Is India Interested In Participating In The ISS?
Will ISRO Participate in the International Space Station?, The Wire
“From a partner-country perspective, let’s take the example of Japan. The annual running costs for the Japanese Experiment Module will be totally around $350-400 million (almost half of ISRO’s annual budget). Which means that if India has to participate meaningfully and do some interesting science, ISRO will need an almost 50% hike (to Rs.3,500 crore) in its budget. Although this is one-tenth of the cost of having our own manned space programmes, this is also the cost of having 50 Mars Orbiter Missions a year!”
ISRO and its partners have a way of doing amazing things for a price that wouldn’t fund Phase A here. The Chandrayaan mission changed how we view the moon in terms of volatiles for way under 100M all up including launch, the bus and the sensors. Not sure how that low-cost culture will fit with the way I see $ spent in our ISS program.
Quite agree. The Indians could stretch their rupees a lot further by signing up for part or all of one of Bigelow’s BA-330 modules. Current word is that a station consisting of two of these modules is on track to be up and running in 2020. That’s about as soon as India could have any significant presence on ISS.
By the time India was ready with a module the ISS might be nearing end of mission so I am a fan of a bigelow station docked at ISS with Multiple docking ports.India and china could dock to this.ISS expansion or end of mission could be built around this idea
Not a good idea, really. ISS’s orbital inclination is over 51 degrees. That makes things fairly easy for the Russians, launching from Baikonur at 46 degrees, but tougher for we Americans launching from Wallops Island (38 degrees) or Cape Canaveral (28 degrees). Ditto our friends at JAXA launching from Tanegashima (30 degrees).
India’s Satish Dhawan facility (14 degrees) and China’s new Wengchang spaceport (20 degrees) are even further out of the comfort zone for launches to ISS.
China has other launch facilities at higher latitudes than the new Wengchang. Tiangong 1, in fact, was launched into its 43 degree orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center (41 degrees). The similarity of its launch facility latitude and orbital inclination suggests China would prefer to operate orbital facilities at inclinations that require little plane change relative to their launch origins. That would make any future Chinese space stations launched from Wengchang likely to be much more equatorial than Tiangong 1 unless the Chinese decide to accept significant plane change energy penalties in order to have a station whose orbital track, as ISS’s does for the Russians, covers their entire country. If Tiangong 1 represents the steepest inclination the Chinese would find useful, the plane change energy requirements for a manned vehicle launched out of Wengchang and bound for ISS would still considerably exceed those for a vehicle going even to some 43 degree replacement for Tiangong 1.
Bottom line? Both China and India would face difficulties getting vehicles from their flagship launch facilities up to ISS’s fairly steeply inclined orbit. Neither might find late invitations to participate in a program with high “dues” and more than half of its useful life already gone terribly compelling compared to what they can either make on their own or buy for a reasonable price.
That’s not exactly correct. The relationship between launch latitude and inclination isn’t symmetric. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to launch onto a lower inclination orbit than the launch latitude. But there is very little penalty in launching to a higher latitude.
The confusing part is the fact that you get a significant _bonus_ by launching due east, onto an orbit with an inclination equal to the launch latitude. A polar launch from an equatorial site gives up that bonus, but isn’t really more difficult than a launch by the same rocket, to the same orbit, from a high latitude site.
I guess I’m saying that giving up a bonus isn’t quite the same thing as paying a penalty.
Good to know. I am, needless to say, not an orbital mechanic. That certainly explains why the Russians wanted such a high inclination for ISS though. I can see I need to learn a lot more about the physics of orbits. Give me something else to do in my declining years.
While there is some payload peanalty in flying to an inclination higher than the latitude of the launch site, it is manageable. The ISS orbit is accessible from launch sites in all the major nations and overflies almost the entire inhabited Earth, making it an excellent platform for observing environmental change.
Perhaps we could barter for this? ESA module went up with Shuttle so perhaps the ESA could loft China and India from kourou french guiana as part of a barter agreement
I hope the Indians have better sense than to throw money into the ISS. Their space program is actually doing good science.
And not spending the wealth of Croesus to do it either. Stay thrifty my friends.
A beautiful turn of phrase!
I don’t see where any awkwardness enters in, except perhaps in the minds of those progressive Americans for whom the aggressions of other nations are always explainable in terms of America’s imaginary faults and provocations.
Stated simply, India is not a power hostile to the U.S. and China is. Some of us have not lived so long in the Bizzaro World of B.H. Obama that we have forgotten that one is supposed to support allies and discomfit enemies instead of the other way around.
I think there are excellent reasons why India should want nothing to do with ISS (see reply to Steven Rappolee above), but I’ve no objection whatsoever to the offer being made. China is another matter entirely.
India is far better off leasing space on the B330 that Bigelow Aerospace has just announced it will launch. It will get far more for its money than joining the ISS.
Well, I know some “international” airports, whose only claim to name is being within paper airplane range of the Mexican or Canadian border. “International” doesn’t have to mean _all_ nations, just more than one. (I’m not agreeing or disagreeing about China, just pointing out the fact that the name doesn’t give them a foot in the door.)
Quite right. The ISS is not a U.N. operation.
We pay most of its bills, so, yeah, it’s ours. All the key decisions are made by NASA in Washington. True, our partners are consulted first, but none of them have a veto.
Not only India but also China should be invited to join. The idea that China is America’s existential enemy and that collaborating with China in space would somehow leave America in the clutches of a new “Red Menace” is a fantasy on the order of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds”. The proper role of the ISS in world affairs is as a catalyst for international trust and cooperation between the world’s most powerful nations, not just between the US and China, but also between China and India, the primary Asian nuclear powers who also have a history of mistrust.
China is the world’s second largest economy and one of only two nations now sending humans into space. China and the US are now the world’s superpowers, and the future of the next generation depends on whether our two countries can develop a relationship based on understanding, collaboration, and peaceful coexistence or nationalistic hatred and nuclear confrontation. For those of us who lived through decades of nuclear terror it is horrifying to see the enthusiasm with which the American politicians who control the NASA budget, notably Frank Wolf and John Culberson, promote the idea that all America’s problems are the fault of some malevolent Chinese mastermind rather than the partisanship and incompetence of the American political class.
Let’s consider some actual history. China is one of the world’s oldest civilizations and has existed as a nation in one form or another for over 2000 years. During the 1850s Western powers, including Britain, France, and the US, invaded and occupied various parts of China and demanded various “rights”, including immunity from Chinese laws and the right to sell opium, at that time prohibited in China, creating huge numbers of Chinese addicts and riches for Western traders. Between 1900 and the end of WWII the western powers were replaced by even more ruthless invaders from Japan. Modern Chinese forget the Korean War as we forget Vietnam, but they remember the Flying Tigers, when a few American volunteers came to their aid in their time of greatest need.