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A Bipartisan Group of Senators Wants To Extend the Space Station To 2030 (arstechnica.com) 56

Posted by BeauHD from the life-support dept.
A bipartisan group of senators has filed a new bill that sets out space policy for NASA over the coming decade. "The new authorizing legislation is largely consistent with much of NASA's present activities, but it differs from White House policy in some key respects," reports Ars Technica. "Most notably, the legislation calls for NASA to support the International Space Station through 2030." From the report: The Trump administration has sought to commercialize space stations in low Earth orbit by 2025, perhaps by becoming a customer on a privately operated International Space Station or by supporting the development of smaller, private labs. "By extending the ISS through 2030, this legislation will help grow our already burgeoning space economy, fortifying the United States' leadership in space, increasing American competitiveness around the world, and creating more jobs and opportunity here at home," said Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who chairs a subcommittee on space and aviation, in a news release.

Cruz was joined by three other senators in introducing the NASA Authorization Act of 2019: the subcommittee's ranking member, Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), as well as Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who are chairman and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, respectively. The new legislation follows the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, which Cruz also led and which President Trump signed into law in March 2017. However, almost immediately after that bill became a law, Cruz characterized it as an interim measure to steady NASA through the presidential transition. The new bill is intended as a more expansive view of space policy, and it encompasses the Trump administration's Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon.
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A Bipartisan Group of Senators Wants To Extend the Space Station To 2030 More

A Bipartisan Group of Senators Wants To Extend the Space Station To 2030

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  • More jobs? But I want fewer jobs! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Thursday November 07, 2019 @05:30AM (#59390042)

    I don't want to generate wealth for a fatcat. I want fatcats to not steal our already generated wealth anymore!

    So we can focus on actually doing and making great things, instead of jobs that a robots can do.

  • This isn't a legislative problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday November 07, 2019 @05:59AM (#59390056)
    The ISS is set to be retired because its parts were only certified for 20-25 years when they were manufactured. That is, the engineers designing the parts were told to make sure they would last 20-25 years, and that's what they did. They thought of all the launch stresses, temperature swings from night to day, pressurization, radiation, etc. that the parts would encounter, and designed them to last at least 20-25 years.

    Extending its service life to 30 years isn't just a matter of signing some forms to keep the people paid and the lights on for 10 more years. Every part with a designed service life of 20-25 years needs to be re-examined by engineers, and in some cases tested, to make sure it'll last the extra 5-10 years. And if a part might not last, some sort of patch or replacement needs to be designed, manufactured, sent up, and installed. This is very expensive; possibly more expensive than simply designing a new space station to replace the ISS.

    The modular nature of the ISS does present another possible solution. Design and launch new modules to replace older ones, and simply jettison old modules which have reached the end of their service life. This is somewhat complicated due to the largest modules having been carried up by the Space Shuttle, which isn't in service any longer. So larger modules might need to be replaced by multiple smaller modules (they're playing around with a design for an expanding module, which stores compactly for launch, but expands to a larger volume once in orbit). But it is one way around the problem.

    The Space Shuttle went through the same thing. It was originally only certified for 25 years. Keeping it in service for 30 years required a whole lot of money spent re-examining designs and re-testing parts to recertify them for 30 years. After which the unknowns just became too big, and it was forcibly retired rather than risk an unexpected parts failure, even though its replacement was badly behind schedule and wasn't ready yet.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Dallas May ( 4891515 )

      The ISS getting old and past it's design life is actually a great reason to extend the life. Think about it. Nothing stays young and new for ever. As the space age moves forward we will have to develop new equipment and procedures to make age related repairs on literally everything. We can't just keep thinking of our space equipment as disposable, some things are going to have to last a few generations.

      • Or we can realize that it's been a very poor investment over the years, and that we should allocate the budget to more exciting and cheaper missions.

        • It blows my mind how phenomenally stupid space fanboys can be, pissing away money for outdated projects that don't produce useful science, while preventing useful projects from being pursued because the old projects take away money needed by they new projects!

          • Yup. (Gives Hubble the side-eye)

            • Repairing Hubble may have been worth it as an exercise. It also didn't prevent the development of a more powerful telescope. We could keep a small part of the ISS going and ditch the rest and still learn all we're going to learn about aging space stations, although arguably we learned enough from Mir to know it is a bad idea.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Shotgun ( 30919 )

            Studying how a orbiting structure ages, the type of failures that will occur and the early warning signs of those failures, is the exact opposite of "not producing useful science." Every single person aboard every single craft needs to depend on the reliability of the craft. We know a lot about metallic failure modes. We even know a lot about metallic failure modes in space. However, I would put forth that we don't have a lot of validation of what we know about >20yr/old metallic failures of orbiting

            • However, I would put forth that we don't have a lot of validation of what we know about >20yr/old metallic failures of orbiting metallic structures.

              I would put forth that this knowledge is not worth $100 billion. Instead, just launch an improved version of the original science mission after 10 years or so. Not only do you get nice new metal structures, you also get better instruments and fresh fuel, plus the extra insights from 10 years of experience with the old instruments.

              Also, focus should be on lower launch cost and cheaper missions. It's a shame that we're still working with that old Hubble, instead of flying up an improvement. The problem is t

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Yet... We also need to understand the practical problem that "Things wear out" over time.

        In your car, things wear out and need to be replaced. Brake pads, tires, engine oil, spark plugs, timing belts all have known replacement intervals. You take your car to the local mechanic and they remove the old parts and put the new ones in. There is a usually a ready available replacement part sitting on the shelf at the Auto Parts store and a garage where a mechanic can install the parts around the corner.

        The pr

        • There is a reason the Mir station was abandoned by the Russians and why it had such a bad reputation for having maintenance issues.

          To be fair, the ISS is not nearly as decrepit an environment as Mir was before it was abandoned.

          Let the Russians manage the decline of the ISS for a few years if they wish

          Or the Chinese. Just hand off the ISS to some entity that still wants to use it.

        • I'm not arguing one side or the other, however, I would like to point out that it isn't just mechanical engineering potentially under the microscope. The ISS is a veritable Petri dish. It has its own complex microbiology and a group of humans interacting with with.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ranbot ( 2648297 )

        The ISS getting old and past it's design life is actually a great reason to extend the life. Think about it. Nothing stays young and new for ever. As the space age moves forward we will have to develop new equipment and procedures to make age related repairs on literally everything. We can't just keep thinking of our space equipment as disposable, some things are going to have to last a few generations.

        I think ~300 years ago a European sea captain told a king/benefactor... "The BOAT getting old and past it's design life is actually a great reason to extend the life. Think about it. Nothing stays young and new for ever. As the NAVAL age moves forward we will have to develop new equipment and procedures to make age related repairs on literally everything. We can't just keep thinking of our BOAT equipment as disposable, some things are going to have to last a few generations." ...and a few months later the c

    • Design and launch new modules to replace older ones, and simply jettison old modules which have reached the end of their service life.

      1. You might as well launch a new station at that point and use the ISS as an assembly hub while it is being assembled out of smaller modules.

      2. Ted Cruz is doing what in some countries is called "opening a tab at the bar without the agreement of the card holder". If he sponsors a few more packets of sanctions against Russians (for whatever reasons) they may actually just detach all of their modules and reassemble them as their own station. What he forgets is that they end up with a viable station as as r

      • Re:This isn't a legislative problem (Score:4, Insightful)

        by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Thursday November 07, 2019 @07:15AM (#59390132)

        they may actually just detach all of their modules and reassemble them as their own station.

        They absolutely can't. How?

        What he forgets is that they end up with a viable station as as result, while the rest of ISS isn't

        They absolutely won't.

        some of the key bits like life support, etc are in the Russian modules.

        And lots of key systems aren't owned by Russians. Hell, even Zarya is not owned by Russians. How would you detach the Russian segment without it?

    • By 2030, the oldest component will have reached *at least* 35 years of age. And if the rumors about Zarya are true, then parts of it may very well reach over 40 years of age.

    • Considering where funding comes from it 100% is a legislative problem. Which is the point of the article.

    • And if the Space Shuttle was even remotely as cheap to fly as forecast, we would have made more of them.

    • This here is the problem with Govt funded Aerospace. People working on NASA projects design one thing in their life and still get paid 100s of thousands in consultancy fees to recertify items 30 yrs after they did any usefull work. Companies keep them around for the potential no bid contracts and eat their cost in the meantime but the cost ultimately gets passed on to taxpayers. Get rid of the ridiculously expensive safety first culture.
      People died at the beginning of flight but private industry pushed on.

      • Get rid of the ridiculously expensive safety first culture. People died at the beginning of flight but private industry pushed on.

        And became the Boeing 737 MAX.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ghoul ( 157158 )

          In the big scheme of things a few casualties are the cost of doing business. While the 737 max is a an unexcusable screwup as corners were cut for marketing reasons, I am perfectly comfortable with the crashes that happened in the 50s and 60s. Things kept moving forward and kept getting safer.
          Ultimately with scale comes better quality - practice makes perfect.
          As long as each NASA mission is a bespoke handicraft there is no scope for quality to be measured in any meaningfull way.
          We need hundreds and thousand

    • #1) Engineers always add wiggle room; if it's 25 years then they actually designed for more just to make sure it reaches 25.
      #2) After planned service life, it's a game of statistics how much longer you can go before a failure.
      #3) Government ALWAYS does this. Nuclear power plants keep getting decade extensions beyond their design and you just slowly replace what you can and put off the problems into the next leader's pile of shit. Leadership is eating shit left for you while smiling and telling everybody we'

      • #8) Ted Cruz. It probably has something stupid, evil, or ignorant involved...

        Trillions of dollars for the Johnson Space Center.
        That's how it ended up there:
        LBJ knew it would provide a tremendous economic boost to Houston.

    • The ISS would be a good platform from which to build the next space station. Building a new space station is a lot of work, it will involve lots of space walks, equipment checks, etc. And the whole time this is going on the astronauts working on the new station are going to need a safe place to stay. The ISS has a proven track record and can host building crews for months on end. Since the ISS wasn't built in one shot I'm sure there are parts from the ISS that can be repurposed. It would also be nice to ke

  • It only cost $100,000,000,000 to build (Score:3)

    by Dallas May ( 4891515 ) on Thursday November 07, 2019 @06:30AM (#59390090)

    It's practically disposable anyway. Why save it? Keep it around too long it'll pick up some crappy historic designation then you'll never get to redevelop.

    • > It's practically disposable anyway. Why save it? Because depending on rubber seals, highly stressed lubricants and electronics that date from the previous millennium to protect your life is a highly dubious proposition?

  • Things get old. That's why we need the ISS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dallas May ( 4891515 ) on Thursday November 07, 2019 @06:42AM (#59390100)

    Entropy is a thing that is real. Even the writer of Ecclesiastes in the Bible wrote about his frustration in seeing his new and beautiful city age and decline over his life. The one thing I can absolutely guarantee you is that everything in this world will age.

    That's the best reason I can think of for extending the ISS. The ISS is aging, and it would be tempting to just call it "Mission Accomplished" and let it burn up in the atmosphere. But it's new science and engineering value now is that it is old. As we move forward in the space age thing will get old with time. Things will break and need to be replaced. Nothing will stay new. The ISS serves as a great opportunity for a test bed of new equipment and procedures for old things in space.

    This is definitely a good idea to continue funding the mission indefinitely.

    • Hi there. Interesting post. The space station give us lots of different crucial information so it is important it will exist in the future.

    • Re:Things get old. That's why we need the ISS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <[slashdot] [at] [keirstead.org]> on Thursday November 07, 2019 @09:31AM (#59390298)

      This is a very good point and one I have not considered, and its amazing fewer people talk about this.

      I mean, look at the show The Expanse - this is what a realistic future in space looks like, with old, outdated equipment the normal. We can't just be assuming everything will be brand new every 10 years in space. It's not sustainable. We have to figure out how to maintain aging equipment just as we do here on earth.

      • Y2K (Score:2)

        by ghoul ( 157158 )

        And eventually we will have a Y2K equivalent bug in space because we kept equipment around too long

      • We can't just be assuming everything will be brand new every 10 years in space. It's not sustainable.

        It is if we develop industry in space, with asteroid mining and so on. But if we do that, we can also just build things to last, by using a lot more mass. So it's a waste of time to try to figure out how to maintain these tin cans, instead of figuring how how to build better ones without having to launch the mass to orbit.

    • Some things are designed for maintenance (Score:4, Insightful)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Thursday November 07, 2019 @09:42AM (#59390322) Journal

      You can replace the serpentine belt in a car in a few minutes, because the engineers one it would wear out and the designed it to be replaced easily enough. There are handy holes going as deep into the engine as necessary to reach the spark plugs because spark plugs wear out and need to be replaced. If an engine was designed without those holes, so you had to disassemble the entire engine to reach the plugs it would be a very different situation. Some equipment has O-rings which you can slip off and slip on new ones. Other, disposable items instead have rubber seals molded in, so they can't be replaced.

      We may be getting to the point where it makes sense to design the next station with serviceable parts. My understanding is that ISS isn't designed that way.

    • The ISS serves as a great opportunity for a test bed of new equipment and procedures for old things in space.

      This is definitely a good idea to continue funding the mission indefinitely.

      Sure, this is a great reason to kill a scientifically useful mission, or permanent moonbase, or mission to Mars! (Idiots, all of you.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      I imagine the ISS itself is now a great study piece on how space stations age, and on the worst case, we should try to get it back to earth in one piece somehow.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Can you imagine if we had a giant space truck that could land while carrying any of the ISS modules... oh, wait.

    • Risking your life to see how something fails seems like a boring way to die.

    • I've read that the biggest issue with the ISS is that molds and bacteria have been growing in places that aren't accessible to be fully cleaned.

  • What about.... (Score:3)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Thursday November 07, 2019 @01:08PM (#59390970)

    ..the Moon ?
    Its billions of years older, and must be really worn out.
    We should scrap that too.

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