Bids for ISS demolition rights are now open, NASA declares NASA has confirmed it will ask American companies to duke it out for the opportunity to deorbit the International Space Station – quietly releasing a request for proposals last week. The specs, which appeared on US government e-procurement portal SAM.gov, are for a vehicle the agency has dubbed the US Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), …
but with all that effort expended to get the thing up there, I can't help feeling it might be nice to push it up out of the way somewhere rather than down to a watery grave, just in case we might find a use for it later.
(Also, it's pretty when it flies overhead every now and then!)
I fear that any effort to push it out will only delay the inevitable reentry.
Unless you're thinking of pushing it entirely out of Earth's gravity well and on to it's own trajectory in space, which would have to basically end up in the Sun. That might be significantly costlier than just dismantling it and letting the rest burn up.
Prospero, launched by the UK from Australia in 1971to LEO is technically decommissioned and "de-orbited" with an expected reentry in 2070. The type of orbit and altitude is what matters to it's stability and longevity, so no, it doesn't need to be moved "entirely out of Earth's gravity well" to keep it up there for many more years. Whether that's viable or economic, I shall leave to the Kerbal aficionados to confirm or deny :-)
they say the one of the hardest parts of space exploration is getting mass out to orbit and beyond.
And there's a lot of stuff there.While the contents of many modules must be obsolete and pointless to reuse, you might think some of the structure was useful
Well, suppose Elon does a Falcon heavy but does NOT separate the outer boosters before it's in orbit... and the ENTIRE payload is a bunch of FUEL placed into orbit.
Then it is a matter of placing the 3 boosters (or maybe just one) into position, re-fueling them in space, and sending it all back the other way at the proper time.
SpaceX Falcon 9 boosters are (by definition) re-usable. It may be the least expensive option.
[re-fueling in space will eventually need doing, so why not use this time to develop a reliable process?]
Why can't SpaceX use a second stage? Send up an empty Dragon capsule to bring home as much as it can safely carry. Can the 2nd stage, with or without remaining attached to Dragon, reach ISS? If it can, would it have enough fuel to get ISS to deorbit into the Pacific graveyard?
If they /can/ do these things, there's no company on earth that could underbid them.
On a different note, if the Chinese want to purchase the relatively new iROSA solar panels from ISS, could SpaceX send up a crew Dragon to dock with ISS, EVA to roll them up, dismount them, throw them in the trunk (as it were), and then deliver them directly to Tiangong station? I figure that would cost $25M, and they could charge the Chinese $60M plus $10 per km delivery charge.
What about sending up a Northrup-Grumman Space Tug? Commission JAXA to design a lightweight origami structure that can fit in the Dragon trunk, be transferred to the NG Tug, and unfolded into a strong, lightweight basket large enough to store all of the usable bits from ISS until its replacement can be made ready for them.
The roadster was never meant to be anything other than a publicity stunt though - this is talking about useful deorbiting work.
Though given the oft quoted assertion that the exhaust gave useful thrust... we just need to feed the air intake (and ignore any of the other issues with working in a vacuum)
"The roadster was never meant to be anything other than a publicity stunt though"
Actually, it was the "dead weight" mass used for testing a fully loaded launch. Most launches use a mass-equivalent concrete block to simulate a payload. What Must (or someone at SaceX) did was a stroke of genius in terms of turning a test launch into a publicity stunt that got a lot of the world talking about him and SpaceX, including many people with little to no interest in space.
How much do you think his insurance premium is on that Roadster? What would he be paying for road tax after driving 500000 miles per year for 5.8 years*? Would he get congestion charge rebate for keeping his Roadster 48M miles from London?
* numbers from https://www.whereisroadster.com/
Why don't they attach some boosters to it and fire it into either deep space or the sun? Surely that would cost less and would reduce the risk of debris falling into unplanned areas? If they put some cameras on it and took pictures of the sun collision that would surely provide some good science?
The energy required is more than the energy needed to put put it into orbit and that was done over 20years by 100s of launches
It's counterintuitive but to drop stuff down into the sun means cancelling out the Earth's orbital speed around the sun - which is a lot of energy
It's counterintuitive but to drop stuff down into the sun means cancelling out the Earth's orbital speed around the sun - which is a lot of energy
Also, you have ti do that really accurately, because conservation of angular momentum means that it's really easy to miss the sun, and have your object whang back the way it came. Just one of the many reasons we don't fire nuclear waste or Donald Trump into the sun.
I believe that it's actually pretty tricky (and expensive) to get something into an orbit which intersects the sun. For a start you have to cancel your orbital speed, which at Earth's distance is a little under 30km/s. For comparison, escape velocity (from the Solar system) from Earth's orbit is just under 17km/s. So it would be easier and cheaper (but arguably less responsible) to send something out into the universe than into the sun. Cheaper than both is to lower the orbit enough for Earth's atmosphere to finish the job.
min acceleration from 18k mph to 25k mph to get it out of earth orbit
or... de-orbit from 18k to about 16k and let the atmosphere do the rest (and humans have tons of experience doing precise de-orbit maneuvers)
probably cost way more to leave earth orbit, fuel + rockets + bigger engines etc.
> tons of experience doing precise de-orbit maneuvers
Although not of such a large fragile object where the parts holding the motors to do the burn, the parts controlling the motors and the communication parts are all going to break apart at different times
The best efforts are going to be 'hit the half of Earth that is mostly Pacific'
I wonder if something like the AMS experiment could be salvaged and moved to a new station. They went to the trouble to repair it, so it must be sort of important. A commercial station would certainly have a much different orbital inclination favoring launches from the US as there would be no need to accommodate Russia. I get the impression changing the inclination of an orbiting object is much more complex than changing its altitude.
The oldest and most decrepit parts of the ISS are the two Russian modules, if they were replaced with a new propulsion module the rest of it could last well past 2030. I'm sure there are commercial operators who could make money out of it if NASA are no longer interested / bleed dry by Artemis.
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