The More Space Stations, The Better
Russia Will Spin-Off ISS Parts for New Space Station, Discovery News
“The Russian space agency Roscosmos says it will support U.S. plans to keep the International Space Station (ISS) operating through 2024, but then wants to split off three still-to-be launched modules to form a new, independent orbital outpost. The announcement this week by a senior planning board reverses previous statements by Russian officials that Russia would end involvement in the 15-nation program in 2020 when current agreements expire. Despite occasional rhetoric, the Russian-U.S. space marriage has been largely left out of growing economic and political tensions stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula last year.”
Keith’s note: This is not a bad thing. And I am not talking about no longer having to deal with Russia since we’ll certainly find a way to find ourselves in a political spat with someone else on Earth after they leave the ISS. Rather, it shows how assets in space can be repurposed, refurbished — re-imagined. Instead of throwing things away in orbit (Skylab, Salyuts, Mir) we can now build upon these assets and move them around like Lego bricks to form new things as we need them – and then do this again and again. When the government is done with their hardware, it can be used by someone else – just like old military bases can become movie studios and shopping malls. The more orbital capacity that is available, the more customers it can collectively and individually serve. The more valuable these on-orbit assets become for government and non-government uses, the more everyone will want to safeguard that growing capacity (and isolate it from terrestrial squabbles) as has been the case with ISS recently.
“but then wants to split off three still-to-be launched modules to form a new, independent orbital outpost.”
Im confused, are 3 modules being split off from the ISS or are the modules to be launched from Earth?
I think they mean three new modules, developed for and funded by the ISS program that Russia wants to use for its own project. Given how delayed they are, it’s debatable whether they would get any decent use out of them if sent to the ageing ISS.
They are modules planned to attach to ISS. They can later be the core of a standalone Russian Mir – The Next Generation. The existing Russian ISS modules are long past their design lifetime and likely will be abandoned.
It may be better for the Russians to go straight to a new spacestation. Build a propulsion and habitation module in an easy to reach orbit then add the 3 modules to that.
The ISS is in an orbit that is a compromise between where the Russians can reach and where the American Space Shuttle could reach.
However it’s an orbit that can observe almost the entire inhabited Earth. We need to festoon it with sensors. And it can also be reached from Jiuquan. We need to invite China to join us on the International Space Station.
Also, it seems to me that because of its ~50 day precession cycle, it offers 25-day opportunities to take escape (or other) trajectories going off in most directions (about 78% i guess) on the sky, that still take advantage of the large velocity and energy of low orbits. An equatorial orbit cannot easily go towards large declinations, + or -.
I imagine that before the end of the decade the ISS, the future Mir2, the future Chinese station will all be obsolete, just expensive outposts for government crews.
The private fleet of planned stations will be available for pennies on the dollar to industry, academia, governments, and individuals. LEO is mid-term a zone of high growth.
China also has one, and is soliciting international partners. The more, the merrier.
Good point, as long as people can figure out better ways to use these expensive hardware other than space tourism or letting astronauts perform high school students designed “experiments” (I have nothing against that btw). One of the things I can imagine is to start stocking up beer (use those as source of H2O, as well as cosmic-ray shield, not to say source of energy, if you wonder why we want to do that) on ISS, attach a booster, and transport it to Mars in 2024.
I found this site describing 12 cool experiments done on ISS. Headless flatworms does appear to be impressive scientifically.
http://mentalfloss.com/arti…
I find it interesting that on the US side of ISS only 35 person-hours per week is devoted to science. The other 500 hours are devoted to houskeeping and personal needs.
When commercial crew begins, that should double to 70 person-hours, but still way little.
Bigelow is offering for $26 million dollars a round trip and 60 days on board a BA330 with zero station chores demands and open access to equipment.
I still can’t wrap my mind around this. ISS cost more than $150 billion dollars ($100bill+ is US share) decades of time
and the death of a shuttle and its crew. For this we get THIRTY-FIVE hours of research a week. And much is replicable in vastly cheaper ways. Yes we do have the simple fact of long endurance effects on people, but skylab 40 years ago had 84 day missions. Mir had crew stays up to 437 days continuous.What a freaking waste.
How did it cost the death of a Shuttle and its crew? Neither of the two Shuttles lost were going to ISS.
You are correct. I was wrong. I erred and used a vlookup to the wrong range in a table. I’ll clean up the post.
The current food fight over ARM points to the importance of ISS- it’s a place to go. Our existing tech won’t take us anyplace else.
Yes, the Commercial Crew is being pulled along by the ISS taxi requirements. Private stations then follow the now available private taxis made possible by the funding from the CC.
However.. I am concerned about the $3-4 billion/year for the next 8 years for ISS coupled with the $3billion+/year for SLS/Orion. It also consumes NASA’s attention and 1/3+ of their budget.
You’re using outdated information. Suggest you read IG-14-031.
IG-14-031 gives an estimate of the US contribution from start to to original EOL of 2019 of near $100 billion dollars with an extra ~$15 billion to extending that 4 more years.
It used the figure of $75 billion thru 2013, or $79 billion to now.
The $75 bil used the low-ball GAO/NASA 2001 estimate for each of the 37 shuttle flights as $760million each..
The final shuttle program accounting shows total costs ~$200billion or about $1.5 billion per flight.
So, the cost till now ranges from $79 billion to $106 billion. Or to original End-of-Life by 2020 of $100B to $127billion.
Or to 2024 extended mission of $115 billion to $142 billion.
I was more referring to the science hours performed aboard the station by the crew members. See Table 6.
OK. I thought you were referring to to the cost. I was using NASA’s target goal of 35 hrs/wk. As you point out that has been inching up to almost 45 hrs/wk untill the current temporary drop.
They are now a quarter of the projected increased goal after Commercial Crew begins to 70hrs/week.
But, my point of whether its 35, 45, or 70, it is way too low to justify $100billion+ cost.
Yale S How many crew members has Bigelow flown so far? They can promise all they want but when they support some people in space – we will find out what they can do.
CST-100 (for which Bigelow has been technology partner http://spacenews.com/bigelo… is depending on the BA330 for much business.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Yes, we will find out. Bigelow has prototypes of the inflated shell in orbit since 2006 and they will have B.E.A.M. attched to ISS this year to see its response to human interaction.
The BA330 flights in 2017(?) and 2018 will be the final test.
An unmanned Bigelow can be used to test NDS docking and in-flight refuelling without risking the manned ISS. The BA330 is not full of micro-gravity experiments so it can take a few hard dockings without everyone freaking out.
I think we are using the ISS for entirely the wrong purpose. It should be there as a construction and support base for new types of manned fully reusable spacecraft that are permanently based in space, and which are modular in design so they can be easily reconfigured for specific missions whilst docked at the ISS, and which have the flexibility (ie nuclear propulsion) to take crews out to Cislunar space, to the Near Earth Asteroids, and also to the inner planets (nb..I do not restrict it just to Mars – even if we do flybys or orbital missions around Venus or Mercury to support unmanned operations in the atmosphere of the former or the surface of the latter, that would be a valid role for such spacecraft). In terms of the science, hand that over to commercial space platforms, be they manned or unmanned, such as Bigelow BA-330 based stations.
So the ISS should be about supporting human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit, rather than just doing limited science for very big bucks.
But I agree with the basic sentiment suggested by Keith – more space stations (not just in LEO) is a good thing. Let’s look at putting one in L4 or L5 for example. How about one in orbit around Mars to support surface and atmosphere operations for manned and unmanned systems? Such a platform could also act as a way-station for the exploration of the main belt asteroids – Ceres is looking damned interesting right at the moment, for those of you who have been following Dawn.
Science can be done on commercial platforms that do not necessarily need to be crewed to fulfill a purpose. The goal of 21st Century space stations should be supporting human exploration of, and expansion into, the beyond Earth orbit realm.
At the rate the Russian add-on modules are actually being built, the ISS will have been deorbited before they actually fly. The whole affair is like a slow-motion car crash, with Russia’s once mighty space industry simply unable to build anything reliably except a rocket based on the Sputnik 1 launcher and a manned vehicle which first flew in 1967. They do *great* PowerPoint, though, right up there (if you see what I mean, because, of course, there’s no ‘up there’ involved) with poor old NASA.
In principle I’m all for lots of space stations, but at $100 billion a pop I think we should be careful not to throw away stuff too thoughtlessly. It has taken us 30 years to get from Reagan’s 1980s space station vision to the (much diminished) ISS we have, and I hope we do not reset the clock to go after some grandiose future concept. As much as possible, let’s expand incrementally until we are certain we have the money to build more of them.
And let’s encourage as much co-operation as we can get in the near term, since there is really not much reason for fierce competition in human space exploration at this stage of the game. We can advance the process faster by combining our efforts, rather than fragmenting them. There are going to be plenty of opportunities for everyone later.
If they’re not the right kind of space stations – ones designed to support the construction of deep-space vehicles – then one is too many.
Given that Russia has a smaller economy (by GDP) than Great Britain, I wouldn’t hold my breath for them to build a new space station. China may eventually build something, but their current “station” has only 5% of the pressurized volume of Skylab (and so something like 2% of the space of ISS), not exactly usable; China lacks a large-diameter heavy-lift rocket right now, although clearly by the mid-2020s they may have rectified that.
Assuming ISS remains in use until 2024, I think perhaps a commercial or public-private space station (Bigelow’s plans seem the most likely to me) that uses inflatable modules as the core of a new, larger station is likely to be lofted before ISS is retired. And in that case, some of the ISS modules could possibly even be attached to the new station as docking nodes and power/life-support modules – assuming that the new station is in a very similar orbit and inclination.
I’m actually optimistic that there will be several ISS-class orbiting stations, some private some government, by 2030. Perhaps 50 people will be in LEO at any given time.