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It needs to be reboosted a couple times per year. You could cut a lot of ground crew, but the power and thermal control systems have to remain operational. Tele
by zardo 10y ago
It needs to be reboosted a couple times per year. You could cut a lot of ground crew, but the power and thermal control systems have to remain operational. Telerobotics could replace astronauts for repair and maintenance. Probably 200-300 million per year minimum.(decreasing as the cost to orbit decreases)
- criddell 10y ago> It needs to be reboosted a couple times per year. Is there a elevation that would be a stable orbit? Why not just boost it to that point?
- maxerickson 10y agoThe "just" part is impossible. Higher orbits also make visits harder/more expensive.
- snuxoll 10y agoTo put it in a stable orbit maintained by gravity itself you'd need to put it at a Lagrange Point, any of the Earth-Moon points aren't exactly LEO last I checked.
- bdamm 10y agoPermanent orbit is not the goal. Just a few decades would be enough to keep the dream alive and get some good science out of it.
- dalke 10y agoThere hasn't been much good science out of it yet. I don't think the future will bring much either. If science were our goal we could have done much more science with the same money.
- krallja 10y ago> There hasn't been much good science out of it yet. I strongly disagree with this statement. Here are 1052 pages of summaries of the results of scientific experiments on the ISS. http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/iss_technical_publication_030116.pdf http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/iss_tech...
- dalke 10y agoI'll modify my statement, since "good science" has two meanings. ISS has produced competently done science (one definition of "good"), but at a high prices. The same amount of money spent either on the ground, or on unmanned space science missions, would have given more science for the dollar. But a lot of those experiments are "let's see what X does ... in space!", or rather, "in microgravity!." When all you have is a hammer, then you will do a lot of hammer science. But it's not that transferable, except in the most vague of terms - which that document does over and over. To quantify it, that's 1052 pages of summaries across 11 years. And not all of them are science. Call it 95 pages of summaries per year. BTW, it's about 550 individual items, so 50 per year. ISS cost, what, $100-$150 billion over 20 years, or 5-7 billion/year? The NIH budget is $32 billion/year, which goes to 50,000 grants. That's about 6x larger. In terms of science per dollar, I'm pretty sure an equivalent summary of the NIH-funded research would exceed 6x95 = ~600 pages. The other definition of "good" is "better than average". For example, if microgravity gave a significantly better to make protein crystals for x-ray analysis, then that would be great science. But in practice, no, it isn't. There are only a handful of crystallization experiments in those 11 years of experiments, and one of the things we've found out is that ultra-centrifuges are more useful than microgravity. A lot cheaper too. The quality of the science is about average for the fields I'm used to, and the cost is much higher. That's why I say "there hasn't been much good science" out of the ISS.
- krallja 10y agoSo, a lot of science has been done, but it isn't "good" science because it costs way more than other alternative lines of inquiry. I think that's fair.
- dalke 10y agoThe problem with LEO is the Earth's atmosphere, while tenuous, is enough to deorbit. Farther orbits are just fine. SNAP-10A, a Soviet nuclear reactor, is in a 1,300-kilometer orbit which won't decay for 4,000 years (estimated). "Stable" is also very relative. The Earth has been in a stable orbit for a few billion years, though it's not at a Lagrange point. A satellite in GEO has an effectively unlimited orbital life.
- 323454 10y agoThe Soviets put a nuclear reactor in orbit!?
- dalke 10y agoYes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A > The US-A programme was responsible for orbiting a total of 33 nuclear reactors, 31 of them BES-5 types with a capacity of providing about two kilowatts of power for the radar unit. In addition, in 1987 the Soviets launched two larger TOPAZ nuclear reactors (six kilowatts) in Kosmos satellites (Kosmos 1818 and Kosmos 1867) which were each capable of 6 months of operation.
- maxerickson 10y agoOne dumped its fuel on Canada, an interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954
- dragonwriter 10y ago> SNAP-10A, a Soviet nuclear reactor SNAP-10A is a US nuclear reactor (the only US one launched, apparently), though the Soviets have launched bunches (just not that one.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAP-10A
- dalke 10y agoOh, my! Thank you for the correction. I didn't realize that we also put one into orbit.
- crgwbr 10y agoRealistically, you don't have to go all the way to a Lagrange point to be a stable orbit—the moon itself is in a stable orbit and isn't sittin in a Lagrange point of the Earth/Sun. You just need to get high enough that atmospheric drag doesn't tangible affect velocity.
- Retric 10y agoLEO costs less to get people to and have fewer micrometeoroid impacts making it safer to operate at. Boosting out of LEO would cost a few billion and also reduce total lifespan as more things get dammaged faster. Further, it risks the Kessler syndrome unless you boost it outside of earths orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome There are many trade offs involved but simply replacing it in 20 years is a much better plan.
- desdiv 10y agoAnother roadblock would be whether the ISS has enough radiation hardening to survive outside LEO. It has ~100 commercial off-the-shelf Thinkpads on board¹, so none of those are radiation hardened for sure. I can't find any information on whether the mission critical computer systems are radiation hardened or not. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Communications_and_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Co...
- colechristensen 10y agoIt needs to be reboosted because of atmospheric drag. Put it higher and there's less drag, but it takes more energy to get to it.