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from the do-we-call-residents-moonies-or-loonies? dept.
According to Popular Mechanics, the Russians might finally reach the Moon... aboard an American-made Orion spacecraft en route to an internationally built and operated orbital lunar outpost:
During the past couple of years, American, Russian, European, Japanese, and Canadian officials quietly discussed a possible joint human space flight program after the retirement of the ISS. Although these five space agencies might not be on the same page as far as whether to go to the moon first or head straight to Mars, they're getting closer to an agreement that a human outpost in lunar orbit would be the necessary first step either way.
During the latest round of negotiations in Houston last month, the ISS partners narrowed down the list of potential modules that would comprise their periodically visited habitat. According to the provisional plan, four key pieces made the cut for the first phase of the assembly, which is penciled in to take place from 2023 to 2028 in lunar orbit: The spartan outpost will include the U.S.-European space tug, a Canadian robot arm, a pair of habitation modules from Europe and Japan, and an airlock module from Russia. This hardware would hitchhike on NASA's giant SLS rocket, along with the Orion crew vehicle at the top of each booster.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday November 09 2016, @06:41PM
- Why bother orbiting the moon when the gravity well isn't very deep?
- How much would be saved by launching a rocket engine to attach to the ISS and pushing that up to the moon slowly, rather than declaring it obsolete and letting it burn? Without air friction to take it down, even when it eventually becomes too old to permanently live in, it'd still be a giant storage/automated assembly room in lunar orbit.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Wednesday November 09 2016, @08:36PM
Makes sense and very little new funding involved so will never happen.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday November 09 2016, @09:09PM
storage/automated assembly room in lunar orbit
Assembly room?
There really isn't anything you need in space that can be assembled in the ISS.
The ISS wouldn't even make a good hotel for assembly workers sent to bolt together a mars rocket.
If you want to get some residual value out of it, why not try to land it (piecemeal) on the moon. Because that's something we just assume can be
done on Mars (as long as you don't send the ESA to do it), but nobody has demonstrated with anything bigger than a Volkswaggen.
Like the Shuttle, there is no longer any useful or necessary science being conducted on the ISS, its a huge waste of resources.
Its time to de-orbit it before it starts killing people.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09 2016, @09:14PM
Make up your mind! De-orbit or land on the moon?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday November 10 2016, @12:33AM
Make up your mind! De-orbit or land on the moon?
Land on the moon allows re-use, but requires new technology.
Deorbit sends it to the scarp heap at the bottom of the ocean but costs nothing.
Making that decision is above my pay grade. The point is to get out of that thing, before some poor crew has to bail out in panic in a Soyuz and the whole thing comes crashing down in some unplanned way.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 10 2016, @02:46AM
The send-ISS-to-the-moon (or similar) thing has been proposed before, but is actually pretty hard, and as others have pointed out, pretty useless. To pile on with a couple more reasons ISS is relatively useless in lunar orbit (or the more commonly-suggested destinations, GEO or L1):
It's designed with the radiation characteristics of LEO in mind. MEO is the worst, but GEO and beyond are substantially more hostile (to both semiconductors and life) than LEO; ISS doesn't have appropriate shielding measures for these. (And you basically get to choose between a low-thrust profile where it spends a long time in the Van Allen belts on the way out, and needs lots of extra radiation shielding, or a high-thrust profile to minimize radiation dose, where you need minimal extra radiation shielding, but lots of structural reinforcement.
Thermal considerations -- LEO means spending a lot of time in Earth's shadow, which means less heat load. The radiators would likely be insufficient for operation in higher Earth orbits or lunar orbits.
If we're going to send up a big enough rocket and enough fuel to send a >400-ton space station from LEO to lunar orbit, it's not that much more expensive to also send a 400-ton space station that's actually suited to lunar-orbit operations. It might be worth salvaging some parts of ISS before it's eventually deorbited (e.g. solar panels and radiators), and using them for other purposes, but even then, it may be cheaper to launch new solar panels with better kW/kg figures, than to drag the old heavy ones so far up the gravity well.