Yep. They've done it again. The ISS crew has just dropped another 1,600 pounds of mass to burn up and get lost. Including a fluids tank that I simply don't believe couldn't have been reused for something more cheaply than building and launching yet another one when the time comes.
Because getting mass to orbit is so cheap that we shouldn't be bothered with trying to reuse it, maybe?
An ammonia tank, huh? Howsabout running a microgravity optimized version of Scrubbing Bubbles through it, so to speak, putting in a new liner, and rehabbing it as a way to compost waste? On top of everything else, this would, if done right, generate fuel for the ISS. Or maybe even create nutrient-rich broth that would be a big step towards their being able to start growing food up there.
Now, I'm well aware that we're not even beginnning to be close to reusing stuff like this yet. Or, at least that NASA's culture doesn't support the kinds of projects I just suggested. But we've got thousands and thousands of pounds of mass up in orbit that we don't know how to reuse and so are throwing away each year. So it seems to me that the rational thing to do is to attach little bitty boosters to get that stuff up to very high orbits indeed for reuse later. Really high orbits. As in above geostationary. Or to a Lagrange point.
Look, it takes time to do a spacewalk. And it takes time and involves risk to drop stuff back down the gravity well. So the current approach isn't free either. So it seems to me that we should be willing to make little taxi bots. A couple of solar panels. A ring of ion engines or plasma engines. Something where most of the boost will come from the output of the solar panels rather than from mass that itself needs to be boosted up.
That way whenever we've got another superceded component or another load of "trash", it just gets attached to a bot (yes, this would involve non-trivial coupling mechanism issues) and that bot putters off into the distance from an initial chemical rocket boost and sets off on its merry way to get all this extremely valuable mass up to high orbit in the next three or four years.
Now, keep in mind, I'm not silly enough to think that NASA would do something this disciplined. Something so defined by delayed gratification and long term planning and execution. I'm saying that I'm sure as hell hope that some private entity is going to set up a company to do this. Maybe they can use an image of Fred Sanford on their patches.
They could start with the "garbage bags" that are a predictable disposal challenge. How big a bot would one of those bags need? Ten kilos? Thirty? If launched up there on a small rocket, how cheaply could that bot be delivered to the ISS? Or is it simply more realistic to initially accept the higher cost and administrative concerns of getting room on a Soyuz? Probably.
Let's allow $5,000,000 for developing the bot (seriously; I think that's doable). A cost of building each bot of, I don't know, half a million dollars. And a net weight of thirty kilos, and a launch and delivery cost to the ISS of $25,000 per kilo, which comes to a delivery cost of $750,000. And another half mil for administrative costs per year. Assume no launches the first two years. And four years more to really get up and running.
This would add up fast, wouldn't it? All for a revenue stream that we *know* won't kick in for years. Except that by the end of four years of operations I'm betting that people will have started bidding for the rights to some or all of that salvage. And that insurers will be kicking in to try to reduce the writeoff cost of deaccessioned equipment. And those factors right there could put the company in the black.
And when that first period is done, we would start to have working bots and enough infrastructure and relationships that when stuff is being designed for use in space they consider including things like attachment points for bots and means of selling off salvage rights, complete with saving full sets of plans to the equipment for reuse by salvagers. We might even see bots start the trip back down to the ISS to taxi up new loads.
And when, twenty or thirty years down the road, people realize that this company owns the rights to several BILLION dollars worth of mass and equipment, not to mention expertise and technology IP, I suspect that anybody who was wise enough to invest in this will become very wealthy indeed.
-Rustin
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