Space Station Gets A Possible New Lease On Life
NASA gets White House backing to extend space station by 4 years
“The world’s most expensive science project — the $100 billion-plus International Space Station — is poised to get four more years in orbit. According to documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, NASA plans to announce this week that it has White House approval to extend the station’s operations by four years until 2024. The decision follows years of pressure by top NASA officials, who consider the station a critical steppingstone to future exploration. But a four-year extension likely would cost NASA about $3 billion a year from 2021 to 2024. That’s a major chunk of the agency’s annual budget, which is now about $17 billion, and a longer mission could force NASA to make tough financial decisions in the future.”
NASA Will Face Solomon’s Choice in 2014, earlier post
“If a budget in the range of $16.6 billion is what happens NASA will have a major problem maintaining both the International Space Station (ISS) and the SLS/Orion Exploration program. Given that the funds are simply not going to be available to keep the ISS alive and functioning and to fully construct and operate the SLS/Orion system, something has to give. Are we going to have to kill one to insure the other’s survival? That is the choice that that is presenting itself – a clear recipe for disaster as far as NASA’s human space flight plans are concerned.”
Obama Administration Extends International Space Station until at Least 2024
“First, it will allow NASA to complete necessary research activities aboard the ISS in support of planned long-duration human missions beyond low-Earth orbit–including our planned human mission to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s. NASA has determined that research on ISS is necessary to mitigate fully 21 of the 32 human-health risks anticipated on long-duration missions. A related critical function of ISS is testing the technologies and spacecraft systems necessary for humans to safely and productively operate in deep space. Extending ISS until 2024 will give us the necessary time to bring these systems to maturity.”
Whether NASA gets an extension or not, what happens at the end of the station’s operations life? I hope they are not going to just de-orbit, and burn up all of that expensive hardware. If they plan to do that, anyway, why not donate it to a research organization which cannot afford their own, but could utilize one that is already built, as well as being able to afford to pay the cost of getting men and supplies to and from it? Or am I dreaming?
if an international group of space agencies could not afford to upkeep the space station, how would a private group be able to?
yes, de-orbit into the pacific is the planned end for the ISS. same end that MIR had.
Transfer some of the guts to a Bigelow facility.
If Bigelow wants to provide the replacement for the ISS he needs to do it for less than $2 billion a year.
NASA will either just contract space from a bigelow facility, or open bids for a new station. I highly doubt that NASA will get any funding anymore for big rockets, humans to LEO launchers, or stations. NASA will finally become a consumer of goods and services. NASA needs to move on to space based vehicles.
OMG! The answer is 20 – 22 Billion per year for God’s sake! Good Grief! How pitiful, Congress wastes this much money in a week!
ISS is an optimization problem. Optimize ROI dependent on time and cost. Recent articles had stated that upgrades/mods to ISS would be necessary to operate until 2028. This article states otherwise, but it was my guess that something optimal would be between 2020 and 2028. Voila! Some extension was also necessary to give the private partners in Commercial Crew and COTS, the time and funds to achieve their own returns – profit and maturity of their solutions.
However, Commercial Crew is not just the means to resume Human Spaceflight (HSF) from American soil with American built vehicles. It is the future of NASA’s HSF, period! Bolden, Grunsfeld and others at HQ have their heads in the sand. They refuse to recognize using Commercial Crew (Dragon, CST-100) to get humans to LEO and commercial heavy lift to deliver hardware for missions beyond LEO as a viable alternative to SLS and Orion. And they hang from a fine thread – Falcon Heavy has not yet flown. The first flight is this year, an Air Force payload is lifted in 2016 and IntelSat lifted to GEO in 2017. Three flights before SLS flies once. Pressures will mount.
So now ISS in NASA’s funding has been set to a constant for 10 years ($3B/year… $30 Billion ). Is it not a good argument that if we increase funding for commercial crew, we will reduce ISS costs by reducing or eliminating more Soyuz flights? Would it not be a better investment to give the funds to Commercial Crew to assure or accelerate development. SLS and Orion are not likely to be terminated soon but we need to assure that Commercial Crew and COTS and add to this Planetary Sciences in SMD, are funded at the right levels.
Space based, reusable, Gas n’ Go, space vehicles is where NASA should be heading. Once SLS/MPCV finally die NASA can move on to the future. Space based commercial refueling and Gas n’ Go.
And do NOT get bogged down with landing on another gravity well. There are plenty of targets for roadtrips that do not involve spending billions for landers. We need reliable gas n go, muliti destination vehicles. Once we have that infrastructure in place it will be time for getting bogged down in one spot with a base.
I agree 1,000% on the gravity well issue — with respect to HSF; SMD is another story. The thing is, no one is going to react to a general statement like you’ve made. Until we name specific places to go, what we’d plan to do at each of those places, and what we expect to learn/gain from each of them (long and short term) — everything sufficiently quantified — then we don’t really have a basis for discussion. Step 2, of course, is realistic costing against a realistic schedule and time frame.
It’s pretty near impossible to accomplish the above in a blog post, but there are plenty of places to put it and then point to it from a post.
Just my thoughts.
Steve, the first rule of sales is … Sell the sizzle not the steak. It would be VERY easy to sell muliti destination over a single spot for the pictures of bootprints.
I agree and should have been more specific
I would center the campaign on the word Freedom. Spacebased, gas n’ go vehicles would give the Nation the freedom to travel ANYWHERE our Nation wants to. (the right wing would eat that up in the house) smiles
I hear you, but there’s more than one “buyer” that we have to sell to, all at the same time. The interested portion of the public might like the “anywhere” approach, but others, both for and against space, will immediately want to know how many adjusted dollars per year does anywhere cost?, what’s in it for me?, “where’s the pork?”, etc. I like the Freedom concept; it works in selling anything from hamburgers to pick-up trucks to vacation cruises, so it’ll probably do well here as well. The bottom line, though, is a lot of money, and decision makers are going to want a lot more than sales presentations. We need details and need to be able to answer any questions thrown at us, immediately, if we’re to hope to get any money. The thing about details is that they take a lot of work to produce and check and review. It’s a lot easier to produce visions and road maps and mission statements, so that’s all we ever get. And you can’t sell much of anything with them.
I agree with your summation. Is it a chicken and the egg senerio? Which comes first, pressure congress and they sell their constituants or sell the public so they pressure their congressional members.
Although the freedom meme has been slapped on fries et cetera it is a stonger meme when utilized with freedom of action.
A couple of take aways from the VSE “years”, though not really used was both the pay as you go slogan and the sprial design.
I believe both of those really apply when you are just working towards a vehicle and road trips. A spiral design is as natual as phi and provides great graphic symbology. From EM 1 & 2, Lunar Orbit, ES1 & 2, (hell every lagrange point from venus to mars, good place to look for small trojens) moons of mars and the asteroid belt.
A stepping stone approach, spiralling outward and pay as you go and bringing commercial aerospace along every step of the way.
I think the spiral design concept is extremely important and powerful. The problem is that it’s like a meshing of R&D and a regular NASA program, but only an engineering type will really understand this and see the utility in it.
Most people want their destinations and exciting events; they don’t want to go through iterative design cycles and redesigns in the name of a better, safer, sustainable, more usable end result. They believe, wrongly, that scientists and engineers should be able to go the ideal end point in a single program, with an accurate budget and schedule prediction.
The fact that this never happens doesn’t seem to faze them. They insist that it happened because people didn’t do the job well, instead of clueing into the fact that it’s an unrealistic expectation.
I’ve argued for years for smaller programs and projects instead of mega-programs. NASA does manage to do small programs, and R&D projects, but they only seem to manage it by allocating minimum funding and not drawing any attention to them, except maybe after the fact when there’s a success.
Maybe one of the first things that needs to be “sold” is a proper layman’s understanding of how programs should be structured and run, and why. These typical large NASA programs generate unreasonable expectations in almost everybody. Maybe that needs to be fixed first?
If true, it would venerate the commercial cargo and crew policy of Obama (after all Presidents like to leave a legacy). His successor would have the added bonus of seeing American astronauts launch from U.S. soil, sooner rather than later.
Obama’s support for Commercial Crew & Cargo builds on bi-partisan legacy of public-private partnership for space transport:
“NASA is challenging U.S. industry to establish capabilities and services that can open new space markets and support the crew and cargo transportation needs of the International Space Station.” – Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Program, Jan. 2006
“NASA will seek to use existing or new commercial launch vehicles for cargo transport to the Space Station” – Vision for Space Exploration, Feb. 2004
“NASA should purchase launch services for its primary payloads from commercial providers whenever such services are required in the course of its activities.” – Launch Services Purchase Act, Nov. 1990
“Enable an American industry of private operators of expendable launch systems, instead of requiring all commercial satellite launches on the Space Shuttle.” – Commercial Space Launch Act, Oct. 1984
National Space Policy of the United States of America
June 28th 2010
“A robust and competitive commercial space sector is vital to continued progress in space.The United States is committed to encouraging and facilitating the growth of a U.S.commercial space sector that supports U.S.needs, is globally competitive, and advances U.S.leadership in the generation of new markets and innovation-driven entrepreneurship.”
Fact Sheet: 2013 National Space Transportation Policy
November 21, 2013
“The National Space Transportation Policy the President signed today will ensure that the United States stays on the cutting edge by maintaining space transportation capabilities that are innovative, reliable, efficient, competitive, and affordable, and that support U.S. interests.
More specifically, the policy:
Supports our domestic aerospace industry. The U.S. government will use commercial space transportation products and services to help fulfill government needs, invest in new and advanced technologies and concepts, and use a broad array of partnerships with industry to promote innovation.”
This is a step in the right direction. Maybe the ISS program will now try to optimize the payload integration and utilization processes, and actually do some serious looking to get some worthwhile payloads on-board. Amazing they had failed to work towards this as they were finishing up assembly.
The real issue, as we recently saw during the Christmas week EVA, may be that some of the major components could crap out and there is little capability to get big components home for refurbishment, minimal capability to perform refurbishment, and minimal capability to launch the refurbished big components back up. Remember that the ammonia coolant pump failed only 2 years ago, and they got a new one up on one of the last Shuttles just in case there was another failure since they knew once Shuttle was gone there was no capability. Now they’ve used the replacement pump-what do they do if this one lasts only 2 years?
Remember Mir? After 10 years of operation, in the mid-1990s, NASA, Congress and the US people had serious misgivings about whether NASA astronauts ought to continue to fly there because of its condition. ISS is now older than Mir was in the mid-1990s.
really? you don’t think the scientific instruments currently on the ISS are worth anything?
It may be too expensive to more the scientific instruments. We do not (yet) have a space tug so entire modules cannot be moved. Individual instruments would have to fit through the docking or berthing port. It would have to fit within a capsule or the Cygnus cargo area.
The spacecraft only have small fuel tanks so the delta-v between the two space stations has to be small. This implies the same orbit.
My conclusion is that most of the scientific instruments will be dumped.
most of the scientific equipment on the ISS are in the modules. yes, when the ISS is de-orbited, so will all the equipment.
If an ISS module is going to be burned up on deorbit anyway, then perhaps we should be looking at “opening the cans” — cut open a module to extract the larger equipment within, then the docking port size is not an issue.
It would be good practice for beginning space “construction” learning (even though it’s destruction). The extracted equipment could even be tied together into groups, perhaps wrapped in reflective foil, and then just left in a relatively safe free fall orbit until such time as it can be picked up and “towed” to another facility using some yet to be developed means. Some things will last for years in the freezer in perfectly good shape until they are needed.
As with LVs, we need to get past the bad habit of using something once and then just throwing it away.
My gut reaction is that large, uncontrolled objects in orbit are going to be a hazard no matter what they are. cutting apart modules would generate small debris that could be very dangerous as well. Also, bundling them up or tying them together means they are free to tumble and spin, so it would probably be hard to capture them again without a way to grapple them. I also think it’s likely that little or none of that equipment is designed to survive the vacuum or temperature swings from passing through Earth’s shadow – the ISS module could be called a protective shell for its equipment. another issue is obsolescence. the scientific equipment in it will be decades old by the time the ISS is deorbited, so it’s probably simpler, cheaper, and better to build new equipment for the next generation of space stations, rather than having crews deal with decades-old equipment.
while reusability is a great idea, there’s a lot of sensible concerns that limit the practicality of reusing some equipment.
How big is this pump??? How heavy is this pump??? How big are the fairings on our rockets??? What do you mean no capability to launch and referbish big components??
It could probably be carried in the unpressurized Dragon trunk if that space can be utilized.
Don’t we need a big return capsule anyway for stuff?? Can’t NASA engineers design a capsule the size of a fairing with a shield that lands like dragon. Doesn’t falcon 1.1 have the lift to get a larger cargo return thing up there?
Add
Isn’t Spacex about to design and test their second stage return system soon? Returning a cylinder to earth. Wouldn’t it be easy for them to make your big return vehicle.
If anyone is still thinking about going to Mars, then we are definitely going to need some type of larger “Earth-return” volume than anyone currently has, assuming that the Mars explorers are coming back.
say here’s an idea. sell it to the Chinese in exchange for the debt notes they hold on us
It is worth pointing out that while, yes, the US debt is high (for now), the Chinese hold about 9%. The balance is spread nicely around the world.
…and your point is? The debt is not coming down anytime soon, especially if these progressive loons contintue to tax and grow government programs. OK so now it is your turn to reply and bash capitalism and free market…
This is really too bad. All it does is kick newer destinations further into the future as funding will be diverted to keep yesterday’s destination flying.
Yet another case NASA afraid of losing what it has, and passing up opportunities to grow beyond it. In other words, Space Shuttle Redux.
Remember when there was planning to fly the Shuttles past 2020? I do. It took Columbia to put an end to that garbage. This is more of that. Who want’s to be come 2017, the ISS gets extended to 2028, and then “with everything holding up so well” in 2022, we start talking about the ISS orbiting past 2034.
Why go to Mars, when it’s so much easier to say we tried, don’t properly budget it and go do something easier? That should be NASA’s motto, if the ISS flies past 2024.
This is very good news. A happy medium between 2020 and 2028.