ISS Discussion Thread

[Codraroll]

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

So the decision to put the lift out of order was caused not by two of five broken cables, but because the sneaky Russkies had a stairway at the wall...

Makes sense.

"Why keep using the old and unsafe lift, or stress about building a new lift? The Russians have a stair we can use, and they're being all sporty about it."

*later*

"Oh, that's why we had a lift of our own in the first case. Probably should have hurried up a bit with that new lift. Well, good thing we never have to use that stair again!"

Edited June 13 by Codraroll

[magnemoe]

On 6/9/2024 at 6:18 AM, kerbiloid said:

Interesting facts: there were zero reasons to involve the Westerners on the working Mir station, and the Russians are still involved on the ISS, while it was working out always like always.

Maybe they forgot to report you something?

Except at the time  Russia was just becoming an country and was very broke.  The launch site was not even in Russia. Think one guy who launched earliest from the Soviet Union before it fell apart still hold the record for longest stay in space and is likely to do so until an manned mars mission. If they had to leave station it was no return missions budgeted so it would be lost. 
But the US was interested so Russia got cash, US got space station experience. Yes this took years but it gave Mir an budget. 

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Russia was just becoming an country

The Russia had lost some territories, but it wasn't "becoming" a country, it was a centuries-old country in trouble.

And even then, it had something to deal with very much.

6 hours ago, magnemoe said:

The launch site was not even in Russia.

Tell it to France with her Kourou.

6 hours ago, magnemoe said:

If they had to leave station it was no return missions budgeted so it would be lost. 

And why would NASA care of that?

But they were funding the competing space program for years.

6 hours ago, magnemoe said:

But the US was interested so Russia got cash, US got space station experience.

US had performed three flights to its own Skylab long before that, a ten or so flights of Spacelab, and their mast construction experiment was more advanced than the two masts on Mir (bigger in size and using replaceable sticks with locks).
So, mostly they had ancested the docking port from Buran, and the very practice of the Shuttle docking.

Still, more Americans had visited Mir than Soviets/Russians, while unlikely they were taking much from the very specific TKS-based design, or from using the Soviet scientific equipment.
The semi-close environment and the bath was what they already had been having on Skylab.

Having Shuttle, they were funding the Soyuz upgrade to TMA to let it carry the American beanpoles of 1.9 m height, instead of just selecting crew of normal size, 1.7..1.8 m, so for some reasons they were seriously going to use Soyuz _{a rhyme, it is} more than a decade before the Shuttle cancellation, just several years after the Shuttle starting flying at all.

The creative funding in the Congress lobby or so, of course, also was a thing, but it's a somewhat strange application area.
Why not fund the NK missile program now for funds now? Why not help the European projects then?

So, actually it's very unclear why indeed NASA was funding Mir and Soyuz.

But if you pay your attention to the history of the spaceflights, there is some specific sequence of the returnable spacecraft generations.

 

7 hours ago, Codraroll said:

"Oh, that's why we had a lift of our own in the first case. Probably should have hurried up a bit with that new lift. Well, good thing we never have to use that stair again!"

Indeed, who needs that fire ladder outside, when you have several lifts. What can go wrong with them at once?

[Codraroll]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The Russia had lost some territories, but it wasn't "becoming" a country, it was a centuries-old country in trouble.

Russia didn't lose territory. The supernational entity Russia used to be a member of, split apart. It's not like if the EU was split up, Belgium could claim Italy as a lost territory.

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Tell it to France with her Kourou.

French Guyana is an administrative region of France. Kazakhstan is an independent country.

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Indeed, who needs that fire ladder outside, when you have several lifts. What can go wrong with them at once?

Considering the state of the fire ladder, it's probably safer to take a chance with the lift.

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, Codraroll said:

French Guyana is an administrative region of France.

Can't recall it joining France.

4 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Russia didn't lose territory. The supernational entity Russia used to be a member of, split apart. It's not like if the EU was split up, Belgium could claim Italy as a lost territory.

What about Sweden and Norway?

4 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Considering the state of the fire ladder, it's probably safer to take a chance with the lift.

Nobody makes you choose the ladder.

[PakledHostage]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Can't recall it joining France.

There are 5 overseas administrative regions, of which French Guyana is one. According to Wikipedia: 

Although these territories have had these political powers since 1982, when France's decentralisation policy dictated that they be given elected regional councils along with other regional powers, the designation overseas regions dates only to the 2003 constitutional change;

Also, I recall that the American justification for funding the Russian space program was to keep the people involved in that program employed in peaceful pursuits after the fall of the Soviet Union, rather than having them all scatter to work for other enemy weapons programs.

[kerbiloid]

Just now, PakledHostage said:

There are 5 overseas administrative regions, of which French Guyana is one.

joining, not had been joined

I don't insist that Guyana isn't French, I just find the selectivity of the quoted poster not completely sincere.

3 minutes ago, PakledHostage said:

Also, I recall that the American justification for funding the Russian space program was to keep the people involved in that program employed in peaceful pursuits after the fall of the Soviet Union, rather than having them all scatter to work for other enemy weapons programs.

In press,  yes. But there were much more specialists staying unemployed and not covered with NASA money, the technologies were widely known since 1950s, and some known cases of missile proliferation (say, the NK ones) were based on the missile technologies from Dnepropetrovsk, lol, not from big Russia.

So, it looks like it was something else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_of_Peace

[Vanamonde]

Okay, but what does all that have to do with the International Space Station? 

[kerbiloid]

On 6/14/2024 at 7:50 PM, Vanamonde said:

Okay, but what does all that have to do with the International Space Station? 

Funding or not the Russian station segment... again... just hypothetically.

Originally, it meant to be a joke, but it's indeed a very dark story, why the Mir program was actually funded by NASA in 1990s.

Several explanations, but all of them incomplete, and the strange things about the Priroda module, "Banner of Peace" twice visited it, and a sequence of cargo delivery: Raduga - Priroda/Shuttle - Soyuz - Dragon- Soyuz/Dragon.

[magnemoe]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Funding or not the Russian station segment... again... just hypothetically.

Originally, it meant to be a joke, but it's indeed a very dark story, why the Mir program was actually funded by NASA in 1990s.

Several explanations, but all of them incomplete, and the strange things about the Priroda module, "Banner of Peace" twice visited it, and a sequence of cargo delivery: Raduga - Priroda/Shuttle - Soyuz - Dragon- Soyuz/Dragon.

Kind of my above post, NASA founded Mir to get space station experience and it was an motive to keep Russian aerospace engines in businesses and not going to Iran or North Korea. 
Mir is relevant as it was the station before ISS. 

[kerbiloid]

On 6/17/2024 at 12:34 AM, magnemoe said:

not going to Iran or North Korea

Kinda they did, and mostly not from Russia.

Why did NASA not pay to other ex-USSR countries? Say, to the UA, which had a Soviet space/missile bureau in Dnepropetrovsk (whose missiles have mysterious similarities with the NK ones), or to Belorussia, which had a lot of space-related staff and stuff?

Also, since when NASA is responsible for non-proliferation? It's a haughty place for another good people.

Looks, like NASA was funding the actively operating space organization, not potentially able to.

On 6/17/2024 at 12:34 AM, magnemoe said:

NASA founded Mir to get space station experience

Skylab. Spacelab.

And from little to no similarities between the SU and US space tech.

[darthgently]

Interesting Falcon Heavy ISS deorbit approach

 

[kerbiloid]

The original deorbit plan was:

2026: Alt = 450 km.
Stop raising the ISS orbit, let it slowly mugrate down.

2030 Jun: Alt = 330 km.
The last crew abandons the station.

2030 July-Nov
3 x Progress one by one get launched to ISS and lower it down to 250..260 km.

Final deorbit burn by Zvezda engines (could do everything itself, but the tanks capacity is too low).

[LordFerret]

In my news feed today...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinholdenplatt/2024/07/13/us-plan-to-crash-space-station-is-condemned-by-space-agency-leaders/

 

[kerbiloid]

Quote

An American plan to destroy the International Space Station by propelling it to burn through the atmosphere, and then crashing it into the Pacific Ocean, would rob citizens of the future of one of civilization’s greatest technological masterworks, and should be halted, say one-time leaders of NASA and of the European Space Agency.

And leave many good people in the agencies without job.

Quote

The decision to raze the Station should be reversed, and the ISS should instead be boosted upward, into a higher orbit, as a gift to successive generations of the new millennium

... which will be harshly swearing while disassembling in orbit the 450 t heavy mousetrap, consisting of unpressurized vessels 4 m in diameter and labyrinth of metal trusses, hanging in the radiation belt, in zero-g, far from any space station support.
And blaming the gifters, who could just deorbit it a century earlier.

Quote

Many of the ISS modules, he told the Senate Subcommittee on Space, are likely to have “structural life” well beyond 2030.

So, is this for the "citizens of the future" or because the barn  still can be used?

Also, there is another life in the modules, but the structural and the human ones. Bacterial and fungi.
Without daily cleaning, but in the radiation bath of the radiation belt, what the great new discoveries will be done by the bacteriologists of the future in the lungs of the citizens of the future, having returned from it.

Or they can vent the air out, and let the museum be fillem by vacuum.
But then the materials inside will be sublimating and melting, so the citizens of the future will have enough funny minutes on visiting the museum.

***

An ion tug to send it away from the Earth, and a 0.2 kt demolition charge onboard would be at once clean and spectacular way to finish the ISS saga.

[RCgothic]

We don't need an abandoned space station slowly shedding debris into an orbit with decay times measured in centuries to millennia. NASA's got this call right IMO.

[darthgently]

Solar orbit? 

[Kekkie]

As long as we're daydreaming, Martian orbit. 

Delta v for Mars transfer is only slightly more than Earth escape velocity from the ISS's altitude. Attach an ion tug with Starlink's engines (Dragon XL-derived, like the deorbit vehicle?) Dry mass 10 tons, so the total mass of the ISS is 460 tons on docking. As the thrusters have ~2500s ISP, and accounting for gravity losses, total propellant mass would probably be around 100t assuming an approximate delta v of 5 km/s (no idea if this approximation works).

All you'd need would be one Starship launch and cargo deployment, an ion propelled tug which doesn't exist yet, a magical mass ratio of 10 for this vehicle, and multi-megawatt power and upgrades to the ISS's electrical system to avoid the thing taking 25 years to move! 

[AckSed]

So I have been digging through this webinar on artificial gravity:

Two statements stood out to me (so far).

First off, Gary Hudson's (formerly of Percheron, Rotary Rocket, currently of Gravitics and Space Studies Institute) anecdote of proposing a 'spinning stick' spin-gravity installation to study the physiological effects of partial gravity on research animals (lightly edited to remove the pauses):

Quote

Let me go back just for a moment to 2017, in fact before that when I became president/trustee of the Space Studies Institute. I looked at the things the Institute was doing and talking about and I said in gravity uh artificial gravity was the most important question to be resolved technically, sociologically, you know physiologically and so forth for human permanent human settlement of space and nobody seemed to be working on it. So I made a proposal for a thing called G-Lab which was about a 100 meter diameter spinning bolo type space station specifically to answer the questions that we were talking about today.

I presented at the American Society for gravitational biology in 2017 I think: the response was deafening silence. And I asked the question why is NASA not interested in this, this seems like it should be right up their alley and the real answer that I got was "this does not support a flags and footprints type mission to go to Mars". And so the agency has been hostile - and I will you know use that word hostile - to the notion of doing anything with artificial gravity or spin gravity uh pretty much since its formation. And it's only the advent of commercial opportunities - Vast, Gravitics, other such companies - that, and the advent of low-cost space transportation is going to change that situation in the next 10 years.

That's quite something. Link to the proposal on SSI's website: https://ssi.org/programs/ssi-g-lab-project/g-lab-2017-overview-and-slides/ Granted, a co-located spinning hab would make people nervous. (Presumably that's why he's now in the business of building habs himself (not operating, just building) and the MMOD protection, and methalox thrusters to spin them up and down: want something done properly, got to do it yourself.)

Donna Roberts, Deputy Chief Scientist in charge of the ISS came in with a sort of explanation and ended up saying the quiet part out loud:

Quote

If we're looking at space tourist and someone who's not a professional astronaut then I think an artificial gravity environment is very important and designing it um taking into account the issues that were discussed by my colleagues is very important. But then on the other hand if we're talking about a space station whose purpose for example is to do um crystal growth or bio printing or other types of studies or manufacturing are fundamental science studies in which a very [low gravity] environment is required then artificial gravity might not be appropriate because that could mess up your studies.
So I really think that there is a place for artificial gravity in certain situations and then there's a place where maybe we don't want to have artificial gravity. As a matter of fact if our reason for going into space is to study the microgravity environment then we don't want to have artificial gravity. We have shown that the microgravity environment accelerates ageing for example and we can use that microgravity environment to study the impact of ageing on tissue samples from the human body that it would take years to develop Pon nerves such as dementias and other disorders that would take years to study here on Earth, but we can study them in a very accelerated time in space and a microgravity environment.
So maybe we don't have artificial gravity in that space station but then on another space station where we want to study some of the uh impacts on the human body or other animals that we've been discussing here today then we would want to have artificial gravity as so I think whenever we're talking about the value of artificial gravity and how it's going to impact the markets we're really going to have to think about what are our objectives, what we're trying to achieve in that particular situation.

TL;DR "We're doing valuable science, so we don't want a spinning hab." Even though later Dr. Roberts tells the seminar about the long-term effects of microgravity.

[Jeb_Needs_A_Parachute]

Originally the ISS would have included a small centrifuge. While spinning has are cool, you only want a small part of the station to have variable gravity for science-zero g is the whole point. But spinning hab research is required to safely visit Mars, so starting now is a good idea.

[kerbiloid]

5 hours ago, AckSed said:

And so the agency has been hostile - and I will you know use that word hostile - to the notion of doing anything with artificial gravity or spin gravity uh pretty much since its formation.

While NASA speaks, Roscosmos is doing.

5 hours ago, Jeb_Needs_A_Parachute said:

Originally the ISS would have included a small centrifuge. While spinning has are cool, you only want a small part of the station to have variable gravity for science-zero g is the whole point. But spinning hab research is required to safely visit Mars, so starting now is a good idea.

First of all, a small internal centrifuge for small creatures was planned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module

But is delayed/postponed/whatever.

Probably would cause vibrations and disturb various astronomical and crystal growing experiments.

So, better use on a separate mini-station.

[AckSed]

I swear there was a small lab-scale centrifuge for studying bone and muscle development in mice.

Ah, here we are, it's called MARS, ironically enough, and was installed in the JAXA Kibo module in 2017. Gary Hudson and Donna Roberts must have missed that memo: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-10998-4

I suppose they could be forgiven for forgetting, since it's not readily apparent that it was on the ISS, and the research on muscle atrophy in lunar gravity only came out 6 years later, in 2023: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-04769-3

[darthgently]

Deorbit plans

 

[kerbiloid]

The ISS empty volume is about 400 m³.

So, if bring 400 t of water and fill the ISS with it, it would be an orbital aquapark with  a labyrinth of modules, without hydrostatic pressure, combining both zero-g and hydro-zero-g.

Also it would be twice heavier, and thus with a twice less drag.

As the water is a good anti-rad protection, this could be orbiting at higher orbit, in the radiation belt, and thus can be used as a cheap particle detector, including the space neutrinos.

It can be populated by various fish, and be a contact fishtank for the customers.
And at the same time it would be a biolab to study the fish herding in zero-g, and zero-g fishing.

When the ISS aquapark finally gets decommissioned, they can use an ion tug to bring this 400 t of water to the Moon or wherever they want.

[Iapetus7342]

Honestly, deorbiting the ISS is a great idea. Minimal space junk, more space in orbit and we already have enough simulations of the station and photos for a comprehensive guide. The Orbiting Aquapark idea would be great for our future residents, but when the end eventually comes, i'd opt to take the water on another tanker and ship that to the moon or wherever they want instead of a 31-year-old hunk of science, oxygen and metal that is super wet and just as heavy.