Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 04 2020, @02:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-goes-up-must-go-down dept.

Expanding, And Eventually Replacing, The International Space Station:

Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), humanity has managed to maintain an uninterrupted foothold in low Earth orbit for just shy of 20 years. There are people reading these words who have had the ISS orbiting overhead for their entire lives, the first generation born into a truly spacefaring civilization.

But as the saying goes, what goes up must eventually come down. The ISS is at too low of an altitude to remain in orbit indefinitely, and core modules of the structure are already operating years beyond their original design lifetimes. As difficult a decision as it might be for the countries involved, in the not too distant future the $150 billion orbiting outpost will have to be abandoned.

Naturally there's some debate as to how far off that day is. NASA officially plans to support the Station until at least 2024, and an extension to 2028 or 2030 is considered very likely. Political tensions have made it difficult to get a similar commitment out of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, but its expected they'll continue crewing and maintaining their segment as long as NASA does the same. Afterwards, it's possible Roscosmos will attempt to salvage some of their modules from the ISS so they can be used on a future station.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:52PM (1 child)

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:52PM (#966733) Journal

    There are a laundry list of reasons that you can't push ISS into a much higher orbit. The hard problems to solve would be significantly increased radiation exposure, comm system link margin, and the power+cooling systems are designed for a ~90 minute day/night cycle.

    None of the issues are such that they couldn't be overcome, but it's a lot of work for a station designed when AOL was still on floppies. There would need to be a very compelling reason to do it.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @02:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @02:38PM (#966941)

    So the question is which is more expensive: Retrofit or replacement?

    With the newer inflatable hab designs, it is a fair question. Price per cubic foot for those are much lower. As far as utility systems retrofits, I imagine these were all designed to be modular. A few have already been replaced once. And as far as radiation go, Couldn't you just add reflective blankets to the outside of the station?

    So first you have to figure out where you want to lift it to, and then do a retrofit feasability study, then do a cost comparison between that and a new station. The retrofit is doable now, the replacement with futuretech that is at least 4 years off. It doesn't matter what the schedule is for SpaceX or Boeing is. Nobody is going to contract the payload builds until they know the price point to fly them, and it takes a long time to build and test a hab. So the lack of parallelism there creates a bump in the schedule.

    If you consider the time-cost of money, then retrofit is the way to go. There is interest bearing on the delay. And you can fly most of the retrofit on Falcon 9, which is a known quantity.