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Comment by f6v | Hacker News Reader

Is there a scientific utility in orbital space station? We’ve already had MIR and ISS. NASA seems to be focused on Moon and Mars. I don’t understand why Roscosmos is talking about launching new station in 2025. I mean, it’s useful for Chinese since they didn’t do that before, but for others? Maybe if it was used as a space hub for other missions...

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The ISS has run many hundreds[1] of experiments, and more are sent up with every launch. It's an invaluable resource, because it's the only (relatively) cheap resource we have for running microgravity experiments which require human input.

They're not the sort of headline-grabbing experiments that most people seem to associate with space (I don't know why they do, most science isn't very exciting), but it's facilitating a lot of science which couldn't reasonably be done without it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_research_on_the_Int...

In a addition to the purely scientific utility, a low orbit space station is also the perfect place for microgravity manufacturing. The ISS already manufactured ZBLAN optical fibre, and there are other promising applications in optics. I wouldn't be surprised if over the years we find a lot of production processes that benefit from the absence of gravity

the 2025 station they're talking about is the sino-russian moon base[0], not an earth satellite.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-russ...

AFAIK they're building an orbital station [1].

> The Deputy Prime Minister also noted that Russia will be able to cope with the construction on its own, but if anyone wants to take part in the project, they will not refuse.

[1]: https://www.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/20/04/2021/607e83219...

yeah, but the 2025 one is the moon base.

i think the main reason russia wants to build the space station is for arctic surveillance. when global warming opens up arctic trade routes and resources (oil), there's going to be a lot of geopolitical shenanigans. idk if you remember when trump wanted to buy greenland and everyone laughed at him, it was related to this.

Can't you do that with simple satellites?

If you're putting your best quality spy equipment in space, presumably you want to be able to do regular maintenance on it.

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