How Long Can the ISS Last? 112
R3d M3rcury writes with the story that "NASA and Boeing, along with other nations, are studying the feasibility of keeping the International Space Station in orbit until 2020 and possibly until 2028 — the 30 year anniversary of the launch of the first module." From the article: "To assess the long-term structural health of the station, Boeing engineers developed detailed computer models based on NASA's projected use -- the expected stresses caused by future dockings, reboosts, crew activity and thermal cycles -- and combined that with actual data from on-board accelerometers and strain gauges. ... "What we're looking at is theoretical crack growth," Pamela McVeigh, the engineer in charge of the Boeing structural analysis in Houston, told CBS News. "So the failure mode would be you'd have a crack beginning, probably (at) a bolt hole, and the crack would grow to another edge. So you'd lose like a flange on a C-beam, or an I-beam. The stiffness of your structure would then change, the bolt hole you that you were growing the crack out of, now that bolt wouldn't be effective."
I seriously doubt we'd build the ISS now (Score:4, Insightful)
The US have given up on space. The NASA budget is treated as pork, with no thought of genuine long-term progress.
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The ISS originated with the Russian space station program anyway, as a successor to Mir. Had the US not been been included in this project back then, I doubt that NASA would have had much interest in a space station.
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ISS developed around a design that emerged under Clinton (option A, aka Alpha), which followed on from the Freedom Space Station work, which itself followed from the "Space Station '84" project that was sold to Reagan.
Where on Earth did you get the idea that NASA wasn't interested in a space station?
Where on earth? I'll tell you where (Score:5, Interesting)
Western Australia July 11 1979
Or if you prefer, the 8th of February 1974 off the coast of San Diego when the last mission finished.
They showed so much of a lack of interest that they threw a working space station away despite having enough Saturn V stages to move it into a higher orbit and five years to do it in.
Re:Where on earth? I'll tell you where (Score:4, Informative)
Actually there was excessive atmospheric heating that brought it down early. But even still, in the post Vietnam era every NASA program was being massively cut and NASA didn't know how to react to that.
Re:I seriously doubt we'd build the ISS now (Score:5, Interesting)
Why did it have to be assembled in tiny pieces instead of using big components with heavy rockets like Skylab was? If the ISS was made of big components with a heavy lift rocket, it could have been assembled in only 5 Saturn V launches (at about $1 billion a launch) or 1 Sea Dragon launch. Reviving a heavy lift rocket program would have paid for itself.
The whole point of the ISS was to give the space shuttle something to do. Using heavy lift rockets would have defeated its purpose.
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Because we as a species are still developing our technical chops. What's the alternative, the war machine? Go ahead, show the world anything that produced the human race can be proud of, then go get yourself to high altitude or deep desert or far enough offshore and look at the night sky. We've got a toehold in _that_.
Re:I seriously doubt we'd build the ISS now (Score:5, Insightful)
I seriously doubt that a Sea Dragon launch could have sent up the ISS, but I would agree that sending up 5-10 Saturn V launches would have most certainly done the trick. If anything, shutting down the Saturn V program was a huge mistake... when viewed in hindsight.
Every single mission that was accomplished with the Shuttle program (including sending up 7-man crews) could have been done with a Saturn V and done by far and away cheaper as well. Improvements in materials, guidance computers, and an evolutionary design change over time as has happened with the Soyuz rocket and spacecraft would have made the Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft a very modern and versatile platform to continue a real space exploration program and maintained at least the capability of going to the Moon as an option instead of having to re-invent the wheel again now that that capability has long since been lost.
What would have been lost, perhaps, is the need for international cooperation that went into building the ISS, but even that is not certain. Much of the basis for building the ISS came from the Apollo-Soyuz mission, where exchanges of technical information already were happening between the Soviet space program and NASA.
Even funnier is how the test stand originally built to handle a production run of over 100 Saturn V vehicles is now being used by SpaceX in Texas for testing the Merlin engines. That was the projection done by Werner Von Braun, and contracts were signed to have a contingency of building that many vehicles.
I do think the ISS would look quite a bit different than the current structure had it been built using Saturn V/I/Apollo hardware, although the modular approach would likely have been done still. It would likely have been an upgraded version of the Skylab modules, and I would even dare say that the Skylab backup that is currently in the Smithsonian very likely would have been a part of or even would have become the core American module for the ISS. It definitely would have been much roomier for the astronauts in the ISS with Saturn V launched modules.
Unfortunately, that is not the path that history took.
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shutting down the Saturn V program was a huge mistake... when viewed in hindsight.
No need to view it in hindsight. Lots of people said so without the benefit of hindsight. No way you could get through the noise of the political players though. NASA is first and foremost a political organization. The real experts have far too little say in what goes on.
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Because we had the Space Shuttle, it was The Future[tm], rockets were old and busted. They told us (and themselves) that it could do everything, so they damn well were going to use it for everything. It was also done that way to give the Shuttle a purpose.
So because pork politics.
It's only now when we're trying to do it again that we realize just how awesome the Saturn V was. And that was before we had powerful microcomputers for guidance. Elon Musk realized that there was no way NASA was going to get a g
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that is because they have not had any long term progress, dont know why its hard for people to notice this
Time at NASA is running backwards. (Score:1)
because they have not had any long term progress
The history of NASA
1 - Go to the moon.
2 - Go into low-earth orbit.
3 - Have no heavy lift capability
What's next, build an optical hand-held telescope to figure out what the big round thing we once thought was cheese is?
Has nobody noticed that at NASA time is running backwards? Assuming that a government entity can accomplish anything at all if its goal is not extremely narrow and we are at war with virtually unlimited budgets, is absurd.
Urgh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not use it as a site to build the next one? (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be nice if they could use the existing one as a site-office to begin building an even bigger one with a longer life expectancy. Use better materials, a piece at a time, and start building a replacement.
14 years isn't far from now. So what then? Start from scratch again? Seems a shame when they could begin stockpiling for the next generation and have it well underway by the time it comes to decommission the existing ISS.
GrpA
Re:Why not use it as a site to build the next one? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why not use it as a site to build the next one? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sadly no, they are not going to be attaching a BA-330 to the station they'll be attaching a BEAM module. Basically a closet for storage & testing built on Bigelows inflatable designs. I initially held out the same hopes when it first hit the news that a Bigelow module was going to be attached to ISS, but in hind site it was obviously never going to happen. First off if Bigelow was able to nearly double the volume (Ok 40% increase, still a lot) of ISS with a single launch and a few hundred million dollars NASA would have to answer a whole lot of unpleasant questions regarding the costs for ISS's construction. I imagine that even if Bigelow offered them a BA-330 free of charge (which isn't as crazy as it sounds, think of the PR) I doubt they would have accepted it. Second of all NASA is crazy careful, they won't allow a bag of potato chips without 3 months of testing and redesign. So I highly doubt they would allow a technology that has never had on orbit testing to be attached to ISS, their flagship manned space mission.
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Why would NASA be embarrassed? New technology comes out and makes old way look overpriced/expensive. It's the saga of all tech.
Seems to me like the Bigelow unit that's going up will be used for storage (non-critical) so that a failure of some kind wouldn't be catastrophic. It's a baby step towards proving the tech as viable... I mean, no one's ever lived in one in space for any length of time, and you want to put a huge one up there, what if some unforseen problem arises? My guess is, if it's been problem
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I would assume the risk of catastrophic failure would preclude it's use as an on-site office. However, keeping it up would yield invaluable data as to what components do fail and how, as well as what parts and systems do hold up very well.
Do we seem a little too risk averse these days? (Score:2)
I would assume the risk of catastrophic failure would preclude it's use as an on-site office. However, keeping it up would yield invaluable data as to what components do fail and how, as well as what parts and systems do hold up very well.
Do we seem a little too risk averse these days? I would think that the "risk of catastrophic failure" would be enough to justify not building the damn thing in the first place, given todays risk averse climate.
At the very least, even if a lot of it falls apart, the end of life plan should be to boost the thing to a Lagrange point, rather than deorbiting it.
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DeltaV to deorbit ISS - DeltaV to move ISS to L4/L5 - >3160 m/s.
One of those is MUCH easier than the other....
Re:Do we seem a little too risk averse these days? (Score:5, Informative)
Bah!
DeltaV to deorbit ISS - ~180 m/s
DeltaV to move ISS to L4/L5 - ~3160 m/s.
Preview, you fool, always preview!
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Deorbit delta V is zero if you wait a while.
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The ISS lacks the required shielding to be usable anywhere other than it's current orbit so moving it's is a total waste of time and money and it would be a giant hunk of space debris for any new missions to L4/L5 points
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The ISS lacks the required shielding to be usable anywhere other than it's current orbit so moving it's is a total waste of time and money and it would be a giant hunk of raw materials for any new missions to L4/L5 points
Fixed that for you...
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The ISS is anything but raw materials.
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The ISS's inclination is actually as high as it is to allow the Russian launch vehicles to be able to make the trip; the use of the STS merely capped how polar they could go.
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China is building a space station. They would have joined the ISS project if the US hadn't blocked them. It's basically US pride that is holding everything back.
Re:Why not use it as a site to build the next one? (Score:4, Informative)
China is building a space station. They would have joined the ISS project if the US hadn't blocked them. It's basically US pride that is holding everything back.
It wasn't just the U.S. government that wasn't interested in having China join. There is also a concern by both Russia and America about the quality of any potential modules and spacecraft that would be attaching itself to the ISS in any docking procedure... and it was Roscosmos that would have taken the largest burden for such activities as the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft would have most easily docked with the Russian segment rather than conforming to the American docking ports.
It was much more than pride at stake here, and while NASA officials were certainly the most vocal in opposition to Chinese participation, there were many other obstacles to getting Chinese astronauts on the ISS. If anything, it was also Chinese pride that sort of shot the whole project down too as they didn't want to be treated as a junior partner in the endeavor as well.
If the ESA and Roscosmos had wanted the Chinese Space Agency involved in the ISS, I'm sure it would have happened. There are other countries involved besides just Russia and America.
OPSEK (Score:2)
Regardless of longevity. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Okay, how? This "shielding" you speak of, of "high orbit"... that sounds like it takes more work than building the thing in the first place! The cracks they speak of are just thermal fatigue cracking that exists in all materials, just in Earth orbit it is extremely rapid.
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We NEED space relics! (Score:2)
Do we really need the relics of space age to hang around until they collide with something else and turn into bullets that make space even more dangerous than it already is, just so your grandchildren, if they're lucky and we haven't cluttered up the useful orbits, can have a "sense of historical understanding" like a devout christian looking at the Shroud of Turin?
We NEED space relics!
One "relic" I'm glad is still around is Buzz Aldrin. I still celebrate Sept. 9 every year (the anniversary of him punching Bart Sibrel).
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That'd be like leaving a sunken ship in a harbor... it makes a great museum, but it can cause a lot of danger if you're not careful. It works for the USS Arizona and a handful of others, but it's a thousand times as dangerous to leave stuff in space to rot... especially since without regular maintenance, it will likely completely deteriorate long before we have the means to turn it into any sort of museum. If you want to go that route, the safest thing to do would probably be to crash it onto the moon inste
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"If you want to go that route, the safest thing to do would probably be to crash it onto the moon instead... at least more of it will be recoverable than leaving it in orbit or letting it crash to Earth."
I guess you don't understand orbital dynamics, it would take a huge amount of fuel to get it to a lunar orbit. (or even to get it to earth escape velocity.
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An ideal orbit for the ISS would be one of the LaGrangian points "near" the Moon (L4 or L5), It would be out of the way for anything that would be put into space for a long time, and quite possibly it could eventually be salvaged for parts and/or sheer mass for any future endeavors in that part of the Solar System. The nice thing about those locations is that you don't even need to worry about any regular maintenance except for perhaps keeping the vehicle operational if that might even remotely be a goal,
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Movement in space is expensive.
Movement in space is cheap compared to getting things into space, if you're not in a hurry. Stick an ion engine on the back, let it run for a couple of years (with no-one on board, due to the radiation belts it has to pass through), and wait for it to get to L5.
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It isn't as if using ion engines on the ISS [gizmag.com] is a new concept. The idea has been kicking around for some time and mainly needs some funding. The idea to put one of those engines on the ISS has been discussed simply to maintain the current orbit as it needs to be boosted periodically anyway.
I would even go so far as to suggest that the required delta-v to put the ISS at L5 has likely been already applied simply to keep the station where it is at instead of crashing down back onto the Earth over its current
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In regard to the Space Shuttle, I have said the same thing since they decided to retire the fleet. It seems the greatest cost of having things in space has always been getting them off the ground. There was no reason to bring the shuttles back once we knew they weren't going to be used again. I remember that, besides the Smithsonian, many institutions complained about how expensive it would be just for annual maintenance to keep a shuttle on display.
So, as you suggested, they should have moved it to a hig
Re:Regardless of longevity. (Score:4, Insightful)
There was no reason to bring the shuttles back once we knew they weren't going to be used again
And what about the little matter of the crews on board the Orbiters? We weren't bringing the Orbiters back, we were bringing the CREWS back.
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3. Detach shuttle with remote control. 4. Boost into higher orbit with remote control. 5. Send crew back on something Russian.
Oh yeah, and learn your SpaceGeek. You're not 'detaching the Shuttle.' You're detaching the Orbiter.
This is a Space Shuttle:
http://harvardpolitics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/space-shuttle-discovery1.jpg [harvardpolitics.com]
This is an Orbiter:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co [wikimedia.org]
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Why would most slashdotters want a space program?
They can just stay at home and play Kerbal Space Program. It's a lot easier and you can get pizza delivered. ;)
(In my pessimistic moments, I wonder if rather than a technological singularity, we won't have a great stagnation with everyone opting for VR rather than the real world.)
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There are 2 reasons for that change:
1) Generational dreams change along with technology. Every world-changing invention has gone through an initial several decades of being awe-inspiring (with the periodic tragedy) before it became commonplace enough for rich people to do it for fun. I'm in my mid-late 30s, and that's what manned trips into space have qualified as since I was a little kid: no otherwise-impossible scientific advancements, two full crews of brilliant people killed (one with at least half th
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In order to prevent it from becoming a hazard you'd have to cover the whole damned thing in shielding. The only viable way to do that with current technologies is probably to surround it in those inflatable modules that Bigelow wanted to build; anything else would be too heavy for basically no payoff. Good luck getting umpteen launches of those going
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Why would it need to be covered? The point is that the ISS is going to be abandoned in place somehow, most likely at the bottom of the Pacific right now.
The only real concern would be potentially having the ISS break apart a little bit at a time, and those individual parts becoming separate pieces of debris in space. Boosting the ISS up to a higher orbit (no mention at how high) simply makes it possible to abandon the station without any further maintenance or cost, even though the initial boosting would
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The only real concern would be potentially having the ISS break apart a little bit at a time, and those individual parts becoming separate pieces of debris in space.
But that is in fact a real concern, one that can't simply be waved away. The station is designed to be powered; I'd imagine that abandoning it will cause it to deteriorate even faster. One day when we have repulsor technology or whatever magical wand is waved, we can worry less about debris and then that sort of thing will be a viable option. Until then, burning it up is the most responsible thing to do.
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The difference between the ISS and the USS Constitution is ease of doing it. The Constitution can be put in dry dock, and you can easily bring workers and materials to it. The ISS is in orbit... which is barely accessible during regular use of it, nevermind using it as a museum money hole. I'd be all for it if there was a practical way to do it, but there likely won't be until long after it deteriorates beyond salvation.
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If you could put the ISS into a orbit where perhaps future generations (I'm talking a thousand years from now or so) could worry about the refurbishment, I'm sure they could figure out how to turn it into a museum. Assuming that the cost of getting into space would drop considerably over that period of time, bringing workers and materials would not really be a problem and as a historic relic there might even be political rationale or even public sympathy in the form of donations that could perform such a t
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I would agree with you. A thousand years from now people would be looking at the ISS like we look at a Norse longboat and wonder how anybody put up with such a vessel to cross the North Atlantic Ocean. Such vessels have been found from archaeological digs, or even something much more recent like the H L Hunley [wikipedia.org] and have been restored at huge expense, certainly more than it cost to originally build those vessels.
While a replica may be built too, I think it has some deeper meaning to have the actual equipmen
This proobably explains why (Score:2)
This probably explains why Pan Am has been postponing my trip to the station since 2001.
It will never be scrapped (Score:4, Interesting)
It may be sent elsewhere, but the ISS is going to be around for a long, long time. Remember, the Russians own a good chunk of it, and they don't believe in giving up on functional assets. If NASA ever is forced out, watch the US modules being transferred to the Russians for $ 1 or something like that.
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What deorbited Mir was not really a lack of funds but rather political pressure from NASA and the U.S. government who didn't want to have Roscosmos distracted by Mir. There was MirCorp who was providing funding to keep Mir going and had even sent up a crew of cosmonauts to get it prepared for other visitors. [wikipedia.org]
That said, the Russian segments of the ISS were intended to be a part of Mir 2 (the second iteration of that station) and there definitely was a sense of closure with Mir anyway on the part of the Russi
Which parts? (Score:3)
Looking at the track record of the Mir station, the Russian-made parts will probably far outlive ours.
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That I am not a communist like you is quite apparent. Did you notice how well the CommBloc did from 1945-1989? Just a real hotbed of innovation, right? Without them the world would be a completely backward place.
The fact that you try to argue that government is able to do anything cheaper shows your naivety. I'm sending you to see Putin for re-education.
keep it going as long as possible (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully they continue to work on it and refurbish it. If we are ever going to have a robust long term presence in space we are going to have to learn how to build reliable structures that can be repaired and maintained over the long term. The IIS seems like a perfect test bed for that sort of development and we already have a huge sunk cost so why not use it?
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There is a tendency on the part of many to consider that designing, building, and maintaining structures in space to be a done deal - simply order up what you want and that's it. What we are finding after all these years is that prolonged exposure of materials to space is still often a matter of unforeseen consequences. While experimental work on Earth and various theories of how materials behave have been useful even if only to present the range of possibilities we are continually finding new behaviours.
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Another viewpoint (Score:5, Funny)
The stiffness of your structure would then change, the bolt hole you that you were growing the crack out of, now that bolt wouldn't be effective.
That's what she said.
as long as possible (Score:1)
excellent opportunity to develop the technologies for repair in space that are needed for further exploration.
What happened to VASIMR (Score:3)
Has it just not happened yet because it doesn't actually work, or because you'd need more solar panels for the required energy, or what?
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Maybe you could actually read the page you linked to?
As of June 2012, its launch is anticipated to be in 2015,[20] the Antares rocket has been reported as the "top contender" for the launch vehicle.[21] Since the available power from the ISS is less than 200 kW, the ISS VASIMR will include a trickle-charged battery system allowing for 15 min pulses of thrust."
Wow, both of your questions answered in the same paragraph!
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Russians (Score:3)
I don't know how long NASA will want to keep ISS in space (hopefully longer than the stated end of mission parameters though) but the Russians have already stated their desire that if NASA does decide they want to shutdown/deorbit ISS they are going to try to detach their modules and start a "new" Russian space complex, OPSEK (Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex). Personally I'm a bit confused, even the oldest parts on ISS are only 15 years old. Does equipment really degrade that fast in orbit? I would think electronics would be the first to go, but they should be fairly modular making most of them easy to replace. Even if an entire module became structurally/electrically unsound, in many cases detaching it from the station and deorbiting it while keeping the rest of the complex active would seem quite easy. The only exceptions to this may be a few of the core modules or nodes, even those would not be out of the question, it would just be a question of sending up a new node or core module and moving unaffected modules to the new core/node.
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ISS's structure is mostly aluminum which does NOT have infinite life(steel does) and will fatigue with time. see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_(material)
The structure WILL break apart sooner or later. Fatigue is an issue in addition to crack growth
Personally (Score:1)
Is anyone surprised? I see the ISS as only slightly less a political "creature of malignant compromises" than the abysmal shuttle was (and is a direct result of many of those, mind you). A "space station" at 230 miles is about as permanent as floating a buoy 25' from shore; it's practically disposable and should have been expected to be so.
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I prefer mega-nation, although stagnation might be closer at this point in time.
Re:Other nations? (Score:4, Informative)
Boeing and NASA are from the USA. The other contributors to the ISS are from other nations