Okay, it's late and I'm tired and I'll make this brief. You may have seen that NASA recently announced that they're considering "deorbiting" (read "burning up in the atmosphere") the entire ISS in 2016.
I'll give you a minute to think about that.
Let's review a few facts.
- Russia has announced that they're going to detach their modules for use on a station that they control.
- The centrifuge module, which was possibly the most important part of the ISS being a viable testbed for long term human space living, was never launched and has been given up and turned into a museum exhibit.
- The operating cost of the ISS are insane. Enough just having it continue to operate eats up as much as half of NASA's humans in space budget.
- The Bigelow Aerospace Trans-hab-based test modules have been up and doing just fine for quite a long time now. At this rate they'll be at Genesis 15 before the Orion ever launches. (Oh, snap!)
- The ISS has almost no shielding since it was designed to be kept below the Van Allen belts. On the other hand, as I've written about before, the crew throws away hundreds of kilos of mass at a time on a regular basis. Mass that could be used to provide a good deal of that shielding for at least parts of the station if they were willing to show the ingenuity of a goddamn family of beavers.
- As for the issue of exposure to heat/light by moving into a higher orbit and out of the earth's shadow, see above again.
- Blue Origin, Virgin, and enough other companies to start a baseball league are well on the way to commercializing many aspects of space activity, including launching humans as even parts of NASA acknowledge with their COTS program.
- Station keeping costs a fortune since the orbit is so low that it faces significant air resistance and has to keep burning fuel just to keep from deorbiting all by itself.
- However moon orbits suck, too since the mass of the moon is so irregular that most or all orbits there are "lumpy" and therefore unstable.
- We're now seeing with things like VASIMR that the old "truisms" about how ion engines can't be made more effective are yet more mahooah from folks who can't see beyond what they've already built and tested. (No, really, flows of massively charged particles can be shaped with magnets? Who would have guessed?) (If I were to get into this now I would start with the fascinatingly earthy blog posts from the guys at Armadillo Aerospace about the silver mesh redesign precess they've been through as they've subjected one of the other "classic truths" of establishment lore about engines to the iterative, flexible approach of the modern geek.)
- The ISS has a buttload of power generation capacity.
- Our economy is screwed.
All of this having been said, if I were a relevant decisionmaker at NASA, I would be doing a pretty broad-ranging review of ISS cost-benefit numbers as well. BUT I wouldn't be looking at deorbiting as a backup. As I have written before and more and more people are writing now, we could use the beastie for other things even if it sucks in its current role and would have to be used as largely an annoying set of tubes with power, toilets, and air to be rebuilt as opportunity permits.
Now, I don't have the time, or possibly even access to the data, to give a detailed and credible plan for this, but it seems to me that the best bet would probably be to start thinking now about ways to brace the structures of the ISS and move the whole damn thing to somewhere stable. Maybe a higher earth orbit. Certainly one high enough to not need to burn so much fuel to stay around. My guess is that an eventual very, very slow move to L5 would be the wisest choice. I suspect that we would want to pull off the solar panels for use immediately somewhere closer to earth but maybe that's just me.
Yes, such a move would take at least ten years. Yes, it would put the ISS out of use in the ways we use it now. But from what I've seen, it sucks at most of the things it was intended to do anyway and, frankly, our best bet is to think of it as a whole muckin' bunch of mass and equipment to be reused someday in a few decades when we're up for treating it the way that we now turn old factories into condos. NASA engineers don't tend to think that way but too f*cking bad. As Mike Griffin and Richard Feynman and Mike Mullane and Buzz Aldrin and a long list of others have explained in exhaustive detail, NASA is long overdue for a culture cleanse. I did my time in corporate America. They want me to, I'll be glad to freshen up my workflow consultant muscles and move to Goddard. I'll even wear the tie I bought there when I was in high school.
For now our minds are biased by the vast cost of doing any complex task in space but really, robots really are finally getting better. And so are spacesuits. And space-based telecommunications. And materials. Just because the idea of rebuilding the ISS into something less profligate is impractical now doesn't mean that it always will be.
So let's start making our peace now with the idea that soon it should be put aside for use later when we're better at this kind of thing. Because we may be getting better but gravity is still a bitch and getting things up the well is going to continue to be brain-shreddingly expensive. Frugal, rational people don't throw away a thing like that just because it would involve some cultural discomfort.
And that, in brief, is what I think.
-Rustin
Comments