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posted by martyb on Wednesday December 12 2018, @09:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the orbital-maneuvers dept.

Russia Wants to Extend U.S. Space Partnership. Or It Could Turn to China.

The American incentives for engaging with Russia in space in the 1990s — political goals like the employment of idle rocket scientists to prevent missile proliferation — have mostly disappeared with the resumption of tensions. The Trump administration has already proposed that by 2025 the United States should stop supporting the International Space Station that is the principal joint project today. A final decision is up to Congress. The American role might be shifted to a commercial footing thereafter.

[...] [It] is unclear how much longer the post-Soviet era of space cooperation between the United States and Russia can last in the more hostile environment now surrounding relations. In the interview, [Dmitri O. Rogozin, the director of Russia's space agency,] said Russia wanted to carry on joint flights with the United States and its allies, despite the tensions over election interference, wars in Syria and Ukraine, and the chemical weapons poisoning of a former double agent in Britain.

[...] Analysts say Moscow has a strong incentive to maintain the joint program: a decided lack of money to pursue a lunar station on its own. Russia's budget for its space program is something less than one-10th what the United States spends on NASA. [...] Russia's preference is to press on with a space program entwined with the United States', on either the lunar program or another venture, Mr. Rogozin said. But if talks fail, Russia can turn to China or India for partnership. There might then be two stations circling the Earth or the moon, one led by the United States the other a Russian-Chinese enterprise. Mr. Rogozin even floated the idea of a "BRIC station," the acronym for the developing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Mr. Rogozin in November ordered the Russian Academy of Sciences to study the prospects for a solo Russian program to build a habitable base on the surface of the moon. Ivan M. Moiseyev, the director of the Institute of Space Policy in Moscow, said in a telephone interview that any proposal for a lone Russian lunar station was fantastical, given the budget constraints. "The technical capability exists, but the finances don't."

The U.S. and NASA could develop stronger partnerships with the European Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and Indian Space Research Organisation instead.

Previously:

Related: Price War Between SpaceX and Russia


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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday December 12 2018, @11:14AM (7 children)

    by zocalo (302) on Wednesday December 12 2018, @11:14AM (#773397)
    Trump, or rather his administration, *is* involved. There are on-going discussions over whether or not to extend the mission and - if so - what that might look like, how it might be funded, who will take part (which may not include the US/NASA), and for how long. So, while the current end of service life and proposed approach to de-orbit the ISS has nothing to do with Trump's administration, *when* that actually gets implemented is almost certainly going to be their call, unless a final decision is kicked down the road to the next presidency of course.
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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday December 12 2018, @12:08PM (5 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 12 2018, @12:08PM (#773412) Homepage Journal

    I'd love nothing more than for the ISS to stay up there until The End Of Time.

    But stuff wears out. Solder joints eventually go bad. Plasticizer evaporates from plastic leading it to grow brittle. There's all manner of ways technology can age.

    In principle all the worn out stuff could be replaced, but some might not be economical to do so; perhaps it would be cheaper to build a _new_ space station, especially so considering how much technology has advanced since the first one was built.

    I expect they started out at least using incandescent light bulbs. I do know that fluorescent lights are not permitted on submarines because they contain Mercury. But now we have RGB LEDs.

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    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by zocalo on Wednesday December 12 2018, @12:38PM (4 children)

      by zocalo (302) on Wednesday December 12 2018, @12:38PM (#773424)

      I'd love nothing more than for the ISS to stay up there until The End Of Time.

      Yeah, me too, even if it's just as a mothballed monument in a higher orbit or at the L1 Earth/Moon Lagrange point, but that's highly unlikely to happen and a de-orbit to avoid space junk, especially if it were to suffer a collision at some point, is the best way to go. Some of the modules are going to exceed their projected service life even in the more modest proposals being floated for a manned mission extension (Boeing is currently doing work on this aspect), and some of those modules are right at the core of the station and not readily serviceable. A half-way house while we wait for a successor to be launched, with some parts of the station depressurised and the rest used for long-term zero-G experiments on an ISS that's unmanned apart from occassional service missions may be one option, but ultimately we do have to stop being sentimental about it and decide on whether to replace it with something else in orbit or focus on the moon instead.

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      • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Wednesday December 12 2018, @06:12PM (3 children)

        by Sulla (5173) on Wednesday December 12 2018, @06:12PM (#773574) Journal

        Could the ISS be brought down in pieces on the BFR?

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        • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday December 12 2018, @06:42PM

          by zocalo (302) on Wednesday December 12 2018, @06:42PM (#773600)
          Definitely, but epi;f take a LOT of trips and a LOT of expense, just so everyone involved can argue over where the reassembled ISS gets to be exhibited since various modules are legally the responsibility of different nations. According to Wikipedia NASA estimated it would have taken more than 27 shuttle mission to do this, and that assessment was obviously undertaken when the shuttle was still in service so probably more than 30 by now with further additions being made. Don't forget that both those craft are designed primarily for getting stuff to orbit, not to bring it back again (BFR payloads would be responsible for making their own way to the surface), so it's not a simple case of looking at the max payload.

          Realistically, either it gets mothballed and pushed out to L1 for posterity and future generations, or it gets a de-orbit burn, and since the latter is cheaper and easier...
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        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 12 2018, @07:00PM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday December 12 2018, @07:00PM (#773606) Journal

          BFR has to be proven before it can be considered, since anti-SpaceX people in NASA and/or Congress are not taking it seriously. Technically it is possible, but does it require a human on board? How much will each flight of the BFR cost? Will there be an upcharge since it would be early in the rocket's history and the USG is the customer?

          Our modules can stay up there until 2028. Some modules are controlled by Canada, EU, Russia, etc. so they need to decide what to do with theirs. Example: Russia has thought about using its modules to form a new station. That's all tentative since they don't have the budget to do anything good anymore.

          We have 10 years to think about this and get BFR working. There's no urgent need to save the ISS yet.

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        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 13 2018, @01:07AM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday December 13 2018, @01:07AM (#773813) Journal

          Another way to look at it: while it would be a bit of a disgrace to just let the ISS or Hubble burn up in the atmosphere, BFR should lower the costs of getting a new one up by at least an order of magnitude.

          With Hubble I think we can make a decent case for returning it safely to the ground and to the Smithsonian. Or we could try to reservice it again. Even if we had a dozen JWSTs and LUVOIRs [wikipedia.org], we are never going to run out of astronomical targets to point Hubble at.

          ISS is a lot harder. It's comprised of modules from multiple international partners, and it could always be somewhat useful in orbit somewhere. There are probably some valid concerns about the longevity of the station. Maybe structural integrity is weakening and bacteria and molds are eating the plastics. If it's just micrometeorites that are the problem, we should be able to slap on additional shielding plates to fix it.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Wednesday December 12 2018, @12:30PM

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday December 12 2018, @12:30PM (#773423)

    Sure, but there is a big difference between "early termination" and "not extending". TFS heavily implies "early termination" although it isn't explicitly written, which is disingenuous.