The Space Station Is Becoming a Spy Satellite for Wildlife | Hacker News Reader

The Space Station Is Becoming a Spy Satellite for Wildlife

theatlantic.com

87 pointsHooke23 comments

It makes me oddly sad that it's "the" space station.

The SciFi fan in me thinks we should shove a couple more up there to keep it company.

China has Tiangong-1 [1], which is their first step towards a space station. You can spot it with the naked eye [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-1 [2] http://www.n2yo.com/?s=37820

Or you can think the other way around: it is THE space station because countries around the world collaborated to create one large one, instead of each one trying to launch a single small one.

There is a lot of synergy from having a single large space station vs. many of small ones.

More of an emacs philosophy than a unix one.

I agree but there is the small issue of cost. I've read before that the ISS was the most expensive project in global history at > $150B. I used google to confirm the cost and was stuck by 1) the fact that "Is the International Space Station real" was in the autocomplete options, and 2) How bloody expensive the War on Terror was/is ($1.7 Trillion according to Google).

The ISS's cost was substantially due to the cost of the Shuttle program. Building an equivalent space station today using the rockets and systems we have available now would likely be considerably cheaper, by a factor of 10 or more.

Do you have cites to support this? My intuition says that only holds if you compare shuttle-as-it-was with other-rockets-as-hoped.

It should almost go without saying. The Shuttle was one of the most expensive launch vehicles in history.

There are several helpful counterpoints to hand though. Two being the history Russian and Chinese space stations. All of them, including the Russian components of the ISS, have been vastly less expensive per module than the US components of ISS. Even if you factor in building and launching modules by US standards on US rockets it's still vastly less expensive than using the Shuttle.

Moreover, we've already seen that it's possible for US companies to deliver spacecraft to the ISS in the commercial cargo program. It would actually be just as easy to deliver components to the station using similar systems for about the same cost as a cargo launch today (around $150 mil at the high end). Over the roughly 2 dozen assembly flights for the Shuttle assembled side of the ISS that works out to an equivalent cost of about $4 billion, plus extra module construction costs. Keeping in mind that such flights have already been used or are being planned to use for adding modules to the ISS (such as BEAM and IDA).

Thanks for the info. Was the Russian contribution to the ISS really 10 times cheaper on a per module basis?

The average cost of a space shuttle mission was $450m. That's 8 astronauts and 23,000kg of payload. [0]

Soyuz costs $62.7m/seat. [1] Which means that 8 seats to the ISS on soyuz is actually more expensive than a shuttle launch.

I couldn't find how much non-astronaut Soyuz payloads cost.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 Full Thrust can lift almost as much payload as the Shuttle, at 22,800kg.

I'm not sure how much each Falcon 9 launch to the ISS costs. Maybe someone else can chime in?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program

1. http://www.space.com/20897-nasa-russia-astronaut-launches-20...

Note that the incremental cost of a shuttle mission was $450 million, but that ignores the high fixed costs. Excluding sunk development costs the average price of a shuttle mission throughout the life of the program was a whopping $1.2 billion.

OK, so that's a factor of 2.7, but not even halfway to a factor of 10.

Sorry to be a stickler on this, but I like to use the ISS as an example of outrageously inefficient science, and so I'd like to make sure this isn't completely attributable to the cost of the shuttle (which, I think we agree, was it's own terrible boondoggle).

approximately $150 million[1] though it was a couple of years ago, before the accident. probably the right ballpark.

[1] http://www.parabolicarc.com/2016/07/11/upmass/

Of course, a man-rated Dragon trip will presumably cost significantly more.

The entire point of the ISS was to consolidate all the efforts and budgets of various space programs and build one trans-national station. Why would you participate in this and then also build a second one? What benefit would you get? This is like saying its depressing that there's only one internet.

Arguably, without the ISS there probably wouldn't be any space stations. Stations were falling out of fashion by the 90s and even before were largely propagandist projects. The ISS was an attempt to turn all this wasted effort into something world usable (not just for the space faring powers of the time) and into something more science-centric. It was also an attempt to stop Russian militarization of space like mounting guns on stations (Salyut 3's 23mm cannon) or building more space battle platforms (Polyus). In fact, parts of the old Polyus system are now part of the Zarya module on the ISS. Seems like win-win for international cooperation, science, and peace.

Space hotel? Habitats? Micro-g factories? All that expansion into space that was supposed to happen regardless of the impracticalities.

There is very little information about the sensors themselves. Would love to find out more if someone has that information.

>The first-generation models will weigh 5 grams but the team wants to get them down to just one, which would allow them to track even the lightest fliers like swifts. Each tag comes equipped with a solar panel, GPS, and a huge memory, and can measure acceleration, temperature, bearing, pressure, light intensity, and more. Unlike the smallest current data-loggers, they can transmit information, too. They can even be reprogrammed from space.

I thought this was a pretty decent amount of info for a non-tech news source.

Good point. Just looking to see if there is more details on how the sensors were made so small and still able to transmit their location. It just blows my mind.

The Datasheet on their site has some tech details:

http://icarusinitiative.org/sites/default/files/ICARUS%20SP%...

That one doesn't seem to be loading for me, but the Internet Archive has a version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160331224522/http://icarusinit...

Interesting, but why involve the ISS? Putting a receiver/relay into orbit seems the perfect job for a small cube sat, or just a regular com sat. Why all the hassle and delay of human spaceflight? And, being on the ISS, the receiver will be stuck in the ISS orbit. that means not tracking anything at higher latitudes higher than the ISS inclination (ie the far north/south above/below 52*).

Because there are already regular delivery trips to the ISS, and the cost of such experiments is thus substantially subsidized by ISS operations. A cube sat would have a very limited lifespan and cost more than their program budget on its own, besides being too limited to be useful.

If their program proves successful they might be able to raise enough money to put hosted payloads on other spacecraft, one of the best being Iridium NEXT. But for now the ISS is their best shot.

Would be so much better if there were more than one ISS around the globe and use it for this kind of role to stop putting lots of little satellites up.

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