yield shorter turn-around of a single vehicle, from days to a couple weeks, compared to a few months to several months for the Shuttle).
Instead, NASA dabbles in scramjets, with a million here and a million there in loose change. Scramjets are a technology with great potential, but even if aggressively funded (which they are not) they won't be ready for a long, long time. A more modest program like the X-33 / VentureStar could get us to higher flight rates with Shuttle-like capacity and reduction in cost of payload delivery which would be substantial enough to stimulate the space economy. We could get to the Moon and Mars a lot cheaper, and go there more often with a rational approach to building a transportation system. (NASA needs to rethink the in-space transfer vehicles, too. VASIMR is a technology within our reach, and if developed as the inter-planetary engine, can dramatically reduce flight times to Mars, from many months to 1 month.)
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NASA has abandoned the goal of building a reliable, cheaper transportation system. They were hot on the trail with the X-33 / VentureStar program. Like nearly all R&D programs, it went over the original budget and behind schedule. However, the program had the right goals, and the right basic plan for getting to them.
I was with you right up until you mentioned the X-33. The X-33 would've tested some really neat technologies, but the way to test previously-untested new technologies is NOT to cram them all into one spacecraft which relies on all of them working to succeed. Rather, one creates a number of simple spacecraft which test all the technologies individually. The X-33 approach was just asking for failure.
That, and I'm rather more partial to the DC-X [wikipedia.org] approach to single-stage to orbit. It relied on already-existing
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Why no other country had succeeded yet in developing technologies that could mimic what the space shuttle could do in order to supply the "International" Space station after the United States retire the shuttles. (with the exception of Russia)
Sally Ride mentioned this in her Augustine Committee presentation, but other countries do have this tech, and will have it ready to service the ISS in a few years. There's also the COTS options as well. I thought it was kind of bizarre when Sally Ride immediately said afterwards that she didn't think they would be able to reduce the gap, without explaining her rationale.
Anyways, here's the options:
* Russian Soyuz
* ESA's ATV [wikipedia.org]
* Japan's HTV [wikipedia.org]
* SpaceX Dragon [wikipedia.org]
* Orbital Taurus II [wikipedia.org]
There's also the EELVs (Delta IV and A
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ATV has already [esa.int] delivered cargo to the station, the shuttle is not required for that.
Soyuz has already proved more than capable of shuttling crew [redorbit.com], so the shuttle is not required for that either.
The Shuttle really isn't required (except as a sop to NASA's pride) once the station is built and operational, and trying to extend its lifetime by yet another expensive mission leads me to think that NASA really has lost its way in internal politics and power struggles.
The shuttle should have been shut down years ag
Decommission Shuttle at the station (Score:3, Interesting)
If they're going to decommission a shuttle, why not leave it at the station? It would provide some redundant facilities, extra living space, and most importantly, engines to boost the orbit periodically (one of the main things the shuttles do now besides delivering supplies and new components).
Re:Decommission Shuttle at the station (Score:5, Informative)
It'd stop working about about a month or two and that'd just be more facility for the Russians to spend time repairing.
The Shuttle simply isn't speced for long term exposure to space. The fact that it doesn't fall apart for the 14 days that it is typically on-orbit is a result of constant care and attention on the ground.
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Wow. And I thought I was cynical about the shuttle....
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Wow. And I thought I was cynical about the shuttle....
What cynicism? These are genuine limits of the Shuttle.
Re:Decommission Shuttle at the station (Score:4, Funny)
sometimes, all you need is a working toilet.
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"Bah! American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!"
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Because it will die twenty odd days after docking if used as redundant facilities, forty odd days if nearly completely powered down. Even if ISS could power Shuttle (which it currently cannot), the Shuttle uses canisters to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere rather than a molecular sieve. (And ventilation hoses cannot be run through the hatches for safety reasons.)
There's more problems than those, but those are the biggies.
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How many hundred canisters could you stack in the cargo bay? I think if I were trying to solve this, I'd take the shuttle, build an empty SpaceLab module, fill half of it with fuel cells and half of it with additional tanks for the OMS engines. Fill all the sleeping quarters with filter canisters since nobody would be sleeping on the shuttle anyway. Add power connectors on the outside of the module so you could crack the CBDs and use it as an auxiliary power source for the station if things went wrong...
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Absolute maximum power down still only buys you (IIRC) fifty to sixty days before the Shuttle dies.
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How exactly do you think the astronauts will get back to earth *alive* then?
Re:Decommission Shuttle at the station (Score:4, Informative)
Soyuz capsules, of course. Same way everybody else on the station gets back to Earth.
VASIMR ion engine to be tested at ISS (Score:2)
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why not just guide it to hit the atmosphere upside down?
They forgot the eBay option (Score:4, Funny)
Shipping - no delivery options. Get there yourself.
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Actually, there's ITAR restrictions on selling the station to anyone who would conceivably want it.
Can you believe that? The Russians have daily access to the ISS but selling it to them would be an ITAR issue.
Not that there's any evidence they are willing or able to buy it.
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WTF isnt a space station permanent? (Score:2)
Can someone please explain to me why they're spending such vast sums and not taking the necessary steps to insure permanence?
You don't settle something by building tents, you build crude wooden structures, add to them, modernize them, then one day you look around you and its a bustling township.
Space will not become commercially viable until the government funded projects provide permanent way-points.
Imagine building a second ISS nearby, anchoring the two together, and setting them spinning to provide artif
Re:WTF isnt a space station permanent? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WTF isnt a space station permanent? (Score:4, Interesting)
Every space station is temporary. Eventually things start to fail (see MIR) and end up becoming very expensive to maintain or unsafe to keep sending missions.
This is not how commercially viable megastructures work though! and that's my point!
Modern commercial structures are bipartite, consisting of a permanent shell and a modular interior. Think of any modern office building or strip mall. When one company moves out its a matter of simple retrofitting to get the next tenant company at home and functioning.
This is how a space station SHOULD work. It should have a permanent shell capable of containing life support, modular, easily replaced apparatus for essentials (air and water supply/purification), and an interior which is easily fitted and re-fitted as necessary.
Doubleplusgood points for artificial gravity through rotation to prevent bone loss of employees for future commercial tenants.
Re:WTF isnt a space station permanent? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're reading too many Science Fiction novels again. No Russian scrubbers piloted by stoned Rostas. No shuttle tanks parked in orbit.
At least for a while. Let's get Mr. Fusion working and then look at these issues.
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A) Space currently is not a commercial venture in 2009. The fact that Virgin Galactic doesn't have a base on the moon is proof of that. Currently you need a ton of funding to even get a single person in space.
B) It currently costs a -ton- of money to get someone to a stable orbit that won't decay in a few years. Even the space shuttle can't even make it that high.
C) You also fail to see that what you consider "permanent" generally isn't. Even a simple thing suc
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There are a few problems with that.
A) Space currently is not a commercial venture in 2009. The fact that Virgin Galactic doesn't have a base on the moon is proof of that. Currently you need a ton of funding to even get a single person in space.
B) It currently costs a -ton- of money to get someone to a stable orbit that won't decay in a few years. Even the space shuttle can't even make it that high.
C) You also fail to see that what you consider "permanent" generally isn't. Even a simple thing such as a broken hose can be a matter of life or death. Eventually things start to wear out and they aren't easy to replace.
Space stations are designed for one thing, for scientific experiments. They are a huge labyrinth of wires, hoses, scientific instruments, etc. And the fact that they can't be cleaned is another big difference. You can't exactly just decide one day to bring it back and scrub it out.
A - America is not a commercial vendor in 1492, the fact that the dutch east india company is not trading there is proof of that.
B - it currently costs a TON of money to establish a colony in america that can actually become sustainable in the next decade.
c - you also fail to see that what you consider "permanent" generally isn't. It takes a long time for a colony to reach the point it can become truly independent, and we, the spanish crown, simply can't afford that.
see the parallels i'm trying to illustrat
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I would like to point out that the Spanish got jack all for their empire. They blew all the gold and silver they could dig out of the ground on the 16th century of hookers and blow (hookers and soldiers), and then left the colonies to rot. There's a reason Latin America was such a political basket case for the first 150 years following Independence.
The British by comparison just kept sending people to die until they overwhelmed any problems with sheer numbers. That seemed to work much better. Moral: Do
Re:WTF isnt a space station permanent? (Score:4, Informative)
The modular approach you describe is more-or-less what Bigelow Aerospace [wikipedia.org] is doing with their private space stations. It'll also be flying at a higher orbit than the ISS, so should suffer less from atmospheric drag problems.
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As far as I've read, it'll likely be quite a while before anything gets off the ground again.
So what have you read? At a glance, Bigelow has his money mostly in low end hotels (though the business specializes in long business stays) which would do relatively well in a recession. Doesn't mean his company will survive, but not every business is automatically at risk.
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Which leads us to the real reason we aren't aiming for permanency yet. Those orbits are very high. While other vehicles could reach it reasonably, our main space construction workhorse, the Space Shuttle, couldn't. It's too heavy and doesn'
Re:WTF isnt a space station permanent? (Score:4, Insightful)
It has a mass of 303t.. and it is in such a low orbit that atmospheric drag is still a major effect.. so you've got to boost that vast mass back into its orbit every couple of months.
The "permanent" adjective applied to the station means that it is "permanently manned" - as in, there is always someone on-board for as long as the station is up there.
People are often talking about moving the ISS into an orbit that is more useful for exploration.. say, an orbit that crosses the inclination of the Moon now and then. Basic calculations though, show that any attempt to "move" the ISS would cost as much delta-v as launching a brand new station.. and as launch costs remain the major dominating factor in space activities, you might as well make a new station.
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and as launch costs remain the major dominating factor in space activities, you might as well make a new station.
Piffle.
There are dozens of ways of moving the ISS into a higher orbit. Let's start experimenting with them today.
The only reason for decommissioning it in 2016 (or 2020) is the routine inability of the American government to actually do anything, coupled with the imperialist need to prevent anyone else from doing anything.
Launch costs are spread nicely across the various states, giving a politic
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He wasn't talking about a higher orbit. He was talking about an orbital plane change.
Say it with me now: Plane changes are expensive.
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Say it with me now: Plane changes are expensive.
Please stop being so condescending. How expensive the plane change is depends on how big a change it is. As I crudely understand it, the price is the delta v of getting to orbit times the angle difference of the two planes divided by 90 degrees. So a 90 degree plane change would be equivalent to putting the satellite in orbit. Making it orbit in the opposite direction (a 180 degree plane change) would cost twice the delta v of getting something into orbit.
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People are often talking about moving the ISS into an orbit that is more useful for exploration.. say, an orbit that crosses the inclination of the Moon now and then. Basic calculations though, show that any attempt to "move" the ISS would cost as much delta-v as launching a brand new station..
Even if that were true (my understanding is that the plane change is only around 25 to 30 degrees which is a touch less than half the delta v required to put the station in orbit), we can use much more efficient engines in space. That is, boost the ISS to a slightly higher orbit and then use the ion engines to make the plane change over a few years.
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my understanding is that the plane change is only around 25 to 30 degrees which is a touch less than half the delta v required to put the station in orbit
My math is incorrect. I'll need to look up the math to see what it should be. At a guess, I'd say that it's roughly a third (instead of half) of the delta v of putting something in orbit. The plane change would be from 50+ degrees (the orbit that goes over Russian launch sites) to 23.5 degrees (that passes over Kennedy Space Center).
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Unless you want to pay ten times as much to get it into a much higher orbit, you're not going to have "permanence". But I definitely agree; it doesn't really make much sense to be decommissioning it in a few years when it's still under construction..
the persistent myth of the way-points in space (Score:2)
How about... (Score:2)
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The problem is down mass. The shuttle has it, no other vehicle does, and the station was designed to require it.
Say something breaks on-orbit that can't be fixed there.. do you just send up a new part? That will cost a lot more than sending the part down, having it repaired, and sending it back up.
Re:How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect it will cost insignificantly more. The launch is usually the expensive part, not the construction of whatever it was that broke.
The Space Shuttle was designed to be able to capture and to return to Earth satellites in orbit. It even did so a couple of times. Just enough to demonstrate that it wasn't worth doing, and that it was far more cost-effective to let dead satellites go and just put up a new one.
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What can I say? Dr Sally Ride disagrees with you.. and who the hell are you?
Put ya ego aside for a moment.
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The problem is down mass. The shuttle has it, no other vehicle does, and the station was designed to require it.
Honest question: How many times has that down-mass capability actually been used? I don't know of any time the "bring broken ISS equipment back to the ground" scenario you describe ever occurred, although I might just be unaware.
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Ion engine? (Score:4, Interesting)
Couldn't they attach an ion engine and let the solar panel's power keep it in orbit if by chance it becomes unmanned for a while?
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There's no ion engine that can lift 303t. Maybe VASIMR will be operational one day.. but it's been in development since 1979, so don't bet on it.
VASIMR (Score:5, Informative)
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ya.. and we'll see how well it goes.
They've taken 30 years to go from TRL1 [wikipedia.org] to TRL5(ish) and meanwhile the rest of the community have focused on actual attainable thrusters.
It's provided many a great PhD thesis (or ten) but I wouldn't expect anything operational soon..
Remember the ultimate goal is nuclear.. fission, then fusion.
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It's provided many a great PhD thesis (or ten) but I wouldn't expect anything operational soon..
Why? The engine design isn't that hard. And you greatly exaggerate the time spent developing VASIMR.
Remember the ultimate goal is nuclear.. fission, then fusion.
No it's not. The ultimate goal is a space-faring civilization. Fission and fusion would merely be steps towards that.
Re:Ion engine? (Score:5, Funny)
There's no ion engine that can lift 303t.
then use two.
I'm temped to suggest a beowulf cluster of ion engines, but I don't want to take the karma hit.
Honestly, the answer is so simple! And I'm just a normal person who can't even do long division. How is it that I know all the answers to solving the ISS problems when these NASA engineers can't seem to figure it out? for serious...
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Any ion engine can lift 303t.
This isn't like on the ground, where if you were told to go push on a 303t truck, friction would mean that you wouldn't move it at all. Any force applied to a mass floating in space, no matter how tiny the force, will go uncut to move the mass.
In any case, if one ion engine firing continually isn't enough to move the space station, you can obviously use 2, as another poster pointed out before he was modded (+5, funny) for mentioning a Beowulf cluster of ion engines!
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Third (and final) meeting being broadcast Thursday (Score:4, Informative)
For those interested, the third and final meeting will be broadcast Thursday, running from 8am - 4pm EDT:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/NASA-TV-HD [ustream.tv]
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=14237 [hobbyspace.com]
http://twitter.com/search?q=%23nasahsf [twitter.com]
I think the Thursday meeting will be the most interesting one, as it'll include the presentations from the "Exploration Beyond Low Earth Orbit" [slashdot.org] subgroup. Some options the subgroup is studying include not just the "Moon Base" plan, but also plans for going directly to Mars ASAP, as well as a "Flexible path" option which would involve manned trips to destinations in shallow gravity wells, like L1, asteroids and Phobos.
The videos from the Tuesday and Wednesday meetings aren't available yet, but you can find out much of what's been discussed already at the following links:
HSF Committee Public Meeting in Alabama - Reviews [hobbyspace.com]
HSF Committee Public Meeting in Houston - Reviews [hobbyspace.com]
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=17962.0 [nasaspaceflight.com]
On the ISS and the Shuttle (Score:2)
Re:Nope (Score:5, Informative)
The ISS is the most amazing laboratory ever built. Vast amounts of awesome science is done on it. Thing is, NASA is so completely inept at communicating this to the public that even space geeks, like myself, have no idea what the hell they do up there.
The ISS program people will occasionally say "I could talk to you all day long about the great science we're doing on the ISS" and THEN THEY DON'T. Maybe if they talked "all day" about it now and then people wouldn't refer to their project as "busy work" for the space program.
But if you don't care about science, maybe you only care about exploration, then I guess you have to go with the argument that the lessons we've learnt about maintaining space systems on the space station will be invaluable for going to Mars.. and we're definitely not ready yet.
unNope (Score:5, Insightful)
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The program ends in 2016. They *want* more money from Congress to extend that to 2020.. whether or not Congress will *give* them more money is the question..
I'd go into detail about all the fantastic research that is being done on the ISS, but I simply don't have the facts.. NASA doesn't make them publicly available, so all I can say is that if fantastic research is being done on the ISS then NASA should let us all know about it.. otherwise opinions like yours are perfectly reasonable.
As for science on Mar
2016 (Score:2)
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That's why dumping the thing in a few short years is such a crime. $100 Billion, twenty years, and the lives of seven astronauts were given to build the ISS, and NASA wants to dump it to make room in their budget for an unfunded Mars stunt. The very plan is criminal.
Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy [wikipedia.org]
Obama's Administration has been especially keen to cut projects that are supposedly too large to kill. That isn't to say I disagree with you, it's just that years ago Bush set in motion a bureaucracy that is committed to removing the shuttle and ISS programs.
fallacious analogy (Score:3, Interesting)
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This isn't an issue of sunk costs. It's an issue of entirely failing to capitalize upon the investment made, failing to do the science that the ISS was designed to do, the science that the public expected to happen when they funded the construction of the science platform. I merely enumerate the costs to demonstrate the magnitude of the crime that NASA and the Bush administration committed when they suddenly announced, without consulting their international partners, that the ISS would be de-orbited in 2016, far short of its original planned lifespan as a research platform. It was originally intended to be operational for 10 to 20 years, not four or five years, after it was completed.
That's a sunk cost. The question is whether we can do anything of positive benefit with this sunk cost. That point hasn't been made yet. Incidentally, nobody has announced that the ISS would be de-orbited in 2016 or any other year. It's standard procedure for a government agency not to make assumptions about the future. The original plan for the ISS had the station in orbit through 2016. NASA chose not to make assumptions about the NASA of 2016 and whether or not they'd keep the ISS in orbit.
Further the
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> the lives of seven astronauts
Hey now, don't drag Columbia into this. If anything, it was abundantly clear that mission had NOTHING to do with the ISS - it wasn't even vaguely in the same orbit.
Your other points are good, and are immediately dismissed by this hyperbole.
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If you don't know what the hell they do up there, how do you know "vast amounts of awesome science" is done in it? I have yet to hear of one little tiny bit of actual science (awesome or not) they've done that couldn't have been done in a much cheaper way.
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The ISS is the most amazing laboratory ever built. Vast amounts of awesome science is done on it. Thing is, NASA is so completely inept at communicating this to the public that even space geeks, like myself, have no idea what the hell they do up there.
Your post got me wondering.. I had no idea either. A little google search gave me this interesting list [nasa.gov].
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For the price of the ISS, you could do 1000 times as many unmanned experiment. WMAP, COBE, GALEX, CHANDRA, Planck, .... (really the list is quite long) all of which have produced real advances (WMAP & COBE revolutionized cosmology) at a fraction of the cost of manned space missions.
Humans are frail (and they complain a lot). Robots work for 24 hours a day everyday without healthcare or a pension. I think the choice is pretty clear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkinson_Microwave_Anisotropy_Probe [wikipedia.org]
http://e [wikipedia.org]
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
I think all the people who's lives have been saved by the medical research done on the ISS would disagree.
You've gotta understand.. every scientist will say that the research of every other scientist is unworthy of being funded, because they want the funding for themselves.
There's vast amounts of work being done on the ISS.. and on the Shuttle for that matter.. but you've gotta dig to find it. Why? Because the media has repeatedly told NASA that it is boring and they don't wanna hear about it.
Science is boring.. yeah.. that's the society we live in.
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And just as importantly, what experiments have been done up there that were not possible with robotics.
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