NASA official warns private sector: We’re moving on from low-Earth orbit
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
The nails aren't a completely tortured analogy to repurposing the operation/maintenance budget.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
We need to be able to build bigger modules for bigger experiments, we need more power, we need it to be higher to further avoid atmospheric drag and to be used as a launch platform for further experiments.
There are various proposals for both low orbit space stations like the Russian OPSEK which will be recoverable, and various future uses for the ISS* including using Node 4 and some of the ISS modules for the EGP which will be a refueling station parked around E/M L1 (approx half way to the moon). The EGP could be build on the existing ISS and launched to L1 since it will have a central node and a service module additional modules even a habitat module could be later added.
* Please note that this will not reuse existing ISS modules in orbit but will reuse built/planned unlaunched parts like Node 4 and Zvezda 2.
* The ISS is actually falling back to earth and needs to be lifted from time to time. You need fuel for that.
* The personnel must be changed frequently (too much time in microgravity is harmful to the body). You need to take people in and out.
* The station itself is very little compared to a building. You can't store years of supplies there, just 12 months or so. You need to send up supplies.
So, you must send fuel, people and supplies very often to the ISS. This is very very expensive.
So, it comes a time where you should consider shutting it down or keep using it.
Keep using it for what? That is the question.
The ISS is constantly supplied and refueled that's not a reason why not to maintain it, it's an argument why we should not have built it in the first place which is a very silly argument to make.
We need space stations the more the merrier, China and India are getting into the game, Russia wants a new one of their own, and the public sector is also looking at such platforms for everything from micro-gravity manufacturing of drugs to space hotels.
The argument that people in favor of decommissioning the ISS should make is we need a bigger, better, further away one that we could use to go cheaply to the moon, asteroid belt, mars, and the Jovian and Saturnian moons.
That is the answer to my question. Should we sink the ship because it is old and we have no use for it or should we sink it because we need another one and can't bear the cost of maintaining two?
If someone is willing to use it, then they must pay for it's maintenance. For NASA it's mission was accomplished, and it's time to move on.
MIR did not de-orbit until the ISS was well underway. More importantly, while building the ISS we had the Space Shuttle, which was like a temporary space station in terms of its habitat. The Space Shuttle pressurized volume was about 75 m^3, and it had an airlock and a big robotic arm.
In contrast, every orbiter currently under development is a little capsule without either. The SpaceX dragon is only 10m^3 of pressurized habitat, and every other is within 2x of that. These are ferries, not platforms for long-term construction projects in orbit. The ISS is the only option for the foreseeable future.
So I hope, if we want to build an interplanetary spacecraft or more-permanent space station, that we find a way to leverage the ISS to reduce the cost and effort.
These missions cost something like half a billion each.
> 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_E...) that will exactly have this role of an intermediary "gas station" between earth and space exploration
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.
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.
The L2 Lagrange point is "behind" the moon.
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.
The size of asteroid we are talking about here is likely to be closer to a container ship or maybe a small hill. Perhaps 1 millionth of the size/mass of Ceres at the most.
"Although the L1, L2, and L3 points are nominally unstable, it turns out that it is possible to find (unstable) periodic orbits around these points, at least in the restricted three-body problem. These periodic orbits, referred to as "halo" orbits, do not exist in a full n-body dynamical system such as the Solar System. However, quasi-periodic (i.e. bounded but not precisely repeating) orbits following Lissajous-curve trajectories do exist in the n-body system. These quasi-periodic Lissajous orbits are what most of Lagrangian-point missions to date have used. Although they are not perfectly stable, a relatively modest effort at station keeping can allow a spacecraft to stay in a desired Lissajous orbit for an extended period of time. It also turns out that, at least in the case of Sun–Earth-L1 missions, it is actually preferable to place the spacecraft in a large-amplitude (100,000–200,000 km or 62,000–124,000 mi) Lissajous orbit, instead of having it sit at the Lagrangian point, because this keeps the spacecraft off the direct line between Sun and Earth, thereby reducing the impact of solar interference on Earth–spacecraft communications. Similarly, a large-amplitude Lissajous orbit around L2 can keep a probe out of Earth's shadow and therefore ensures a better illumination of its solar panels."
Earth-Sun L4 and L5 is more stable, but almost useless as a waypoint; however there are already naturally captured asteroids (and a lot of dust) already there.
All orbits require station keeping in a dynamic solar system that is circling around a black hole.
I am totally with you on using the asteroids for materials, but I am not sure that they would provide useful gravity either. Even one of the largest near-earth asteroids, 433 Eros, only has a surface gravity of 0.0059 m/s^2. Is that useful?
I mean that the habitable modules would be located inside silos embedded within the asteroid, so that the living space would be entirely surrounded by radiation shielding mass.
That would be pretty dark and cold.
The problem in space is generally getting rid of heat. Vacuum is a great insulator, insulation material is effective and relatively cheap, and radiative cooling is fairly slow. The other thermal problem is exposure to direct sunlight. The asteroid as a shell of massive shielding would help in this regard.
With enough time, and high enough specific impulse/in place fuel extraction, you can move anything.
I suppose that whould cost a lot more than 140 billions.
Another reason is resupply. The station can only run for a few months or a year without resupply, and the further you move it away the more difficult and expensive resupply becomes.
There are a host of other reasons, but they all stem from the fact that the ISS was engineered to always be close to Earth, and the space environment elsewhere is sufficiently different that the ISS basically can't work in a dramatically different orbit.
We can hardly park the ISS in a NASA hangar, refurbish it, and send it back on its way.
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.
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.
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.
I actually deal with this all the time in hobby electronics you buy various parts which all of them have a spec with +- certain percent and you when you buy them from a single batch you can be quite out of luck and find out that when you add them all together the tolerances just stack against your initial design.
If 0.01% is out of spec then you need tighter tolerance specs on your individual components or otherwise your design does not mathematically make sense.
This sounds like a design and process control issue as much as anything.
Not to mention that increased tolerances means higher costs and there's a point where you can't adhere to them physically and as far as real world manufacturing goes the tighter your tolerances are the tighter the control and QA needs to be which results only in diminishing returns.
When you end up manufacturing things tolerances can be skewed by a 100 different reasons from a slightly different zero and certification process to different CAD/CNC software which rounds up thing slightly differently. The ISS development actually learned quite a few things with that and they've both adjusted their process segmented the manufacturing by entire modules rather than individual parts then the only thing you need to really worry about are the tolerances for the actual dock which have quite a bit of wiggle room. If you had to make the frame for the cupola in Italy, the outer housing in France the Windows in Germany, the Shutters in the Netherlands and assemble them in the UK you would ended up with similar problems.
Saying there's nothing wrong with X you just need a better process can be said for pretty much everything but that argument rarely holds water when you deal with real world applications, there's a reason why there are entire engineering disciplines for manufacturing and process control.
So no as an Engineer you need to design tolerances not for the worse case scenario but for the actual manufacturing process you are using and the controls you can enact on that process. When that process is then spread out across as many parties as possible it's no longer the process you've started with and quite likely isn't neither and ideal process nor one you could ever really optimize.
There's a good reason why some of the worlds most advanced engineering parts are still quite often hand fitted at the end, and that's when you work with a single manufacturing process in a single factory. When you spread that out you end up with parts that sometimes can't even be hand fitted anymore.
And the reason it was a deeply flawed concept was...politics. The Shuttle that the politicians would allow NASA to build was not the Shuttle that the NASA engineers originally wanted to build.
The Saturn was given to us by basically empowering a dictator to run the program and get things done, a lot like a CEO. The Space Shuttle was given to us by typical bureaucracy, and lies. Lots and lots of lies told with a straight face to the public.
I don't know that private companies can ever compete with NASA on the scale of spending, but given NASA's current relatively tiny budget, it doesn't seem out of the question.
And I like to daydream about a future where the space shuttle never happened and the Saturn XX single stage super rocket takes vacationers to the moon and then lands itself on its landing pad ready for a quick refuel and return trip.
You forgot the military. They're e.g. the reason it has such big wings, because they wanted a huge single-orbit crossrange capability. Presumably for spying, maybe as a backup in case the Russians shot down a Keyhole or something.
http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum30/HTML/001340.html http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=4998.0
Your sources seem more credible, but it's (obviously) hard to get concrete facts on military applications of the shuttle.
That applies to every large organization. I've never heard of or worked in one that was otherwise.
Contrary to the conservative myth, the U.S. government's large organizations have a pretty good track record of innovation and getting things done. Consider the U.S. military, NASA (did you see those photos of Pluto?), most science funding, my highways are safe and very functional, my water and food supply are clean, prisons effectively hold prisoners, dams don't burst, my lights turn on, etc.
Of course they are very imperfect, like all large organizations, and constant vigilence and improvement is necessary. But I reject the idea that government is somehow innately incompetent and private business is innately superior. It's almost a rejection of the idea that democratic self-government can be effective. Really they are different tools for different jobs.
One person's anecdotal experience doesn't confirm anything. There are probably tens of millions of government employees in the United States alone.
> It's more then just being a large organization there is a real lack of competitive pressures that force efficiency.
That's true in many large organizations. Inefficiencies due to employees' (including managers') lack of exposure with any marketplace consequence are a very common, well-studied problem. See: Dilbert.