ISS Irony

21 century pyramid. After end of the current civilization, in the 30 century, man will rediscover ancient history with newly invented telescope. This will prove that the world is not flat, but we are inside a sphere.

ISS is in a low earth orbit. There's enough atmosphere out there that the orbit is decaying, and it won't last until the 30th century without regular boosts.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Well, we still have a few years to figure out how to keep it up. We can still send out unmanned Atlas V, just no more publicity stuns with space shuttles.

Link won't work here, goes into some sort of security lock.

Just wait a while. Some day Virgin Galactic might team up with Fedex. Then you can send a parcel up there and even get a tracking number for it. Proof of signature could present a minor issue though.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Delete that part after the '2' and it works.

Keep all the systems running.

Not that it's a likely option, but I wonder what they could accomplish if they didn't pay much attention to cost and safety. Treat it like a war where nobody much cares about a trillion dollars and if a thousand (or a million) perish and we'd have a permanent Mars colony already.

Cheap coolings. Freeze me up there and bring me back when they can stop aging.

With the retirement of the US shuttle and the recent problems with Russian Protons and Soyuz boosters, perhaps the taikonauts will save the ISS :-)

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Atlas V can carry as big a payload as the shuttle. The shuttles are for TVs and medias, not for payloads. Even a manned capsule can fit inside the payload if necessary. We are knew that shuttles were never necessary.

Maybe the Chinese will buy it to use as a "space hotel".

Same as they bought that Russian aircraft carrier to use as a floating casino, or maybe more of an.. aircraft carrier as it turned out.

Freezing doesn't stop radiation damage - though it does stop you repairing that damage. There's not going to be much point in thawing you out once all your DNA has been chopped into little bits.

I'd pay the extra to be frozen and buried deep underground, if I thought that we were ever going to be able to thaw corpsicles.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The US is now a third rate nation and can no longer afford a space program...let the piece of junk crash and burn like everything else the US does.

We can afford the best space program in the world. Or we could, until the shuttle and the ISS wasted all the available money for decades.

Spam in a can makes no sense. Humans in space, given current technology, makes no sense. The really good missions, science and robotics and telescopes, have been starved by a useless and dangerous space station, which has only proved how dangerous and difficult it is to keep humans in space... for which lesson we paid a few hundred billion dollars and a bunch of lives.

John

Quite a lot of effort to keep moving it to a higher orbit.

Skylab came down early because unexpectedly strong solar activity caused more atmospheric friction. You have to work at it periodically to maintain a low Earth orbit otherwise it will fall out of the sky.

On this topic I find myself in full agreement with you. Robotic missions are the way forward for cost effective space exploration. Unless and until we find something where robotic systems cannot cope.

It would not have been so bad if the guys on these ISS jaunts had been doing some worthwhile scientific research whilst up there. OTOH it may have prevented some redundant Russian rocket scientists helping other nations build ICBMs so it might not have been a complete waste of money.

The Shuttle has provided important servicing missions for the Hubble Space Telescope and it takes real balls to sit on an oversized firework with that much bulk of LH2. Von Braun always maintained that manned space vehicles should never use solid propellants (no way to switch them off once lit). He didn't anticipate the actual failure modes that occurred but I think he had a valid point. Specific impulse is good.

Regards, Martin Brown

Martin Brown schrieb:

Hello,

the Saturn V also did use solid propellants, but only in small rockets with a very short burning time for stage separation and to gather the fuel at the bottom of the tanks of the upper stage. The ignition of a liquid fuel rocket in zero gravity would be difficult and dangerous, bubbles in the LH2 could destroy the thrust chambers of the rocket engines.

Without the Shuttle, the Hubble Space Telescope could not be repaired or serviced, but starting a new telescope into an orbit would have been cheaper than repairing the old one.

Bye

Right.

We could have built dozens of world-class telescopes for the cost of one Hubble repair mission. At most wavelengths, a ground-based adaptive-optic scope has better resolution than Hubble, and we could have built a stunning worldwide milliarc-second radiotelescope network for a fraction of the cost of Hubble. Or we could have launched a fleet of smaller throw-away telescopes for the wavelengths of interest.

Or we could have developed robotics to fix Hubble.

The shuttle and the ISS never made economic or scientific sense. They were all politics, and worked about as well as political schemes usually work, which is to destroy money and lives and produce nothing or less.

John

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There are other ways to send repairman up other than the shuttle. We could have launch many Titan/Atlas at a fraction of the cost of shuttle.

It was NASA's job program. USAF did not want it, although they are the one driving the vehicles.

That isn't true for either very long time exposures or moderately wide fields where the approximations used for adaptive optics break down. It is approximately true for longer wavelengths in the near infrared and a handful of other special cases. Keck on paper can do 0.04" arc under the best possible assumptions but can be an order of magnitude worse depending on the seeing conditions. Hubble is always 0.05".

We can now do incredibly well with ground based planetary imaging even with amateur gear. And one thing that Hubble and particularly Chandra can do is observe in wavelengths that never reach the ground.

The Herschel and Webb space telescopes are going after that too. It makes sense to look carefully in the gaps where we have no good data.

We already have one. It is called VLBI. There is a catch. You can only look at very tiny and very very bright targets like innards of quasar galaxies. There is also Merlin and the VLA that cover a much more useful range of angular size with adequate resolution and sensitivity.

That was considered but the designs were not amenable to robotic repair and they were pretty borderline for manual repair by guys working in pressure suits with their clumsy gloves and adapted tools and jigs.

The shuttle was a brave try at a reusable launch vehicle. It is easy to be wise after the event. The ceramic tiles were truly impressive but they were known to be fragile newer ones apparently less so. Ablative heat shields are not very sexy but they are almost entirely bulletproof.

Regards, Martin Brown

It was obvious a decade ago that the ISS was useless and the shuttles expensive and lethal. Nobody had the guts to kill the programs then. They had to wait for the inevitable, for the shuttles to age and blow up and kill their crews, for the ISS to become unusable for other reasons, before it was politically possible to consider abandoning them. Even now, NASA is weaseling about keeping ISS "operational" but uninhabited, an empty spam can in the sky. Nobody is willing to stick his head up and say the obvious. Nobody wants to be the guy who killed JFK's dream.

John

But do you really learn anything from the easy stuff? Was the American Revolution a walk in the park?

Do we as a race want to reach for the stars, or just sit here on good ol' Terra, just doing the same old stuff over and over and over again, generation after generation, until we just fizzle out?

Thanks, Rich