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NASA plans to retire the ISS by 2031 by crashing it into the Pacific Ocean
- jqpabc123 5y agoBut what happens if the Chinese recover pieces of it from the ocean and figure out how to waste trillions of dollars to no good effect too? /sarcasm Wouldn't we have been much better served using all that money to figure out how to manufacture more/better microchips? The StarTrek fantasy will still be there in a century or two.
- jeffwass 5y agoIgnoring your sarcasm and focusing on your second point : One big example is SpaceX. I don’t think they’d be as successful as they are right now if they didn’t have some of that initial funding from NASA to help them bootstrap to where they are today. This is one stellar example of how federal research funding dollars can generate positive societal benefits through the transfer to private industry. Of course there are some companies that just siphon federal dollars without much to show in return, but for SpaceX they have really returned multiples on those initial “investments”.
- ydlr 5y agoI think you just found a mission statement for NASA that congress can get behind: Welfare for Billionaires.
- jqpabc123 5y agoSo we need the ISS so we can use taxpayer money to fund billionaires to develop rockets to launch to the ISS? See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning Where would we be without SpaceX? Pretty much where we are now --- struggling to find enough chips to build cars and Raspberry PIs.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoIt would be nice if we could do both.
- jqpabc123 5y agoYes. But unfortunately, the one being addressed won't have any real impact for generations while more immediate needs are being ignored. NASA has spent trillions studying the effects of weightlessness on people. In comparison, they have spent virtually nothing on protecting the plant from an asteroid strike or mitigating the effects of global warming --- both of which are way more pressing concerns. Studying people in space is about as practical as addressing global warming by funding research on Dyson spheres.
- JKCalhoun 5y agoGlobal warming, I agree, should be everyone's highest priority. Asteroid strike ... hasn't it been a while since the Earth has seen one on a scale that would rival global warming? Worrying about an asteroid strike seems like something that has stirred the public imagination but has a crazy low likelihood.
- jqpabc123 5y agoIt's been a while --- but most scientists consider a significant asteroid strike to be a near certainty --- they just can't say when. Based on *known* asteroids, the probability by 2300 has been calculated at about 1 in 2000. But don't relax just yet, we find previously unknown asteroids all the time. Just last year, one (2021 UA1) flew by Antarctica undetected until after it has passed at a distance of about 1400 miles. But even if we detect one, there is no real working plan in place to try and deflect it. Thanks NASA --- this is why we give you the big bucks! Physicist Stephen Hawking, in his final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, considered an asteroid collision to be the single biggest threat to the planet.
- bgun 5y agoWhile HN complains that we want cars without chips to begin with.
- yread 5y agoChips? We need more crisps
- emiliobumachar 5y agoThe ISS is a microgravity lab, and allows experiments in i.e. growing crystals. That's far out of my area of expertise, but it wouldn't surprise me if it eventually yielded some application in microchips.
- rtkwe 5y agoThere's research that can only be done in space because the microgravity allows smaller forces to be isolated and studied in ways they can't be on Earth. For one example they can grow protein crystals better up there which allow studying their structure and finding medical interventions to treat the diseases associated with them. https://www.issnationallab.org/iss360/probing-proteins-leveraging-microgravity-for-medically-important-molecular-crystallization/ https://www.issnationallab.org/iss360/probing-proteins-lever...
- jqpabc123 5y agoSo there is a "protein crystal disease"? How many people suffer from this?
- rtkwe 5y agoYes lots of diseases manifest as malformed proteins, to understand them you need to know the structure of the protein which is commonly done using x-ray crystallography which requires growing a crystal made of the thing you're studying. It's the way we learned the shape of DNA and a fundamental process for studying a lot of biological systems. Growing those crystals is tough on Earth because of gravity so they grew some on ISS they'd never managed to grow on Earth.
- jqpabc123 5y ago...they grew some on ISS they'd never managed to grow on Earth. It's nice they were able to grow some crystals that never occur on earth because of --- gravity. But is this valuable in any way back on earth? Highly doubtful. Probably about as productive as funding for an anti-gravity device on earth --- which the military is doing by the way.
- rtkwe 5y agoI've said it 2 times now basically but I'll spell it out I guess. With the crystals they can determine the structure of errant proteins and develop treatments to target them to help people with the diseases these proteins create. Without the structure of the protein this is on the scale of extremely difficult to impossible.
- tedchs 5y agoCrazy idea: are there enough space nerds who would pay for a small momento piece of ISS that it might be worthwhile to disassemble it in space and bring parts back to Earth?
- pc86 5y agoEven if you broke it into thousands of pieces and brought it back I think the cost would be astronomical. You've got to launch a craft up to take it apart and bring pieces back, potentially multiple times, compared to the cost of just blasting it into the water.
- bob1029 5y ago> the cost would be astronomical Absolutely. But, I think we may be also be underestimating the size of the market for things like this... Just search for Enron coffee mugs or pokemon cards on Ebay.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoNo but a kickstarter to take a ship, and drag the ocean for the pieces would be cool.
- emiliobumachar 5y agoThe ISS routinely discards thrash by placing it in returning Soyuz capsules which would otherwise return empty. I wonder if there's a market for this thrash.
- _Microft 5y agoIdea: gently boost it into a much higher orbit, leave it there and designate it as (one of) the first Space Heritage Site(s).
- Someone 5y agoFirst? Neil Armstrong’s footprints on the moon already are somewhat protected (https://astronomy.com/news/2021/01/neil-armstrongs-bootprint-and-other-lunar-artifacts-are-now-protected-by-us-law https://astronomy.com/news/2021/01/neil-armstrongs-bootprint...)
- Nbox9 5y agoWouldn’t that be a _lunar_ heritage site, not a _space_ heritage site?
- jasonpeacock 5y agoWell, the moon _is_ in space... ;)
- 0xFFFE 5y agoYou need to keep it fueled for it to maintain whatever orbit it gets pushed into. Orbital decay and everything.
- gameswithgo 5y agoIf the orbit is higher it can last for thousands or millions of years
- ethbr0 5y agoOrbital decay comes from something. At some distance from Earth, you run out of somethings (most critically: atmosphere) decaying an orbit. So past a certain distance, orbits are effectively "forever" ones. It just takes more energy to get there, which is why the ISS is where it is.
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- JKCalhoun 5y agoI never understood why a free-fall from space with a parachute would not work. (I bring this up because I would propose bringing down sections of ISS with extremely large parachutes.) I get there is no air in space, and how thin it is as you approach the Earth's surface. But it is a gradient after all. If a falling body begins to heat up, that suggests it has entered a region with some atmosphere — and so some parachute utility. In my mind the effectiveness of the parachute would track the rise in atmospheric density — just as the rise in atmospheric density became a heat issue. In other words, the parachute would slowly become effective, enough so to keep the falling body from ever attaining a speed that generates too much heat (with regard to the density of the atmosphere it is traversing). How is the model in my head wrong? Does the parachute effectiveness lag with regard to the rise of the "heat gradient"?
- emiliobumachar 5y agoMy guess is that your idea is right, but the gradient is just not smooth enough.
- richardwhiuk 5y agoSize of parachute for the ISS is prohibitively large. Heating is all concentrated on a single profile.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago> I never understood why a free-fall from space with a parachute would not work. It depends what you mean by "from space". The ISS is in space and also _in orbit_, so is moving laterally at about 17,500 mph / 28,000 km/h / 7777 m/s / Mach 22 (1) It's not just about falling, it's about the heat and stress of hitting the air when moving sideways at nearly 8 kilometres per second. The "sub-orbital hop" scenario that Bezos and Branson do involves technically "falling from space" but is very different as they're not moving sideways. 1) https://www.space.com/16748-international-space-station.html https://www.space.com/16748-international-space-station.html
- theandrewbailey 5y ago> How is the model in my head wrong? Does the parachute effectiveness lag with regard to the rise of the "heat gradient"? Consider that landing on Mars is difficult: it has enough of an atmosphere to be a problem (lots of heat on re-entry), but too thin to be useful (limited drag). With that in mind, my guess is that the ISS would heat up faster than the parachute would slow it down.
- rtkwe 5y agoI believe it when there's a replacement launched, it's been about to be decommissioned for the last 2 decades with the same idea that there will be a commercial station to replace it and it always gets pushed back because space is still too damn expensive for anyone other than a government to put people up there. Maybe NASA's hand will be forced by the slow degradation of the structure from heat cycling causing leaks and cracks we're starting to see, but I think that's more likely to wind up with a break in this continuous habitation streak than with a proper replacement.
- oceanplexian 5y agoThe entire ISS could be launched in 3, maybe 4 SpaceX Starship launches assuming Elon is correct about his claims for the payload. To put in in perspective, the ISS required 36 Space Shuttle launches at a cost of $1.5B per launch ($54B). For that cost, assuming a pessimistic cost for Starship of $10M per launch (5,400/4 launches), you could launch 1,350 International Space Stations for the same price as the ISS cost to launch flying on the shuttle. To me it sounds not only realistic that we would launch a replacement but surpass it by 100x or 1000x.
- WarChortle 5y agoWe have come a long way from the late 90s and early 2000s when ISS was built. If NASA was properly funded I'm sure it would also be able to build a competing station cheaper/easier as well. ISS and NASA paved the way for SpaceX. So them being to do it cheaper isn't as impressive as it was bound to happen.
- CookiesOnMyDesk 5y agoThat would also be the first time Elon is correct about his claims, then.
- Fatnino 5y agoHis claims about falcon 9 mostly line up with reality.
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- hakko 5y agoThe ISS takes over 10% of NASA's budget at over $3b/year in maintenance, so they won't be able to take care of it and sustain their proposed moon mission at the same time. Plus the low-hanging fruit for research has already been performed. My unpopular opinion is that manned spaceflight is an expensive national vanity project for modest research gains, and the projects that have been most successfull from a science perspective have been the deep space probes/space telescopes.
- londons_explore 5y ago> modest research gains You also have to add in the PR benefits of each. If children aren't interested in space today, there won't be any government funding for space missions when those children become voters. In that light, dropping manned missions entirely will probably reduce interest in space quite a bit. Probably moreso than a rover on mars that figures out the composition of some rock.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago> Probably moreso than a rover on mars that figures out the composition of some rock. Over the past 20yr hose rovers had gone from "testing the composition of probably dead rocks" to "actively looking for signs of current or former microbial life". Even the landings have gone from "shoot the thing at the planet and wait to hear back from it" to a live-streamed helicopter drop. I think they've excliped the ISS in terms of excitement for the junior-high and above crowd. Skyping someone in a blue jumpsuit who's floating around in a tube doesn't have the cool factor that "literally on another planet" gets you.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoWhy not leave it and add more and more modules over time, until it is a giant space city?
- zardo 5y agoIt needs to be boosted every month or so or it will be dragged down into thicker atmosphere.
- iso1210 5y agoBecause it keeps falling down to earth due to the (very thin) atmosphere at that altitude slowing it down. To counteract that periodically it's boosted by a visiting Russian spacecraft, however that won't last forever. American spacecraft don't dock in the right location to allow the boost. On top of that, old things require constant and increasing costs in maintenance. At some point it becomes more economical to build a new one than keep an old one running. And in any case the value of keeping it running has to outstrip the cost of keeping it running, with the cost increasing, and the value not (It claims it's international, but China isn't involved, they have their own space station. With blackjack and hookers), and Russia can't afford it. By 2031 SpaceX will hopefully have an orbiting Starship, that craft alone has an internal volume around the same as the entire Space Station's pressurised volume. If Starship is successful, a new station based on launching and docking skills built through the starship program, will be far better value for money.
- altendo 5y agoI wonder if there is a way to ditch the ISS without contributing to oceanic pollution. I get that this is likely a low-cost solution (disassembling it and transporting it wouldn't be cheap) but it would be nice to not contribute to the trash already floating around.
- gameswithgo 5y agoAs long as you remove any toxic stuff ahead of time, dumping the metal isn't so bad. It will become a thriving ecosystem on the ocean floor.