NASA Announces Plans to Destroy the International Space Station | Hacker News Reader

NASA Announces Plans to Destroy the International Space Station

futurism.com

28 pointsgtirloni11 comments

It's disappointing, but I'll offer a reality check here. The space station is a mechanical piece of hardware that degrades with wear and tear over time. It's not like Star Trek where every ship and station is perfectly gleaming in every episode. Things break down and require constant maintenance.

The space station is much more like a thirty-year-old RV than Deep Space Nine, except you're a billion dollars away from the nearest auto parts store. It's not going to last forever.

> NASA is selling the retirement as a “transition of operations to commercial services,” reiterating its emphasis on supporting private-public endeavors in Earth’s orbit.

> It’ll be the sad end to one of the biggest international scientific cooperatives ever undertaken and may well mark the decline of the multi-nation approach to space research and exploration.

In a way... what happened to the internet, the privatization and commercialization, is going to happen to space. I don't know if I should like that.

There must be something missing here. The ISS is not exactly NASA's. It is NASA's but not only. So NASA alone can not decide when to destroy it.

Strange title. "NASA makes plans for decommissioning the ISS when the time comes"

NASA does not decide that. Its the US Congress who will decide. This is just NASA and the Biden plan for whenever it will end, but they wont actually decide. They can just make it harder for the next president and congress to extend it to not work towards extending it.

How to dispose it was always gone be by dropping it into the ocean.

I though that I in ISS stands for international.

I always saw it that way, away from all the global politics and bullshit, "for science". Imagine if this turned into circus auction to lure Musk or Bezos to buy the damn thing instead..

If someone is willing to keep it going after the governments of the world no longer are, why not? If there's more than one, an auction sounds reasonable.

You have the exact literally 100% wrong opinion about ISS. Its the exact opposite of 'for science' its DIRECT result of foreign policy in the whole ISS project is inherently political and has been for 30 years.

Neither Musk nor Bezos would ever want to buy it, and almost certainty nobody else would either.

And if you think Musk or Bezos could make it more of circus then it already is, you have not been paying attention. The ISS storyline over the last couple years is closer to Tom Clancy novel then a science project.

I guess you take the motto "politics ruins everything" scorched earth approach more seriously.

It might stand for international but the the stuff that actually matters to keep it running is American.

The European have given up even providing cargo shipments, instead providing the support module for Orion. All the core life support and power modules are US.

Simply put, what the US decides is what the European and Japan will follow along with.

The Russians make grand claims about how they can split of their part of the ISS and run their own station. But the Russians claim a lot of things. Non are actually going to happen.

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