Engineers successfully reboost International Space Station after early Dragon abort NASA and SpaceX have successfully raised the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS) with a 15-minute burn of the Draco thrusters located in the trunk of the Dragon freighter. ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen ESA astronaut on the difference between flying in a Soyuz and piloting a Crew Dragon READ MORE The latest effort …
I'm getting fucking tired of all the SpaceX debris floating in the Caribbean.
I think we need to worry about debris floating around in LEO more. Kessler syndrome seems to be getting real.
It's so childish and they all loved him until he parted company with the Democrats because as he has pointed out, his views haven't changed the left's did. Same nonsense with Trump. I don't like many of the things he does but to decry everything just because Trump said it, is like self-harming. I don't think there's a politician alive I've agreed totally with and if there is, he's probably gas-lighting me. These childish black/white views are all driven by the media and its links to the so called left. They aren't really left because that itself is a huge gas-lighting job.
I am also getting tired of the "It's the lefts fault" arguments that appear regular as clockwork.
Every thing you are 'told to dislike', by your Tribal leaders, is by definition 'Left' !!!
Since when have the 'left' been synonymous with the monied persons that own/run the 'Media'.
It is simplistic and frankly asinine to have on 'Auto-repeat' the rhetorical crutch "it's the left <target of choice> fault" !!!
The world is NOT divided into Left vs Right, that is the view that the current party in power in the US of A would like you to believe.
This is because it makes ALL issues political and simple ... THEM or US, at a Tribal level.
Tribal support is inculcated into the US masses from an early age, from supporting 'OUR' Neighbourhood, 'OUR' school, 'OUR' sports team, 'OUR' city, 'OUR' State ... not even mentioning the blind 'Flag obsession' which does not mean what you think it means.
'THEM' and 'US' and winning at all cost for 'OUR' Tribe is the mindset that is created in the majority of the people in the US of A.
Conflict is built-in because it 'controls' the masses by 'dividing' them deliberately.
'Divide and Conquer' keeps the people at the top in 'their' place with all the power, while keeping 'you' in your place !!!
Are you so blind with hate for the 'Other Tribe' that you cannot see this or do you just hate 'Others' ... period ???
:)
Not to detract from your excellent points, but the "tribal" issue is certainly not confined to the USA nor is it recent.
I direct my learnéd correspondent's attention to the phenomenon of soccer team fan behaviour through the last 50 years, both domestic and abroad.
I also mention the widely held disdain in the UK "The South" and "The North" hold for each other's populations (some of the ascribed stereotypical behaviours of which I can confirm from personal experience).
And the Flanders and Swan anthem "A Song of Patriotic Prejudice" is, of course, satire, but hits close to the mark nevertheless, all the way from 1963 (ish).
Fair points if you look at sports in general ... BUT sport support is generally NOT political.
Ditto regarding the North/South divide ... BUT again usually not political, and in my experience includes a modicum of 'Banter'.
The issue is the magnitude of the 'hate' that is included in the taking up of "Tribal" opposition ... in the US of A instance it is somewhat off the scale.
As for the Flanders and Swan mention, I am not sure what that adds to the argument.
Not being familiar with the anthem BUT aware of Flanders and Swan, I looked it up.
It appears to be, in short, English patriotic satire and/or mock-patriotism.
(Luckily the 'Brits' are self depreciating which usually, but not always, tempers our arrogance)
It appears to me, it was not intended to be a clarion call to arms against our close neighbours but rather a means to highlight that we are capable of being equally disparaging of other members of our 'UNION' while extolling our virtues and those of our 'SepticSceptred Isle' while saluting the flag !!!
A contradictory patriotic yet confused mindset ... ignoring our faults while pointing at others faults !!!
N.B.
To avoid the coming 'hoist by your own canard' rejoinder (for the last line), I am aware this could apply to my criticism of the US of A Political landscape.
I actually agree with the anthem and its implied barbs against our own political/patriotic mindset.
:)
A bit sneering to disparage SpaceX for raising the orbit as they were contracted then say this won't replace the Russians.
It doesn't say that.
It says SpaceX raised the orbit as they were contracted to do.
It then goes on to say that the Russian portion of the ISS couldn't be decoupled from the American portion as it's an aging vehicle reaching the end of it's lifetime that operates as a cohesive whole.
Putin - now there's an interesting man. He certainly talks a lot of sense and so does Lavrov. When you compare Russia's actions to the West, instead of listening to the pushed narrative, are they worse or better than us? I don't think anyone bothers to listen to more than a 5s soundbite the media present of Putin, Lavrov, Trump, Musk or anyone. All opinions are constructed by the media and pushed out in carefully selected soundbites. Before anyone screams Ukraine, what about Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iran, Vietnam, Yugoslavia. Not to mention all the proxy actions and 'soft' power regime changes across the entire globe. We stick our nose, dollar bribes and guns in anywhere we feel like, f'king ordinary people's lives up. At least Putin sounds intelligent and I don't recall a Western leader sounding or acting intelligently for decades now.
Most of these countries the fight was about natural resources and/or regimes that weren't liked. Syria and Yugoslavia were, and still are ... complicated. Like centuries old complicated.
I'm sure Putin and especially Lavrov are intelligent in their own way (and could likely run rings round the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue not least because they've been doing politics a lot longer than they have), but there appears to be a global nostalgia for the 'good old days' sometime in the Cold War when there was a certain world order. Global politics means every map is changing every few tens of years. Look at old maps of Europe and you'll see what I mean. There were no good old days, just old days, and those in charge of countries need to have respect both for their own and neighbours borders and the people who live within them.
"At least Putin sounds intelligent"
Not really, Isaac Asimov spoke a truth that "violence is the last resort of the incompetent".
Economic wars would be much more preferable than wholesale mass slaughter. Indeed, if Putin wanted somehow to procure Ukraine in terms of resources, a trade alliance would have made a lot more sense, and such agreements are usually mutually beneficial when arranged by the competent.
Instead an attempt to procure territory by force has just led to a decimation of the aggressor, itself which will leave yet another regime to try and pick up the pieces.
Why don't they shoot it into moon orbit, sending down bits as they need them or keeping it in orbit as a service module?
OK, simplistic view, I know but the main job, escaping earth gravity is done already.
Give it a little shove and it can take it's sweet time getting there with no one left aboard and prove useful as a resource.
May even provide an orbiting waystation if they isolate the Russian side.
The cost of Earth surface to low Earth orbit is between 9 and 10 km/s. LEO to low lunar orbit using Oberth effect is 4km/s but getting there gradually costs 8km/s. At best the ISS is only about half way to Lunar orbit.
The ISS is brittle and bits of it are flaking off already. As it is in LEO those bits de-orbit in a few years so pose a low risk of destroying satellites below it. Raise it a few hundred kilometres and the de-orbit time increases to centuries. Around there the probability of trashing other satellites becomes a certainty and now that large constellations of satellites are a thing Kessler syndrome is much easier to trigger. Above GEO satellites slowly go up, not down. They become a hazard forever. At some point the ISS is going to break up into big pieces. You really do not want those fragments complicating flights to the Moon.
The biggest reason to not send the ISS to the Moon for spare parts is financial. Congress spends billions annually on SLS and that can only go most of the way to the Moon. LOP-G is needed to justify the existence of SLS and congress is looking forward to spending billions on that too. Even though it would be worse than useless sending the ISS towards the Moon would be seen as a threat to LOP-G spending.
Indeed, given that the mass of the ISS is roughly 420 tonnes, to give that a delta-v of (slightly less than) 4 Km/s, assuming that we have a liquid oxygen / liquid hydrogen powered booster, anyone care to guess how much fuel would need to be burnt to achieve this?
And, of course, you need to lift all that fuel up to the same orbit, which uses even more fuel.....
The first problem is the thrust limit for the ISS. A hard upper limit is the maximum thrust through the IDSS docking port: 17.7kN. Another vague estimate comes from the artist's impression of SpaceX's ISS de-orbiter. It has 32x Draco thrusters (400N each) in a ring on the back implying a limit of about 1.2kN. The lowest thrust liquid hydrogen engine I could find is a BE-7 at 44kN. We are going to need a tank to hold the propellant. Let's try an SLS core stage at almost 100t dry mass. The required propellant is 745t, comfortably under the 987t the core stage can hold, but the pain has barely started. A BE-7 burns about 100kg/s so it would take about two hours to get through all the required propellant. Even if a BE-7 can do two hours continuous without melting Oberth requires burning all the propellant at perigee. That is not going to happen with a single long burn. In real life the BE-7 would burn for a few minutes then spend an orbit waiting to get back to perigee then burn again and again with the orbits getting progressively longer. Some of the propellant is going to boil off. That SLS core stage is looking a bit small now.
The plan is now development of a scaled down BE-7 engine before 2029, an SLS launch with no payload to put a core stage in orbit and at least 7 Starship launches to refill that core stage.
If we try going the slow route with a low thrust high efficiency engine (NEXT) the first pass is 93t of Xenon propellant (about $170,000,000 or three times the world's annual production). That does not include the mass of the propellant tank or engines. At 0.237N of thrust NEXT is not going to break the ISS but it would take 52 years to get through all the propellant. Air resistance would be a problem. ISS has the power to run 34 NEXT engines at once (if you turn off life support.) A scaled up NEXT would have a smaller propellant issue (~1 Starship launch) but could make up for that with a requirement for extra solar panels and radiators.
"The required propellant is 745t"
If you intended to give one big push, it would be. The problem is a big push would snap a lot of sections and pieces off. You'd need to calculate a low thrust scenario with lots and lots of boil off of any cryogenic propellants.
To keep costs down, a combination of hypergolic and ion thrusters could be figured out.
Starship? How would it deliver Krypton and how many decades would you want to wait before it's working?
OK, let's try a YF-50D engine. Thrust is 6.5kN - between the estimates I gave for ISS thrust limits (If you have a real number that would help). The mass ratio just jumped to 3.65 (it was 2.43 for BE-7. The original poster had good reason to pick a high Isp propellant). That makes 1100t before we include the mass of the tank. The engine is pressure fed so we will need a strong tank. (There are gas generator hypergolic engines but all the ones in production have far too much thrust). Switching to ion thruster part of the way to the Moon reduces the hypergolic propellant mass at the expense of bringing in krypton propellant. As a bonus the hypergolic tank can be discarded at the staging point but it cannot be a re-purposed booster tank because those are not built for pressure fed engines. A scaled down YF-25 would be a good starting point and could probably be available quicker than the scaled down BE-7 I needed for liquid hydrogen or the scaled up NEXT I needed for krypton.
You are right that a combination of chemical rocket followed by electric will give a lower mass solution and that hypergolic simplifies the problem of boil off. It is not clear that the extra mass required for hypergolic is lower or higher than the extra mass required boil off.
By all means post some numbers. As you do not like Starship development time you are welcome to substitute SLS block 2.
That really highlights that we need an entirely different technology to become a true spacefaring species. I guess a low energy means of warping space-time is the only way it can happen. Which is probably why we aren't seeing little green men dropping by for their Latte.
"The ISS is brittle and bits of it are flaking off already"
More to the point, it's infested with Space Fungus, just like MIR was and is already verging on being a biohazard to its occupants
Just because you COULD boost it to a higher orbit, doesn't mean you SHOULD boost it to a higher orbir
The financial arguments being raised for keeping it aloft boil down to assumptions of launch costs staying traditional. Starship changes that equation even more dramaticallly than Falcon 9 already has
Arguments about "preservation" are well and good but the downsides outweigh the upsides. It's better to salvage what can be carried off the station/returned to the ground for decontamination and drop the rest on Point Nemo. So far C'thul'hu hasn't complained about the gifts from above
I'm sure someone will propose trying to dismantle and bring it back down on starship. That can carry 150t up but only 50t down and then you have an entire module with Space Fungus on the ground with no way of easily sterilising it
"The biggest reason to not send the ISS to the Moon for spare parts is financial. "
The maths to work out a path from the Earth to the moon using a low thrust ion engine slowly raising the orbit would be mind boggling. In its present configuration, ISS couldn't take very much acceleration without breaking a lot of things that might come off and become a hazard. The problem would be both financial and technical.
>” The ISS is brittle and bits of it are flaking off already. As it is in LEO those bits de-orbit in a few years so pose a low risk of destroying satellites below it”
This is a sign of things to come; expect the best earth-moon paths to become littered with “bits” that have fallen off either going to or coming from the moon. Yes “space” is a very large place, but I suspect there are limited low energy orbital paths to get stuff to and from the moon, and as we have seen in other pursuits, given the space mankind tends to be rather profligate and wasteful, so why worry about the debris…
Other people have answered the logistical issues well, but I'll add that it would be a useless endeavour anyway.
The chances of ISS parts being of use to a future moon base are slim. Could be designed in, but then you can't take advantage of advancements since those parts were built. Additionally, the potentially useful bits are old so could have faults developing. The metalwork will be suffering from fatigue as well - to an unknown extent. These aspects will be exacerbated by turning off the life support systems etc - temperatures will go to extremes and get the corresponding expansion/contraction issues.
OK, so what about just treating it as raw materials? Well then you need a factory to reprocess those materials. You'd be better off launching the bits that you want up there than the factory you hope will be able to produce the bits you want up there.
From my perspective the best way to make a moon base is on the moon... i.e. in a moon-based factory, with moon (or asteroid-based) materials. AFAIK the minerals present in the moon are very similar to that of Earth. The rocket equation is harsh, and sending all the material up from Earth's surface is IMO impractical.
So what I'm saying is basically we need a moon-based factory(ies) anyway. I keep hoping some of the research into additive manufacture and robotics will make it practical to send a robot or 10 up there on its own to start gathering and refining materials. Once enough have been made we can then send up robots that can use those to make more complex things, and so on.
Hope I'm not creating our Replicator overlords, but how else will we do it?
The minerals available on the moon are rather different to the composition of the Earth, particularly in the bits that can be reached. What is on the moon is generally nasty and sharp due to a complete absence of weathering processes to make things less unpleasant (think of it as effectively asbestos), but the major difference is the lack of volatiles (especially water) and anything vaguely biological which removes a lot of types of rocks and minerals too.
The manufacturing processes would have to be very different to those on Earth due to the vast difference in available material, primarily water, but also the very unpleasant state that things are in as well which will greatly increase maintenance as well as just the greatly reduced gravity. None of this is unsurmountable and lunar factories would be the way to go but without easy supplies of basics such as lubricants (usually petrochemical in nature, or at worst biological) and rubbers (again, usually petrochemical or biological) such machinery can't be maintained for long which would require either frequent resupply from Earth or some novel replacements, likely biological which then requires an extensive protected enclosed ecosystem even if it is just bacterial vats. Nothing that is unsurmountable, but the investment to get it up and running would be immense before anything even vaguely self-sustaining is possible.
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How hard can it be to fix a slow leak!? Spray paint the inside with LeakStop (or whatever it's called) and get 'er done!!!
I'm sure there will be some Trans-Karen coming along to tell me that LeakStop wouldn't be appropriate to spray anything in the ISS (that would probably screw up the air scrubbers and so on).
I hope that some other Karen will come along to explain the rhetorical hyperbole in my post.
But anyways, what a waste deorbitting the ISS.
And not even the sniveling Register explaining why that is a good idea. Since SpaceX and Musk are for it, why isn't the Register reflexively lampooning the idea?
