Letting the ISS burn up......Why?

[lugge]

11 hours ago, fredinno said:

Why would a project be cancelled just because it gets obsolete before being finished? Srsly?

A multi-billion-dollar project which follows a cancelled multi-billion-dollar project which is lacking a manifest (other than 3 test flights)... well, I would call that thing obsolete. (obsolete like in: no use for it). But we had this SLS topic quite a few times, lets keep it out of this thread.

On a personal note, I would appreciate it if you turn off the full-quoting. It makes threads confusing and people have to guess which part of the post exactly you are referring to.

And, back on topic :-)

ISS will not be brought back to earth, at least not as something you want to show in a museum. Not possible at the moment, and if it were than there would be no money. The same applies to the "bring it to a higher orbit" solution.

I hope they can maintain the ISS a little bit longer. Maybe they realize that, with the current world economy, no country can fund a station like this on their one.

Well, I like ISS. The longer I think of it...

Lego should make a model out of it! Like they did with the shuttle, which is my favorite Lego, albeit the failed shuttle concept ;-)

[kerbiloid]

Voyagers are happy ones.

• Humans exactly know where they are.
• Nobody will steal them for many decades.
• They are compact: just cut off their RTG, magnitometer and maybe antennas, and you can easily put them into your cargo bay.

A century later somebody will just fly to them, take them onboard and return to the museum.

 

[DMSP]

OK, if there would be a way to move it to a "safer" orbit, than do that and Mothball it. Who knows when we will need it again.

(Like in Stephan Baxter's Titan).

If there is no way to do so, unfortunately I think it has to go. We don't want to loose all that stuff we have in LEO.

[Buster Charlie]

5 hours ago, fredinno said:

We can build a lunar mission from Orion/SLS, and go to the Apollo 11 landing site. That would allow for experiments on long-term space exposure, and study the near-side Marina with new instruments. And put the flag back up.

It's actually more plausible than recovering the ISS, TBH.

I know that

RAMBLING ALERT:

I read a little bit about the last years of the MIR, and I understood then why they let it die. When I was younger when it deorbited I was like "Oh man what a waste" but doing some further reading made me realize it's probably for the best. As they say that's the nature of space flight, As Kennedy said "It's hard".

I want people to think about the reality of money in this regard. Some people say we should spend $0 on space flight 'because we got problems on earth', I disagree with that logic for many reasons. However while I support human space flight, I used the "Fix the American flag" as a extreme example to drive home a point.

 

As an American I would in fact like our bleached white american flag (I do wonder if the side facing the dirt would have any color, or would it be bleached too by general radiation exposure vs just UV exposure?) to not be laying in the dirt on the moon. However It would be an incredible waste of human life to do so. That's what people need to think about when they talk about recovering the ISS. Money is an abstraction of human labor or creativity and the value we put on that. When Tax dollars go to space flight it's essentially either taking by threat of violence people's money, or more realistically asking peoples children, grandchildren, or yet unborn generations to pay for it at the threat of violence.

So in general when I advocate human space flight, I always try to keep in mind just what a "billion" dollars really means. People only live so long, they only pay so much taxes before they retired or die, that is money they don't get to spend on themselves. That represents a percentage of their precious life. If Elon musk said "I want to spend my own money to recover the ISS intact! I'm going to build a heatsheild 200m diameter and a parachute 100km across!", at least the manufacturer of that heat shield and parachute would be paying employees some good money to build it. But the point is, if he earned that money lawfully he has the right to blow it on a completely sentimental endeavor. If Senator So and So From Such and Such state wants to do the same, he's essentially asking everyone else to pay for it, against their will at no immediate risk to his own lifestyle. 

I hope this isn't considered too 'political'. I'm just saying that besides the technological aspect of "can we do it" you should also be asking if it's ethical to do it? The Moon landing may have been symbolic and a big 'waste of money' to some, but at least you can point at specific developments that came out of it. And also, I doubt you'd have found many Americans alive during the Apollo 11 landing that would be mad at their tax burden in regards to an achievement such as that, but I can't cite a source so that's just my opinion. Contrast the achievement of sending a man to another world (no matter how close, how small, or how boring that world is) vs trying to bring back a man made object from LEO? We know it can be done, it's just very very very expensive, so what is the achievement in "borrowing money to spend it to prove we can spend money"?

 

So if we did send a Moon lander back to the moon to set up a base, or as a dry run for mars, then that serves a purpose. And if along the way they fixed the American Flag, that's a bonus. But sending a mission just to fix the flag is theft and abuse of power. So would it be nice to have the most expensive human creation in the Smithsonian? YES. Would it be worth essentially squandering an unimaginaiable amount of human effort to pay for it? NOT IMHO. And that's the kicker, the ISS isn't expensive because it's particularly expensive because it's some amazing construct. The Large Hadron Collider  aparently cost $13.25 Billion, I bet if you tried to build it in space it would cost $132.5 billion (pulled that number out of somewhere). So if the significance of the ISS is that it's an ordinary construct that exists in an extraordinarily expensive place to build things, and requires expensive Inspection and certification for safety reasons.... Well then we could build a log cabin in space, it would cost a few billion, and we could bring it back to earth for a few more billion, put it in the smithsonian and say "This log cabin was in space" and nobody would be able to tell the difference.

 

Fun fact, the Wright flyer at the smithsonian isn't even the actual working aircraft, they crated it up for the transport, and they lost some parts and probably mis-assembled some parts, and the result is the Wright flyer at the smithsonian is made of the parts of the Wright flyer, but isn't actually the wright flyer. So if we built a time machine, and it costs $500 billion to use the time machine, would it be worth $500 billion to go back in time, and recover the working wright flyer and put it in the smithsonian?

 

I'm so full of it, i'm sorry, it's the coffee...

[HebaruSan]

52 minutes ago, Buster Charlie said:

If Senator So and So From Such and Such state wants to do the same, he's essentially asking everyone else to pay for it, against their will at no immediate risk to his own lifestyle. 

Well, sort of. In another sense, it's not against their will, because they sent him to Washington to represent them, and they can replace him at the end of his term if they don't like what he does. It's not a perfect mechanism, but it's not the same as someone breaking into your bank account, either. (Moderators, please be gentle and only remove this part of this post if you deem this too political.)

52 minutes ago, Buster Charlie said:

So would it be nice to have the most expensive human creation in the Smithsonian? YES. Would it be worth essentially squandering an unimaginable amount of human effort to pay for it? NOT IMHO.

I don't think it's necessarily that people think it would be important to have it at the Smithsonian, in the sense of accomplishing something that matters to us. Rather, it seems like a waste to do all those launches to build it, spend all that money, send all those supply shipments, even start the commercial crew program, and then ultimately just scrap it and not have anything to show for it. As others have noted, there's not even much prospect of building a replacement in the near future. If continuing to operate and extend it is off the table, as it seems to be, I think it's understandable, if not exactly rational, to fall back to wanting to at least preserve it as a museum piece.

[Buster Charlie]

1 minute ago, HebaruSan said:

Well, sort of. In another sense, it's not against their will, because they sent him to Washington to represent them, and they can replace him at the end of his term if they don't like what he does. It's not a perfect mechanism, but it's not the same as someone breaking into your bank account, either. (Moderators, please be gentle and only remove this part of this post if you deem this too political.)

Fair point, I don't feel it's too political. I guess my point was it's easier to spend money on something when you don't feel it has any consequences, this is why certain radio financial advisers tell people to use cash vs a credit card, a credit card makes it to easy to get into debt. So you want to buy that big screen TV, are you more likely to do it if all you need to do is swipe a card and deal with it when the bill comes vs pull out a fist full of $20 or $100 bill and hand them over. So that is the essence of my argument, it's easy to say "Sure let's do it" when it has no consequences.

 

1 minute ago, HebaruSan said:

 

I don't think it's necessarily that people think it would be important to have it at the Smithsonian, in the sense of accomplishing something that matters to us. Rather, it seems like a waste to do all those launches to build it, spend all that money, send all those supply shipments, even start the commercial crew program, and then ultimately just scrap it and not have anything to show for it. As others have noted, there's not even much prospect of building a replacement in the near future. If continuing to operate and extend it is off the table, as it seems to be, I think it's understandable, if not exactly rational, to fall back to wanting to at least preserve it as a museum piece.

If we have nothing to show for it, then it was a waste of money and we should cut our losses. If we can say we gained a huge amount of data on micro-gravity and human space habitation, then even if the machine is destroyed the knowledge gained from it is not lost. Same can be said about the Apollo Program, there are pieces of the Saturn V Apollo rocket that are lost forever, but all the info, experience, and gains are still with us. We don't need to bring back the Apollo 11 Landing stage to make Apollo 11 worthwhile.

My understanding is the ISS is essentially squandered due to politics, the original idea of using it to stage deep space flight was killed when we put it at such high inclination, and the only reason we put it at that inclination was due to the Russians paying for a tiny percentage of it (they needed that inclination to reach it easily). Eh.

 

 

[wumpus]

18 hours ago, fredinno said:

VASMIR hasn't already been cancelled. It's being proposed to NASA for Orion SLS usage. Where in the world did you get the idea VASMIR was cancelled?

The plan to send a VASMIR to the ISS was canceled.  With such an engine, I would expect you could find a graveyard orbit that wouldn't decay (probably not the "official" GTO graveyard, but sufficiently above LEO).  Note that since the engines planned required more power than the ISS could supply, lifting the station might require few/no crew (it would be fine for stationkeeping burns, but lifting a 400 tons is another story).  Also managing to stay in the SLS program does little to convince me that they are beyond the powerpoint stage in bringing VASMIR out of the laboratory (where it does work).

19 hours ago, Buster Charlie said:

You know the Apollo 11 flag got knocked over during lunar ascent,  why don't we spend a trillion dollars to go fix that? That would be so cool.

If I were building a whoever-prize cubesat to the Moon, I would certainly calculate how much mass it would take for a lunar probe to right the flag (covering it with a new colored film would just too complicated (although require less theoretical mass)).  I'm guessing its just a little too much (and would blow any prize-craft's budget), but it would be a lot less than the Ranger's sent to the Moon in the early 1960s.

29 minutes ago, Buster Charlie said:

If we have nothing to show for it, then it was a waste of money and we should cut our losses. If we can say we gained a huge amount of data on micro-gravity and human space habitation, then even if the machine is destroyed the knowledge gained from it is not lost. Same can be said about the Apollo Program, there are pieces of the Saturn V Apollo rocket that are lost forever, but all the info, experience, and gains are still with us. We don't need to bring back the Apollo 11 Landing stage to make Apollo 11 worthwhile.

My understanding is the ISS is essentially squandered due to politics, the original idea of using it to stage deep space flight was killed when we put it at such high inclination, and the only reason we put it at that inclination was due to the Russians paying for a tiny percentage of it (they needed that inclination to reach it easily). Eh.

The engineers for the Apollo mission that I knew have been dead for twenty years.  Neil Armstrong was 38 when he "leaped for all mankind" and has died of old age.  We are losing plenty of that information, and I can only hope that a good chunk of it was passed on to the next generation.

I can't see how ISS could be considered "essentially squandered".  It does what it was meant to do: give astronauts a place to go in space.  While recent claims of "year in space" giving critical information for travel to Mars is highly exaggerated (basically insisting that the Russian data is NIH).  Building the bridges needed for international cooperation is probably more important than anything else technically done on the ISS.  The idea of using the ISS for deep space exploration is pretty weird.  It would only make sense for crewed exploration, and then only by sending up crew-rated stages up on cheap non-crew-rated boosters (space-x and orbital-STK come to mind).  You still pay 9000 m/s delta-v regardless of the means to get to LEO.

[mikegarrison]

1 hour ago, Buster Charlie said:

My understanding is the ISS is essentially squandered due to politics, the original idea of using it to stage deep space flight was killed when we put it at such high inclination, and the only reason we put it at that inclination was due to the Russians paying for a tiny percentage of it (they needed that inclination to reach it easily). Eh.

And didn't that turn out to be a good idea now that the Russians have the only crew-capable spacecraft?

[fredinno]

5 hours ago, wumpus said:

The plan to send a VASMIR to the ISS was canceled.  With such an engine, I would expect you could find a graveyard orbit that wouldn't decay (probably not the "official" GTO graveyard, but sufficiently above LEO).  Note that since the engines planned required more power than the ISS could supply, lifting the station might require few/no crew (it would be fine for stationkeeping burns, but lifting a 400 tons is another story).  Also managing to stay in the SLS program does little to convince me that they are beyond the powerpoint stage in bringing VASMIR out of the laboratory (where it does work).

The SLS program has sent a competition for ARM-used ION engines. But it's doubtful it'll be used beyond that, unless we get commercial reusable space tugs from a cooperation with a company like Orbital ATK.

Also, VASMIR on the ISS was to use capacitors to slowly store more and more energy until it was needed for VASMIR, thus bypassing the energy problem.
 

11 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Voyagers are happy ones.

• Humans exactly know where they are.
• Nobody will steal them for many decades.
• They are compact: just cut off their RTG, magnitometer and maybe antennas, and you can easily put them into your cargo bay.

A century later somebody will just fly to them, take them onboard and return to the museum.

 

Yeah, good luck matching the hyperbolic trajectory of Voyager...

I would rather have said Beagle 2, or Pathfinder.

10 hours ago, DMSP said:

OK, if there would be a way to move it to a "safer" orbit, than do that and Mothball it. Who knows when we will need it again.

(Like in Stephan Baxter's Titan).

If there is no way to do so, unfortunately I think it has to go. We don't want to loose all that stuff we have in LEO.

You "can" move it to a higher orbit at the end of it's lifetime. But why would you? It's going to degrade and become unusable...

6 hours ago, Buster Charlie said:

My understanding is the ISS is essentially squandered due to politics, the original idea of using it to stage deep space flight was killed when we put it at such high inclination, and the only reason we put it at that inclination was due to the Russians paying for a tiny percentage of it (they needed that inclination to reach it easily). Eh.

Well, if we didn't do that, the ISS would be abandoned (Hermes was going horribly, so NASA would have to bail them out, sucking money from the rest of the ISS program), or it would be much smaller and less capable.

[DMSP]

1 hour ago, fredinno said:

You "can" move it to a higher orbit at the end of it's lifetime. But why would you? It's going to degrade and become unusable...

Well, not if you kept boosting its orbit up. Sure, it would take lots of fuel, money and time, but who knows. I know I don't!

[fredinno]

40 minutes ago, DMSP said:

Well, not if you kept boosting its orbit up. Sure, it would take lots of fuel, money and time, but who knows. I know I don't!

You can boost it up to the Van Allen, and make sure it doesn't come down within the next century...

[Buster Charlie]

8 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

And didn't that turn out to be a good idea now that the Russians have the only crew-capable spacecraft?

Not if it defeats the purpose of the station in the first place.

Long winded answer: If you build a cruise liner, and the only way Russia would pay for 10% of the Cruise liner was to put it in a lake, it would make it pretty useless as a cruise liner. And then you say "Ah ha, but only Russia has a tug that can load passengers onto the cruise liner so it's actually good!"

Edited March 25, 2016 by Buster Charlie

[Bill Phil]

2 hours ago, fredinno said:

You can boost it up to the Van Allen, and make sure it doesn't come down within the next century...

Then it'll soak up more radiation than we care for...

Plus it's hard to do.

[kerbiloid]

9 hours ago, fredinno said:

Yeah, good luck matching the hyperbolic trajectory of Voyager

Their trajectory is precisely known for the last 40 years. Why would it significantly change 100 years later, far from planets, far from the Sun?
They are ~1 t pieces of metal, bright and reflective. Any anti-meteoroid radar will scream in panic when it will appear in several AU from the space yacht.

[Nibb31]

8 hours ago, DMSP said:

Well, not if you kept boosting its orbit up. Sure, it would take lots of fuel, money and time, but who knows. I know I don't!

Boosting it over a long period means that you are keeping mission control and all the control systems running. In that case, you are still going to be spending a lot of money on it for no reason.

Once you shut down the systems, then it's dead and it becomes useless. It can't be rebooted or restarted or reused or revisited, and it will break up eventually. Keeping it around for sentimental reasons just makes it a source of debris and a hazard. 

6 hours ago, Buster Charlie said:

Not if it defeats the purpose of the station in the first place.

But the purpose of the ISS was not to work as an exploration gateway. It has always been a designed as a research facility.

The ideas of using a space station for exploration go back to the early days of Space Station Freedom, when we were supposed to be flying the space shuttle every week and returning to the Moon with it. 

 

[Aghanim]

Crazy idea: Boost the ISS to some random Earth escape orbit so that it can stay in space without debris hazard to Earth orbitals

Not so crazy idea: If they decides to deorbit it, put some sort of heatproof camera inside so we can watch what would it be to be inside a burning space station

[Nibb31]

9 minutes ago, Aghanim said:

Crazy idea: Boost the ISS to some random Earth escape orbit so that it can stay in space without debris hazard to Earth orbitals

Please read the thread before proposing stuff that has already been proposed and dismissed.

9 minutes ago, Aghanim said:

Not so crazy idea: If they decides to deorbit it, put some sort of heatproof camera inside so we can watch what would it be to be inside a burning space station

And the point of that would be ?

[Aghanim]

10 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

Please read the thread before proposing stuff that has already been proposed and dismissed.

Done, I know and pretty much agrees with the point so disregard this

11 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

And the point of that would be ?

Just a follow up on the idea on the first page, and who knows? No one have seen reentry burnup from the inside of an vehicle, and maybe it will become a nice ending video of the space station that have a long history with us. Just saying

[kerbiloid]

11 minutes ago, Aghanim said:

it will become a nice ending video of the space station

Video would be nice - probably yes.

40 minutes ago, Aghanim said:

we can watch what would it be to be inside a burning space station

We can see - probably no.
Because the plasma cloud will supress radio signal, and then this recorder would be found somewhere on the ocean bottom, among other debries.

[Buster Charlie]

 

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

Video would be nice - probably yes.

We can see - probably no.
Because the plasma cloud will supress radio signal, and then this recorder would be found somewhere on the ocean bottom, among other debries.

Although, I bet a system could be engineered to which the cameras would be hardened and transmit to a black box with solid state memory (sorta how they recovered the Columbia video? right?) The black box would be designed to survive rentry and impact, we've done this before, and then and this is the key part... You either need to have a way to locate them with a radio signal after the impact, or you need a way for them to deploy floats that would survive impact  and come to the surface?

 

I'm not saying it's easy, Like Kennedy said.. "It's HARD".

[kerbiloid]

Of course, the video record from inside Columbia occasionally survived in the accident. So, it's possible.

But as ISS would be deorbited into the ocean depth, an eject/beacon system would be a challenge.

[fredinno]

12 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Their trajectory is precisely known for the last 40 years. Why would it significantly change 100 years later, far from planets, far from the Sun?
They are ~1 t pieces of metal, bright and reflective. Any anti-meteoroid radar will scream in panic when it will appear in several AU from the space yacht.

Because you need to go faster than the Voyagers to bring it back, then burn back to earth. Basically, this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/

7 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

And the point of that would be ?

Well, a camera and black box in a reentering ISS can't be that expensive, and similar things have been done. Also, it would be cool (good for publicity), and offer great SCIENCE! on the nature of reentry on various (unprotected) materials. I would put at least one in every module, if that's possible.

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Of course, the video record from inside Columbia occasionally survived in the accident. So, it's possible.

But as ISS would be deorbited into the ocean depth, an eject/beacon system would be a challenge.

Airbags on the waterproof black box(es) would probably be sufficient. Then, give it enough battery life for a week for a radio transmitter/GPS tracking beacon to get its exact location in the ocean.

[hendrack]

I read somehwere the Zvezda module and some other stuff is going to be reused in a future russian space station.

Edited March 26, 2016 by hendrack

[Nibb31]

Not Zvezda, that's the oldest part of the station. The Russians had plans to reuse the Nauka, which is scheduled to launch to the ISS in 2017, but who knows if they'll have enough cash to start a new station.

[RainDreamer]

I wonder if there will be any pieces of ISS survive re entry( this being not totally vaporized or turned to dust). I bet there would be people collecting the charred remains from the bottom of the ocean to put it in a museum or something.