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NASA official warns private sector: We’re moving on from low-Earth orbit

• snowwrestler 11y ago
  Why would we ever de-orbit the ISS? It took far more money and effort to get it there than it takes to operate it. The long-term value of ISS is unclear, but so is the long-term value of going to the moon or Mars. Imagine if the people who founded Jamestown said, "hey, we're ready to start moving deeper in the continent, so let's burn Jamestown and push it into the ocean first." Why give up a beach head? Our reach on single missions is constrained by our rocket size. Therefore to do bigger missions, we will need to assemble and supply spacecraft in space over multiple launches, as we have assembled the ISS. If nothing else, the ISS would be useful for "worker housing" during such assembly projects.
  • maxerickson 11y ago
    Settlers regularly burned their houses to the ground to recover the nails. The nails aren't a completely tortured analogy to repurposing the operation/maintenance budget.
    • Jtsummers 11y ago
      By that (burning for nails) analogy, we'd be disassembling and reusing the ISS rather than discussing deorbiting it (in 10-15 years).
      • JshWright 11y ago
        The 'nails' in this case are dollars in a budget. The ISS consumes a very large number of dollars on an annual basis, and 'burning it down' would free those dollars up for other purposes.
      • DubiousPusher 11y ago
        Two words, opportunity cost.
      • nolok 11y ago
        That's what the russians are doing with their modules
  • josefresco 11y ago
    The metaphorical beachhead has no value: "During the advisory council meeting, in response to questions, Gerstenmaier also made it clear that NASA didn’t require a vibrant commercial presence in low-Earth orbit as a staging point for missions deeper into space."
  • tokai 11y ago
    Space stations cannot live forever. https://www.rt.com/news/iss-bacteria-mir-mutation-765/ https://www.rt.com/news/iss-bacteria-mir-mutation-765/
    • IndianAstronaut 11y ago
      This really calls into question whether or not we can build these large multi year or multi generational ships for interstellar travel.
      • tokai 11y ago
        We need to get a lot better at managing ALL parts of a ecosystem before they will be viable.
      • smellf 11y ago
        Eh, it's RT, I would take anything of theirs casting the West in a negative light with a grain of salt.
        • avar 11y ago
          The ISS is more Russian than it is western. The West has contributed more money to it, but Russia was an essential partner and contributed most of the core technology due to their experience with Mir. Regardless of that, while RT has its biases, do you really think they extend to a mundane article about bacteria on Mir & the ISS? It's hardly a discussion about the rightful sovereign of eastern Ukraine.
  • dogma1138 11y ago
    For the same reason that they de-orbited MIR it will eventually outlive it's purpose. The modules have a life span, the ISS's mission has already been extended beyond it's original scope, eventually it will come to a point where you can not maintain it and it actually becomes a risk to the astronauts (we didn't had major incidents with the ISS, MIR had a few including a fire, but no major casualties, but after nearly 20 years things can start to break down and a catastrophic failure can very likely result in loss of the entire crew). The ISS is also limited in terms of what you can bring to it, what type of experiments you can run and how can you extend it so in some sense it limits our capabilities. When something outlives it's purpose sometimes it's best to discard it because having it and investing resources into it prevents you from expanding and building something new. We'll eventually have to build a bigger station that could be used for bigger experiments like micro gravity sustainable agriculture, industrial manufacturing and more. As well as potentially actually simulating gravity and other things. Ideally you'll also want a space station quite further away from earth like maybe a 1/3rd of the distance to the moon which can be used as a launch platform and a future space dock. Projects like that are going to be very expensive and giving up on the ISS could actually release quite a bit of funding as well as drive the need for a new space station because "well we got the ISS do we really need a new one?" is quite often used as an excuse just like orbiter development was hindered due to the shuttle being in operation for so long.
    • Shivetya 11y ago
      well the idea that is built with modules should imply that we can swap out the pieces as they age and as the mission changes. if anything the real reason to abandon the ISS is the same reason we needed to abandon the shuttle program. Nostalgic money pits tend to stick around preventing progress and investment in new and better systems. I still think one of the best things to happen to NASA in the last ten plus years was having the shuttle program shut down. Yeah it lead to years with lack of capability but it was that shuttle which held back such development and others have stepped in. I would prefer to get to the moon, having a solid surface under you would have some great benefits, let alone being able to dig deep and hide.
      • 11y ago
  • phire 11y ago
    Just keeping the ISS in orbit would require at least one mission every year or so to boost it into a higher orbit and re-stock some of the consumables. These missions cost something like half a billion each.
  • rakoo 11y ago
    It also sidesteps the partners operating the ISS; NASA isn't the only one (albeit possibly the largest one) on the station. > If nothing else, the ISS would be useful for "worker housing" during such assembly projects. Interestingly Russia plans to take some of their part from the ISS to build another space station (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Piloted_Assembly_and_Experiment_Complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Piloted_Assembly_and_E...) that will exactly have this role of an intermediary "gas station" between earth and space exploration
  • adventured 11y ago
    ISS takes up about 15%-18% of NASA's budget. It's slated to cost NASA about $3 billion per year, at least, through the rest of its life. Is that cheap, as far as hundred billion dollar space stations are concerned? Or is that expensive as far as moving on to new projects is concerned (and having budget drag from a legacy program that will be ~30 years old in 2024)? That's part of the debate. Personally I'd rather Congress give NASA another $3 billion in funding just to keep the ISS until we (hopefully) begin replacing it.
  • _paulc 11y ago
    A better analogy would be if the Jamestown settlers had spent 10 years floating in the English Channel being resupplied by rowing boat rather than actually getting on with the business of crossing the ocean and settling somewhere. The whole programme is frankly a total waste of time and money which is a huge distraction to actually making any progress in manned space exploration.
    • avar 11y ago
      I'm not saying you're wrong, but every announcement from NASA about the ISS seems to have the tone of "It may be in LEO, but it's an invaluable research platform teaching us lessons that are directly transferable to colonizing the Moon/Mars". Is that an unfair summary of what's happening on the ISS?
      • rtkwe 11y ago
        Yeah the ISS is where we're learning how to actually run a long term space habitat. Each station has taught us more about tons of things that happen here on Earth by removing the effects of gravity so that other forces with much smaller effects can be examined and harnessed. There are other ways we might have gotten this data but there's a lot to be said for having a person there to repair anything that's gone wrong or to change experimental apparatus instead of having to launch it all again.
• MCRed 11y ago
  We need to move on from NASA anyway. As a government organization it is always going to be somewhat capricious and compromised by the needs of politics (eg: part of the reason the Space Shuttle was so expensive is that it was spread out all over the country so each politician could claim jobs from it.) NASA needs to get out of the way, and congress needs to get out of the way. Yes, some civilians will die in private spacecraft, but that doesn't mean that space tourism is not a valid thing. Civilians have died on cruise ships! We need sub orbit, then orbit, then hotels, then a base from which trips to the moon can be considered. When all of this is an economically viable industry, then the civilization can consider the possibility of visiting another planet and not having all of our eggheads in one gravity well. Government will not get us there, and at this point, given the hurdles put in front of Virgin Galactic, they are a hinderance-- at least part of the time.
  • Aloha 11y ago
    I'd disagree on politics making the space shuttle more expensive - the shuttle would have cost about the same no matter where the factories went to built it - it was a deeply flawed concept from the start, and one borne largely out of politics.
    • dogma1138 11y ago
      It's really not you had parts built all over due to politics each with a different quality control process which lead to issues of major parts not fitting properly because they were manufactured to slightly different tolerances, about 40% of the tiles have had to be rejects due to this for example, major engine components also have had this issues. Also due to politics the shuttles have had to be assembled in California and then flown to Florida which was very expensive process. Government projects are tend to be designed as too big to fail and bring as much work to as many states as possible because that what gets you the vote. This isn't an argument against NASA, NASA is very much needed there are a few fields you do not want to hand off to the private industry completely (and ideally not at all) and space exploration is one of them. SpaceX is for the time being more or less a unicorn because it is privately held and for the time being Elon Musk does not have to answer on every decision to shareholders when it will come to that the overall level of innovation will slow down, commercial space flight isn't a bad idea but commercial altruistic space exploration is a pipe dream in the long run. You will not find many companies that will be willing to take on a 20-30 years Mars project for nothing than their own fame, yes working for NASA on such projects is very lucrative but in the absence of NASA it just wont work because there will be very little financial drive to do so. ULA/LM doesn't want to go to Mars they want NASA to choose Orion and their launcher to go to Mars and pay them heavily to develop and build it even if it never gets used.
• binarymax 11y ago
  Naive question: why can't it be boosted out of low earth orbit and used further out in space?
  • nickff 11y ago
    Used where and for what? The international space station was originally intended as a low earth orbit base for human space activity, then gradually morphed into a low-gravity laboratory.
    • aluhut 11y ago
      Drop it on the moon if nobody wants it. Could be a Theme Park when we settle.
      • motoboi 11y ago
        Nice idea. But, just to play with the numbers, it would require tons of fuel and, unless ura thinks of a debris field instead of a park, we must break and descent it there. I suppose that whould cost a lot more than 140 billions.
      • nickff 11y ago
        The space station can't hold itself together on the moon, it is not built for 1/6g; you might be able to position it in lunar orbit, but that would be quite expensive; higher orbits would preserve the station just as well at much lower cost, but the station would be an unsafe derelict in a few years.
        • vanattab 11y ago
          Would it really be all that expensive though. We are going to have to send tons of mass out there eventually. Is there anything fundamentally different about a lunar orbit that would make such a base not as useful. I understand it was not designed to experience large acceleration forces but could we not use this as an opportunity to test ion drives and/or other low impulse drive mechanism? Slowly inch it towards a linear orbit? Then send astronauts to meet it in orbit with a next gen reusable lunar lander? On a SpaceX heavy and or SLS?
• stcredzero 11y ago
  I think NASA should capture an asteroid and place it into a stable Lagrange point. The mass of the asteroid could provide resources, radiation shielding, and additional gravitational stability for other facilities/assets at the same Lagrange point. If suitable engineering is done, stations could undock from the radiation shield and updated stations docked in place, so the investment in delta-v and materiel could be preserved.
  • orik 11y ago
    why not the moon?
    • ch4s3 11y ago
      LEO is an orbit around Earth with an altitude between 160 kilometers (99 mi), and 2,000 kilometers (1,200 mi) The moon is on average 384,400 kilometers (238,900 miles) away. The Moon(ish) is where NASA is headed, LEO is what they're leaving behind.
    • stcredzero 11y ago
      why not the moon? The L2 Lagrange point is "behind" the moon.
    • stephengillie 11y ago
      Why not halfway between us and the moon? It could be an easy-to-reach halfway point for the Moon, a refueling station and very-low-g launchpad other points, internet relay base, and also have commercial, industrial, and housing areas. This could be an interesting new step in human modification of the environment - "orbitforming" (like terraforming?) a better solar system. It's like razing a hill to make way for farmland or better city building conditions. An asteroid that's easy for vacationing billionaires, mining companies, and highly-pollutant industry to reach would be a great next step for humankind.
    • mcguire 11y ago
      Don't be silly. Shoving around a mountain is laughably beyond NASA's capabilities. Moving the moon would be ridiculous.
• mcguire 11y ago
  "'We’re going to get out of ISS as quickly as we can,' said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight, last week." If NASA gets out of ISS, it will not longer have a manned spaceflight program. It's not going anywhere without a launch vehicle, which it doesn't currently have.