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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 09 2016, @06:09PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 10 2016, @02:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 10 2016, @02:46AM (#424968)

    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.

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