Save Freedom: We Must Stop the Destruction of the International Space Station
spacenews.com
spacenews.com
Have you done the math on the amount of fuel that needs to be transported up given the specific impulse of Dragon thrusters its total usable delta-v? Or the risk of transporting to the new orbit while protecting it from the various microimpacts? The article is primarily and argument from emotion rather than one based on numbers.
A modified Progress cargo vehicle is docked to the tail end of the Russian segment. The docking part of Progress is then permanently installed by a closeout crew, and additional power to the pack routed. Progress descent/service module stack is then jettisoned, exposing the thruster pack to the space, allowing the ISS to be boosted by the pack just like how it's normally done. No way ISS needs more than a Progress full of Xenon to get to a centuries lasting orbit, but additional tanks can even be installed as expendable Progress spacecrafts to other ports if needed.
I think similar device can be delivered by a Dragon, but it'll have to replace PMA-2 in Node 2 V-bar side, so logistics would be more complicated(dock second to last crew to PMA-2, dock the last crew to PMA-3, get second to last crew off, move PMA-2 somewhere else, dock Dragon to relocated PMA-2, install pack to CBM, everyone leaves and pack activates).
> The ISS be stripped of whatever of the billions of dollars of still-useful hardware and tech it has aboard. This can be auctioned to one of the several new commercial space station facilities, or even, if appropriate, transferred to NASA’s planned lunar orbiting “Gateway” facility.
Are there any such reusable systems aboard the ISS? Can they be removed?
> The station be moved to a medium-high orbit, sealed, and declared a Universal Heritage Site.
What system would be used to bring people and supplies to that orbit? How much would it cost per launch?
And the elephant in the room: How can this project guarantee the safety of the station long term? We already know about cracks appearing and Mir also decayed over time.
What people? What supplies? It would be parked there, noone would be visiting any time soon.
> And the elephant in the room: How can this project guarantee the safety of the station long term? We already know about cracks appearing and Mir also decayed over time.
Nothing is guaranteed, but a lump of unpressurized metal in a high orbit wouldn't face many issues.
> Mir also decayed over time.
Orbital decay can be ignored for objects high enough.
Moving it to a higher orbit and just leaving it there is a way to ensure there's a long lived source of space debris. The sealing it up part kind of implies there wouldn't be any crew or supplies needed, but the thing will suffer collisions and decay (fall apart) on its own.
Either way, the residual value of these systems is far less than the cost to produce them initially.
Source: Worked in aerospace for a number of years
I do think the rest of this makes a lot of sense. Recycle the thing, scrap it, over many decades. Get the humans out, boost it, make sure it'll hold together. And then let whomever wants to come off pull parts or material.
This should be a lesson in space manufacturing/assembly/recycling. We could learn so much about how to work on space from this. And ideally there'd be no rush. Boost it, and wait 10 years for space industry to be more caught up, more interested & able to start work.
- sixteen thermal cycles a day
- constant vibration (sometimes severely when it was boosted) which means fatigue
- numerous effects of radiation on every material in the station, including the metal that makes up its structure (hardening/embrittlement), but also every seal keeping people alive
I guess it justifies a steady stream of funding in the way that a program like Apollo did not. It seems there is little science of value happening there, and most of that is the science of keeping primates alive in space.
I think some claims are either that building it causes some useful basic research and that it is good practice for some future crude space mission. For the first claim, I don’t really see why the ISS is better than the regular aviation research done by nasa combined with the kind of space missions that don’t involve primates (telescopes and rovers and probes and suchlike), especially when you consider the number that might be attempted without so much of the budget going to the ISS. For the second claim I would observe first that there have not been many missions for all this practice and I will secondly say that I don’t really understand the point of these proposed future missions anyway.
Mostly I see the ISS as an enormous opportunity cost preventing nasa budgets from being spent on more scientifically interesting missions. But maybe there’s some advantage I don’t see, or removing the ISS wouldn’t make that much more money for the kind of missions I do think are worthwhile.
> If NASA dumps ISS on the Earth, it will be the worst public relations disaster in its history. At the very moment, new generations of eco-conscious young people are taking the reins of control, as the agency that has stood for a hopeful vision of the future will be trashing the planet. Ridiculous. Worse, one of the world’s most exciting companies will be spattered by the debris along the way. It is an awful decision, a terrible plan and a signal that America isn’t serious about staying in space. For if it were, it would protect such a treasured symbol of what went into making it happen.
Deorbiting an unused spacecraft is absolutely the responsible thing to do. If you care about our future in space, filling up our space environment with abandoned objects is a terrible policy.
E.G. Punt the decision a few more years. Maybe Starship works and other options get cheeper or we can even bring the ISS back to earth?
Other options:
Land it somewhere on the moon (maybe safely distant but conveniently near by other historic sites for a future Moon Museum?)
Boost it out of the Sol system perpendicular to the plane, just a little above escape velocity. If we ever get better space ships it'll be waiting.
That would be one hell of a museum
Its a fragile complex structure, that would have to be disassembled into pieces loaded into cargo bay and than landed.
How do we claim that as an American Heritage site?
We have to remove ISS before it becomes a hazard to orbital operations in general. It will degenerate into quite a bit of debris, even if we attempt to make it a historical site.
If money were no object, I think we would have a duty to future generations to save the entire ISS - the value being able to "touch" history is immeasurable.
Man with an agenda. Why not build one yourself and sell staff out of it ?
They have so much content, and they suck at showing it off well