25 years of meatbags permanently in space on the ISS Anyone turning 25 this week has never known a time when humans weren't living in space. The same might not be true when they're 30. On November 2, 2000, the first crew docked with the International Space Station. Commander Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev arrived aboard Soyuz TM-31, entering a …
Thanks.
https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104560/u-2stu-2s/
Rock On!
No, not you Bono. I meant Kelly Johnson
There seems to be a couple of non-NASA, entirely commercial operators looking to have something up there relatively soon. And don't forget the Chinese who have continuous occupation their space station since 2021. India are planning their own too, and I'd not put it past them to succeed and do it waaaay cheaper than anyone else :-)
Kentucky[Air] Fried Chicken at the Chinese Space Station
Vast has just flown a Haven Demo. Hoping to fly their first space station haven-1 in 2026, I believe they have finished construction and its in testing now. Its doesn't have its own life support and relies on Dragon to remain docked to it to provide that and other services, only a 1 or 2 weeks in space.
Then next development is a standalone modular space station Haven-2 designed to be launched by Starship and will more habitual capacity than ISS. I don't think construction has started and earliest launch date will be 2028.
If you missed it last night catch up on BBC iPlayer 'Once Upon Time in Space' episode 2.
It features an ageing and broken Mir with its first mixed US/USSR crews. Impending disaster by fire or depressurisation both happened. Guts were on display (luckily not the other kind). But it paved the way for the ISS building on the experience of managing long periods in space. Made even more remote by the intermittent and garbled communication links. An eye-opener for those used to the 'comforts ' of the NASA Space Shuttle.
Also an interesting contrast between the two US astronauts in integrating with the Russian cosmonauts. Though, imho, cosmonaut Sasha and his family stole the show.
Part 4 of Once Upon A Time In Space, which was mentioned by Lon24, covers Tiangong. Now that Russia and the USA have stopped co-operating, neither has the ability to build a new space station. Russia can't afford it and the USA is trying do it using private enterprise, who will want a profit on their investment. Meanwhile China still has government funding and is sticking up the middle finger to the West. Tiangong is an object of national pride for China.
Exactly. Human presence in orbit will continue. It's a little shortsighted to say that the ISS going end-of-life means the end of having humans up there. OK, so it won't be the US or Russia with a little help from ESA. So what? It will still be humans in space. And that in and of itself is a Good Thing, as far as I'm concerned.
With Musk and his 1 % now so Rich they are doing space. Just think if half that money went to paying their way and they were just millionaires.
Problem is they are not advancing space for mankind. They are burning up resources, hoarding wealth and pushing AI that they know that the earth will be screwed faster than anyone could have guessed.
They will try and teraform and than dollar and dime they new inhabitance or workers for everything including oxygen.
Others will be mining space and have mining ships where you work to live and they still live in an opulant life free of laws.
Trump will be happy and take the cash and keep his King complex and use the wars for not being able to replace the IIS
> Problem is they are not advancing space for mankind
Really? You mean the company that is able to recover and reuse expensive boosters, that nobody had been able to do for 50 years?
You mean the company that has reduced the cost of access to space 30-fold? (it needs to be reduced another 30-fold but it's the best anyone has done)
You mean the company that's launching better than once a week, improving things from once every 3 to 12 months?
You mean the company that can 3D print rocket engines, and turn them out in weeks instead of 7-9 months?
You mean the company that's launching satellites that give people internet access? People like me that have a choice of "AT&T at $80/mo for 100mb and shitty customer service, or fuck you"
You mean the company that's working on a Saturn-V class fully reusable booster?
Oh yeah, they haven't done anything useful.
Woop de doo, so what?
Thrilling as all that may be, in reality it's just techno-froth. None of it contributes anything of real substance when it comes to dealing with humanity's (and, by extension, the World's) problems.
Arguably they are pretty much symptoms of The Problem - selfishness, greed, arrogance, and ignorance, etc.
I'm impressed, but sadly not in a good way.
"Woop de doo, so what?"
CLEARLY ignorant of the vast contributions to scientific knowledge by ISS to all of humanity.
https://interestingengineering.com/lists/13-science-breakthroughs-experiments-iss
Here are the top 13 science breakthroughs of ISS, according to "interesting engineering," back in 2023 on the 25th anniversary of ISS.
Making up #10 is the "Mr. Smith" experiment in which they let loose a leftover Russian space suit back in 2006, "SuitSat-1."
https://youtu.be/Bet1jgj3s68
"What the hell did that prove," well for your information it was NOT just fooling around but was a SINCERELY IMPORTANT inquiry into whether you could repurpose an old spacesuit as a satellite for a little while, that is to say: if you jettison some jackass in a space suit out the pod bay door, will guy be able to remain in orbit for awhile? Triumphantly guy DID remain in orbit, from Feb 2006 all the way until Sept 2006. So naysayers can probably stuff that in their collective pipes and smoke it.
Never mind the surface of the earth, how about the upper atmosphere. Currently at least one starlink satellite comes down every day. Eventually 5 or more. Plus how many other constellations of thousands of satellites. Vapourized in the upper atmosphere leaving heavy metal aerosols. It's adding up to significance even compared to regular stardust / chunks coming down. Never mind not being able to launch anything more through all the debris already up there, the pollution from torching them might make the hole in the ozone layer that was "solved" by changing hairspray and refrigerants look mild in the end.
The amount that deorbiting satellites contribute to the upper atmosphere is trivial compared to space dust @ ~100 tons/day.
If there were 100 starlinks reentering a day then there might be cause for concern. Aluminium is already up there thanks to that dust
There's a similar story with tritium released by nuclear reactors. All of them combined is still far less than 0.1% of what's created naturally thanks to cosmic ray interactions
There used to be spotthestation.nasa.gov, but it's been replaced by (IMHO) a much better app.
It takes your current location and shows you the current station orbit, plus the next sighting time and a countdown to that time.
If you click the sighting time, you get a list of sightings for the next month, and you can click them to set a notification or add to your calendar.
Once you have a sighting, it has an AR mode, where you can point the camera, and it will try to show you where to look for ISS in the sky.
ISS is pretty damn bright and easy to spot.
“Spot the Phantom Zone” app
Because the ISS is, in reality, the Phantom Zone.
It’s an alternate dimension or whatever that’s floating around in space that nobody can ever leave until somebody comes and lets em out.
Meanwhile there’s pretend experiments to busy yourself with, I guess.
ISS is pretty much the ultimate prison. They don’t need guards or door locks, because where do you think you’re going to go?
"ISS is pretty damn bright and easy to spot."
Yep. I saw it the other day while sitting on the veranda with the missus, having sundowner drinks. (We live at the KwaZulu-Natal south coast.) Then there came this incredibly bright dot soaring overhead. It was still far too light for stars, planets and ordinary satellites. No doubt as to what it was. ISS shines brightly like nothing else does.
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There's a book by Mary Roach called "Packing for Mars" which discusses living in space.
It's the only such book I know that's NOT been written by an astronaut or space enthusiast, and it has a really level headed, open minded look at things.
It discusses all the downsides and all the upsides. Like it's really hard to find things in zero-gee... for example, on Earth a pair of pliers can be on the floor, or on a table, and it will be laying in one position. In orbit, it could be ANYWHERE or even floating in mid-air, and it'll be in ANY orientation. Turns out the human brain has an incredibly hard time dealing with this. Astronauts come to realize they've been looking right at the object they're searching for, for hours, and not recognized it.
Basically, at the end of the book, she sums it up like camping in a remote wilderness. It's a pain in the ass, its dirty, it's dangerous, and you forgo a lot of comfort, but boy, is the view worth it, and you learn things about yourself and the universe around you.
Really worth a read.
Yeah. While we see in 3D, we don't necessarily think in 3D, or Zero-G.
We're hardwired to expect that if you let go of something it drops to the floor.. Same with "Up" and "Down" - meaningless without gravity.
I hope they put another bird up in orbit but the Moon offers a lot more potential. Amazing to me that we landed humans there decades ago and haven't ever gone back.
There's always talk of possible colonies on Mars - what chance of that if we can't yet establish one on our closest neighbour?
Exactly this, and some of the effects are really eerie when you look at them. I was watching the video of Chinese astronauts loading their oven to cook chicken and I noticed how eerie it was watching the layout of the chicken on skewers and how none of it was affected by gravity. On Earth the things would have collapsed and fallen down but in space he could manipulate and carry them very differently.
A great presentation I went to by an astronaut noted that aside from the physical issues around muscle and bone density loss after a long stint in zero gravity, the coordination ones were very notable too and even weeks after he would routine drop things on the floor from an arbitrary height because he was so used to just letting go of something and it staying largely in place. He also noted that coordination was also off because just moving an arm and hand/fingers again after acclimatising to zero gravity meant having to subtly relearn basic movements. So not only did he break things, such as cups, by just dropping them on the floor but also regularly knocked things off tables too because his arm was lower than expected!
One of the things learned in the Skylab missions of the '70s was a comment that if you lost a tool or anything else in skylab, it would generally turn up the next day on the air filter for the atmosphere system.
But it will be a sad day when the ISS comes down, especially since theres nothing thats going to replace it, as 'its expensive' or 'a waste' or 'i want to sit on my pile of gold like Smaug the dragon'
Our only hope (here in the west) is the starship project run by that loony musk and we'll see if he can be talked into building another major orbiting lab.
One tiny ISS fact, it took 20 odd shuttle flights and a number of Proton launches to get the ISS into orbit. Saturn 5 rockets could have done the job complete in 5 launches.
One of the problems with using Saturn 5 to put Skylab up was bringing the booster down.
Meaning that, they had no way of doing so and it had to decay/fall completely uncontrollably - which gave everyone quite the headache.
China's done the same thing - twice - with its own space stations. Having more of them increases the odds of having the things land someplace they could do some actual damage
"Astronauts come to realize they've been looking right at the object they're searching for, for hours, and not recognized it."
To be fair, that's me and the tools on my workbench.
If astronauts have trouble finding the tools infront of them, I suggest they take their wives.
Not that there’s any point to be goofing off in orbit, but there’s an (open) secret about the ISS: the whole thing is modular.
Seriously, you could just swop out bits as they wear out. You could literally replace the whole dang thing piece-by-piece.
(Source: it’s how they built the dang thing in the first place!)
Whatever, it’s a stupid thing anyway.
Yes it's modular and yes you can do that and yes it's been proposed
The problem isn't the modularity or Zveda's leaks. It's the space fungus that's permeating the entire station like it did on Mir before it.
Swapping out modules will simply result in the biohazard remaining. The fungi are not only proving resiliant to every cleaning susbtance that can be thrown at them, they're also growing on the OUTSIDE of the station
Eventually you have to send up a new station - but putting it in context, a starship upper stage is bigger than ISS, so remaining obsessively attached to the existing structures isn't wise. Even if you could reboost ISS indefinitely it would end up as an unapproachable toxic object within 20 years or so (and do you REALLY want to let the space fungus mutate into even more hardy versions?)
The thing is, the people that go up there tend to be of a scientific inclination. As such they just put politics aside and get on with what needs doing. That means cooperating with your cohabitees regardless of colour, creed, race, religion, sexuality or any other bullshit you can think of.
Why not just deorbit the broken bits, and replace them with more modern upgrades? Maybe even a spinning-gravity research module.
Surely Elon "Mr Mars" Musk and his ilk must be in pole position to benefit from ongoing research - and cough up for it.
If I were him, I'd be putting together a Space Scrappy shell company for the international co-owners to sell their "largest space junk ever" to.
Or, maybe his profitably contracted de-orbiter could just accidentally on purpose line up the wrong way and push it up where he can fiddle with it in peace.
After many years, I found out that PC stood for Paper Casette, whereas everyone always called it the paper tray, since its the tray where the paper goes.
So its asking for Letter sized paper in the tray / casette.
Thinking more on this, if its a casette, then that means that a printer is a form of Casette Recorder then, which has a completely different meaning again, but that won't mean anything to anyone born after the 1980's
The printers in question were made by Canon (despite the HP badging) and the original loading trays _were_ cassettes inserted into their slot
Let's not even go into the inanity of a standard that defines default paper sizes as "US Letter for English(all variants), A4 for all other languages" - it's one of the more annoying things about postscript/pdf and it's been baked in from the very first draft back in 1983
Well said, thank you for this post. One forgets the difficulties surmounted in the beginnings of the ISS.
So many times I've checked the timing and gone outside to watch the ISS pass overhead. That there were fellow humans aboard always awed me. I'm glad we spent the $$ to launch & build it. I hope it's the small first step on an endless journey.
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