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The International Space Station Is The Undiscovered Country

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 19, 2017
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Why The International Space Station Is The Single Best Thing We Did, Wired
“The International Space Station is one of the few nonstellar things up there that we can see from down here without instruments. It’s a prefab home the size of a football field, 462 tons and more than $100 billion worth of pressurized roomlike modules and gleaming solar arrays, orbiting 250 miles above the surface of the Earth. Its flight path is available online, and you can find out when it will make a nighttime pass over your backyard. Right on schedule, you’ll spot an unblinking white light that’s moving at 17,500 miles an hour. It will cross your field of view, on a line straight enough to have been drawn with a ruler, in only a few seconds. A few minutes more and the men and women inside that light will be over Greece. A few minutes more, Mongolia. There have been 53 expeditions to the ISS; 53 long-duration crews have called it home since Expedition 1 floated aboard in 2000. They’ve been mostly from America and Russia, the two principal and unlikely partners in one of the most expensive and challenging construction projects ever completed. (The ISS rose out of the ashes of two previous space stations: Russia’s Mir, last occupied in 1999 before it fell out of the sky in 2001, and Ronald Reagan’s proposed Freedom, which never got past the blueprints.) Its first few residents came and went largely without incident, conducting scientific experiments in everything from fluid dynamics to zero-G botany while studying what month after weightless month can do to the human body.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

23 responses to “The International Space Station Is The Undiscovered Country”

  1. Michael Spencer says:
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    ISS gets little love in these parts, but I think that ‘Wired’ is spot-on. It is a stunning achievement and should be understood to be so.

  2. Daniel Woodard says:
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    It’s time to unleash the ISS as a sensor platform. I saw a presentation awhile back for a 1 meter UV astronomical telescope. Possibilities for Earth observation are almost unlimited. A local university has a multispectral scanner ready to fly. The ISS program needs incentive and a modicum of funding for investigators to develop external sensor payloads. Also fueling and checkout of probes and solar-electric propulsion units.

    • fcrary says:
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      There’s a lot of good radio astronomy which can’t be done from the ground. The ionosphere cuts off signals below about 10 MHz. Admittedly, ISS is a bit low for that (500 km would be better), but it just involves running simple wire antennas along a long truss.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        Interesting, but would it be possible to identify the source of radio energy with a simple dipole? Maybe from occultation by the Earth?

        • fcrary says:
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          No, one dipole antenna wouldn’t do it. That would separate known, bright sources (e.g. the Sun and Jupiter) but not much else. But multiple antennas wired up as a phased array would work. People have also proposed multiple CubeSats with each with a single antenna, but that takes knowledge of their relative positions and orientations to a fraction of a wavelength, as well as on-spacecraft signal mixing.

          One application is planetary aurora emissions from extrasolar planets. I believe every magnetized planet in the solar system produces radio emissions (although this may be a statement of faith for Mercury; the data may not be there.) Jupiter is the only observable from the ground (peak frequency around 38 MHz), none of the rest emit above 1 MHz. That means ground-based searches may miss exoplanets with more typical magnetic fields.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            Arrays of satellites orbiting near the station were proposed back in the Seventies, although cubesats lack the propellant for conventional station-keeping. KSC scientist Bob Youngquist has proposed an electromagnetic/RF system for maintaining precise formations and measuring relative position between co-orbiting devices.

  3. chuckc192000 says:
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    His description of an ISS flyover is inaccurate. It can take 5 or 6 minutes for an ISS pass, not “a few seconds”. He’s obviously never seen one.

  4. Zen Puck says:
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    One of the best things about America is NASA. One of the most impressive accomplishments of NASA is the ISS. Say what you will about the politics swirling around it’s ‘maximization of use’, it is an engineering achievement like no other.

  5. Bob Mahoney says:
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    We learned how to properly assemble ISS during all those supposed wasted years the shuttle was ‘going around in circles’. ISS success is a shuttle-derived one.
    Some day a larger percentage of space pundits may finally acknowledge just how much the shuttle program advanced/matured space operations.

  6. DougSpace says:
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    Because of the ongoing, high-cost of developing and sustaining the ISS we weren’t able to go beyond LEO before now. It’s not just what the $100+ billion got us but what could have been accomplished otherwise with that amount of money. The same principle holds true for the SLS, Orion, the DSG, and dare I say, a gapless transition to a commercial, LEO station.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      I have the sense that the money spent was, in large part, research; and that much of the criticism of ISS is backward-facing.

      As to your points on a replacement, two points:

      1. If we’ve not found a use for ISS, why do we need another station?
      2. ‘gapless’? That made me laugh, sorry.

      • DougSpace says:
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        > 2. ‘gapless’? That made me laugh, sorry.

        What really makes me laugh is when my spellchecker always turns ‘gapless’ into ‘hapless’!

        But seriously, a ‘gapless’ transition is what the ASD is pushing for and I believe they got a law passed mandating that NASA lay out a plan for doing so:

        http://allianceforspacedeve

        • Daniel Woodard says:
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          We could just keep the ISS functional and gradually turn management functions over to commercial operators, but NASA would have to avoid looking to closely over their shoulders.

          • DougSpace says:
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            So, my questions are these. If we were to hand over the ISS to commercial entities, how soon would their revenue cover the cost of flights and upkeep? They are nowhere close to that point now. If they are unprofitable for some time then presumably NASA would make up the difference for as long as it would take until the commercial entities. So, how much would NASA pay and what could have been achieved had that money been spent otherwise, in particular, if spent modifying a Centaur to become a lunar lander?

            Secondly, the ISS was not built with commercial in mind. So, how much more would it cost companies to maintain the ISS versus develop and maintain an e.g. Bigelow commercial station? Three B-330s and three partially reusable F9s would yield approx the same internal volume of the ISS. So, development costs for a new station might not cost that much.

            I would say that we shouldn’t use tax dollars to support a transition to a commercial station unless it is likely to be profitable in the near-term and perhaps that, from their profits, they could partially or wholly repay our investment.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            Commercial operation and commercial funding are different questions. All SX and indeed Boeing Commercial launches are commercial operations, but in many cases the government is the customer. I was suggesting the latter arrangement; that NASA could turn over ISS mission management to a contractor that would still be bound by international agreements but would have flexibility in both operational decisions and in negotiations with the IPs. I agree that it does not seem likely at present.

            As to operating a space station for purely commercial customers such as tourists, the main requirement is continued reduction in the cost of human flight to LEO. At $1M a ticket there would be a substantial market.

          • Bill Housley says:
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            Something I read might answer that. They are adding one more to the number of folks crewing the ISS, saying that it will double time aboard spent on science.
            I think that it will turn out that the ISS design is not efficient enough for commercial use and that those in the future will have less overhead work hours.

          • fcrary says:
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            That would carry some legal entanglements. ISS is not a NASA station. The US government, through NASA and (I presume) one or more memorandums of understanding, has commitments to Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, and CSA. not “looking to closely over their [commercial operators] shoulders” might be incompatible. Even if the experiment is in a commercial operator’s equipment rack, if it starts an electrical fire, NASA would be responsible to their international partners.

  7. Bill Housley says:
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    For all of its accomplishments, its greatest orbits are still in front of it. It will be the demonstration platform for an aggressive new paradigm in space hardware development and envelope expansion that will bring space in out of the dark.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      That’s what I tend to think as well. But I’m bothered by this simple question: if it’s such a great place for this, or that, why hasn’t it happened yet?

      We built it. They didn’t come.

      • Bill Housley says:
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        It’s a model-t…not an SUV.

      • Bill Housley says:
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        Well, “it” is for government astronauts. Bigelow is building “it” and won’t launch “it” until we have a way to get to “it”. THEN they will come. 😉