The thread for space cadets!

I'm still reading the full PDF.

This is an very exciting idea! If it's not too optimistic, it really could change transit in the US and developing countries.

I'm not qualified to evaluate the physics and engineering, though.

I think his estimates of the cost of the capsules themselves feels low - but again I'm not at all qualified to evaluate that. I love the low terrain footprint - that makes it a lot more feasible to squeeze onto an existing land-use scheme.
 
I think his estimates of the cost of the capsules themselves feels low
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It is absurdly low, the whole thing is way too optimistic. I think it's an interesting idea and I'm sure it could be done. I'm just tempering the irrational exuberance over in the official thread right now, not knocking the whole idea. :lol:
 
Here is an article on the potential future of the ISS beyond 2020.

The outlook doesn't look good - the ESA is wobbly, the Japanes are more-or-less written off (the post-Fukushima economic outlook is bad, to say the least). The Americans want to continue with it, but with all of the budget problems, keeping the station active and in use is far from certain, especially if the other partners pull back or out entirely. One of the American administrators that was interviewed claimed the Russians were optimistic on the station. That notion is dubious to me. For one, the Russians (the last time I checked) were planning on detaching some of their modules entirely to form the core of their own station. Now that obviously depends on whether or not they can get Angara working. But they have well known technical issues of their own and I wouldn't put it past them to pull out if they keep suffering launch disasters if only to save face. Then there is the escalating political disagreements between Russia and the US. While I don't think they will get to the point where cooperation in space breaks down, I can't rule it out either.

So things just don't look good past 2020, which is the planned (but not necessary from a technical standpoint) retirement year for the ISS.

One thing that the article stresses is that the ISS has so far failed to deliver any major science breakthroughs and the research delivered to-date has been minimal. There are several factors at play there as well: the station was scaled back at the outset, so much of the original facillities that were planned for science simply don't exist. The Space Shuttle accident also meant that construction was delayed and of course that also impacted the science mission. One of the sources of the article also states that most of the partners have done what he calls 'conventional' research at the station; that they haven't fully utilized the unique environment of the station to do really cutting-edge stuff. Then, naturally, budget issues have certainly contributed to a lack of useful science output.

The sources hope that in 7 years time that more meaningful research can be done, and that even a single major breakthrough can help justifiy (politically) the cost of keeping the station. That is shaky ground to rest the station's future on, I think, but they don't have many other options. There is the possibility that commercial activities could be undertaken at the station, though I am pretty sure that the other partners besides the US aren't nearly as gung-ho about commercial space enterprise as we are.

So what do you all think? Will there be an ISS after 2020?

Oh and the article also mentions that there's very little chance that the ISS will be allowed to orbit past 2020 if it's not in operation, fyi. The article suggests it will have to be de-orbited at that point and not kept in standby on orbit.

One other thing - by 2020 the ISS will be approaching the age that Mir was went it was abandoned. Now I feel confident in saying the ISS has been kept in better condition than the Mir was (after all, there hasn't been a major political dissolution such as what faced the USSR in the member nations), still, stuff on orbit that's continually habited gets filthy. You can't just open the windows up and air the place out! So it'll be interesting to see just how good of shape the ISS is in at that point. I do know the solar panels and other components have taken numerous micrometeroid hits. We'll have to see I guess.
 
Kepler's pretty much dead. It was fun while it lasted. :(

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/science/space/nasas-kepler-mended-but-may-never-fully-recover.html

NASA said Thursday that its celebrated planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, which broke down in May when a reaction wheel that controls its pointing failed, could not be fixed and would never again search for planets around other stars.

The disappointing news brings to an end, for now, one phase of the most romantic of space dreams, the search for other Earths among the exoplanets of the Milky Way. NASA has already asked astronomers for ideas on how to use the hobbled spacecraft, whose telescope is in perfect shape.
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hobbsyoyo said:
So what do you all think? Will there be an ISS after 2020?
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I think yes, it will be there.

As for what I think about ISS and its future, usefulness, costs, etc... Look, if in 7 years we have super cheap transport to LEO and commercially available space station modules for all purposes, then it would probably make sense to build new, smaller 3rd-generation space stations dedicated to various research/commercial purposes. De-orbiting the ISS could then actually free funds for doing *more* in space.

But if we don't have all that (and it is VERY likely we won't), there aren't many alternative to the ISS, are they? Without ISS, we would have no outpost in space at all. What would we do then? Stage stunt Orion flights around the Moon or to L-points once in a blue moon? It isn't very likely that there will be any programme to built a base on the Moon, or go to Mars even. Or perhaps the Chinese would kindly let us visit their space station, which will be completed by that time? :crazyeye: Essentially, we'd lose the ISS and with it all the potential for research and spaceflight experience-gathering in exchange for nothing; it would be a step back.

ESA, NASA, JAXA and the Russians are understandably wary of the costs of maintaining the ISS beyond 2020, but there is the fact that we already invested 100 billion bucks in this piece of hardware. Abandoning it before it can be fully utilized would be insane. (And please no references to the sunken cost fallacy; stuff doesn't sink in space ;) ).

As for the Russians detaching their segment - I thought they only meant to do it if NASA decided to terminate the ISS. I understand they rather want to have somewhere to go in orbit, than a collection of debris on the bottom of the Pacific.

---

tl;dr:
ISS has perhaps not been the station we wanted and we could have had, but it's better than no station at all. We've gained a lot of experience with spaceflight thanks to it, we have provided a destination for the commercial sector to go to, and thanks to the ESA and JAXA research modules (Columbus and Kibo), we still can do a lot of useful science there.

Oh, BTW, if we decide to abandon the station, I vote we "hibernate" its systems, put solar-electric thrusters on it and rather than de-orbiting it, we raise it to a higher orbit, or perhaps even lift it to the L1 or L2 point. What we do with it then will be an open question and we won't have to fear it falls down due to orbital decay or collides with a derelict satellite.
 
PlutonianEmpire said:
Kepler's pretty much dead. It was fun while it lasted. :(

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/science/space/nasas-kepler-mended-but-may-never-fully-recover.html
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Yeah. Too bad nobody can get to it and replace the faulty gyros.

+1 point for people who say that we need a robust space infrastructure to put an end to this "launch-use-discard" culture that has developed with respect to using space. It's absurd to be sending up pieces of hardware costing hundreds of millions of dollars/euros only to give up on them because a few parts got worn out. If the telescope was on Earth, the repair would be trivial issue.

Ditto for Herschel and, Gods forbid, JSWT. What, pray tell, will we do if something doesn't deploy properly? Abandon years of development and billions of dollars of investment? That's insane.
 
Hey, I think it's insane to de-orbit the ISS as well!

I am just going off what that article says and trying to read the tea leaves of the climate of the industry. I really think I can't discount the negative effects of the economic downturn in Europe and Japan or the sequester at home. As I am sure you have heard on the Space Show, the sequester in the US is really screwing everything up. I can't emphasize enough how much it is hurting the space sector from private companies that are seeing contracts dry up, to NASA which is facing a budget cut just when they need a budget increase for the SLS, to University teams like my own which are having their entire programs shut down and so on. It's really, truly a disaster and it's actually going to get significantly worse next year if they don't reverse sequester, which our government is too deadlocked to do.

Then there is the particulars of our political situation that doesn't have to do with the sequester that comes into play. So on the right, you have two anti-space groups. There are those who hate NASA and government spending in general and would cut it in a heartbeat. Then there are those on the right who are rah rah rah PRIVATE ENTERPRISE ERMEHGERD! who actually hate the COTS program and NASA funding of private companies. They see that as government interference because they don't understand basic economics beyond TAXES ARE THEFT and think that it is all a huge mistake to fund anything through the government and think that simple tax cuts will cure everything. Now there is a lot of overlap in those two groups and I don't think they are huge groups to begin with. However, there are enough of them in the Congress to gunk up the works; those same types of politicians are essentially the reason we still have the sequester. Throw in the specter of a Rand Paul presidency in 2016 and I'm sure you can see what a bind the American space program is in.

And that's just the right! Now look at the left and you'll see many, many politicians who think that other social programs should be given funding at the expensive of NASA. While the pull to defund NASA isn't as strong on the left, given that it's so hard to pass basic budgets (we haven't had an actual budget in years!), NASA is too tempting of a bargaining chip and as such it's an easy target for funding slashes in order to preserver or increase social programs. So the general political outlook is horrible!

Now consider the fact that although de-orbiting the ISS is insane, so was stopping production of the European ATV's, or shutting down the Hermes program, or cancelling the Constellation program only to reinstate it and then never funding it adequately, and then there's the Angara program that's spinning it's wheels, or cancelling the Shuttle before a replacement was ready, letting Skylab de-orbit, so on and so forth. So there actually is a solid history of absolutely stupid, short-sighted decisions from these countries.

As for commercial enterprise making use of the ISS or keeping it alive, well that too is a mixed bag I think. For one, that is heavily dependent on NASA continuing to bankroll private space enterprise development. For another, you also have to consider that if private enterprise begins to deliver on it's lofty promise, they may have much better alternatives by 2020. Bigelow has plans for orbital factories and research stations and it's basic Genesis system (with 2 on-orbit tests as well as a module to be delivered to the ISS this year IIRC) can deliver a larger working/living space at the fraction of ISS's cost. Plus, the added benefit of skipping the ISS and going with fully private systems is that you don't have to negotiatie with all the ISS member nations. That's a really big drawback because as I said before, not everyone is gung-ho about private enterprise and I don't see them handing over their hardware or space on the station without a fight. Even within NASA, the recent turn toward private enterprise is very recent and not fully supported within the agency; they are mostly following political directives at this point and many within the agency are against it.

So all in all, yeah I think de-orbiting the ISS is quite stupid. I just can't write it off easily. I hope it doesn't come to pass though, that would be a disaster. As for boosting it to a higher orbit, that's a possibility though I have to note that one of the sources of that article stated he didn't see that as very likely. Now I'm not sure if he was considering boosting it to a higher orbit, he may have been talking about just keeping it in it's present orbit uninhabited. But likely he was considering boosting it because ISS's current orbit will decay pretty quickly and it needs frequent boosts to counteract atmospheric drag so boosting it may be the only way to keep it up long-term. But then that raises the question of what orbits could the ISS be moved to? NASA likes to keep the ISS well clear of debris and other satellites and even if the station is uninhabited, if they ever are going to re-commission it, it's going to have to be in a clear orbit and that's aren't necessarily easy to come by given the crowding of junk and hardware in LEO.

I just don't know man...it doesn't look good but I'm still an optimist.

I'll have to re-look at the Russian space-station plans. I thought they had announced their intent to detach modules regardless of what happens to the ISS but I'm not 100%. I also don't put much faith in Russia getting a station up, not while they are regularly crashing rockets and now until Angara finally comes together, which may be years off.

As for the impact of the Chinese having a station, well that depends on political leadership. If we have a Rand Paul-type president, I fully expect that s/he won't react to the Chinese at all. Those types are so focused on dismantling the government that I can't see them responding. That said, it could just as easily swing the other way and we'll keep the ISS up just to keep up with the Jones's, as the saying goes.

One thing I just thought of - if the other agencies pull out, will NASA have to buy them out? It's their hardware, so imagine they are going to want some sort of payment in order for NASA to keep it for itself and keep operating it. That's another expense NASA doesn't have the budget for....

I'm rambling at this point; I'll stop.

Oh one thing on JWST, I'm sure you've heard on the Space Show where he's talked about our inability to service it and the potential disaster if it doesn't deploy correctly? Well that is truly scary! Though we did just land a massive rover on Mars with an untested Skycrane, so I do have hope it will turn out ok. :)
 
Well, ESA has been able to survive the economic "crisis" here in Europe with pretty much flat budgets. It doesn't increase much, but nobody seriously suggested cutting it. (Seriously, ESA costs like 3-7 billion €uro per year, depending on what you count, so even total ignorants can see that if we're spending HUNDREDS of billions on bailing out Greece, cutting ESA to zero would make no difference at all). Now that the European Commission seeks to take over ESA, I think they'll have to sweeten the deal a little, hopefully by giving it more money in addition to what it's getting from the member states' contributions.

I think it is 90% sure Europe would support extending the ISS programme. It may drag its feet, but eventually it will pay. *But* ESA cannot run ISS alone. If the US gives up, then Europe will do the same. I believe the same is true for Japan and Russia - they will pay their share to keep the ISS up, but only if the US shows some leadership.

(And I agree that the sequester or what-do-you-call-it is a disaster. Every time I think our government is dysfunctional because it always passes the budget in the nick of time, or a few weeks late, I look at the situation in the US and I am at once calmer.)

I am an optimist though, because I count on most people thinking the same way I do - "if I put so much of my damn money into this, I won't just throw it away". Hopefully, COTS will make the ISS cheaper to maintain, so keeping it up for longer won't be *that* big of a deal.
 
Well I tend to think that pinning your hopes on America showing leadership is a false hope for the foreseeable future. :sad:

I hope you are right, and I do think there's better than 50/50 odds that the station will be kept running. Something interesting I read in Space News today:

The decision to keep the station up has to be made sooner rather than later. The main contracts that support the ISS effort expire in 2015, which is why NASA is broaching the subject now and not in the future. They basically have to decide how to proceed in the next 18 months or even sooner in order to have enough hardware ready to fly in the 2020 timeframe. It's going to be interesting how this plays out, but the time element basically throws the argument about being able to do more science in the future out the window in my estimation. It's really hard to justify big, current decisions based on 'it could happen', especially when the 'it could happen' part hinges on uncertain future commitments from the ISS partners.

Care to place a wager, Winner or anyone else?
 
hobbsyoyo said:
Well I tend to think that pinning your hopes on America showing leadership is a false hope for the foreseeable future. :sad:
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As Churchill once said (at least I think it was him), in paraphrase, "the Americans will always do the right thing, having first thoroughly explored every other possibility" ;)

I hope you are right, and I do think there's better than 50/50 odds that the station will be kept running. Something interesting I read in Space News today:

The decision to keep the station up has to be made sooner rather than later. The main contracts that support the ISS effort expire in 2015, which is why NASA is broaching the subject now and not in the future. They basically have to decide how to proceed in the next 18 months or even sooner in order to have enough hardware ready to fly in the 2020 timeframe. It's going to be interesting how this plays out, but the time element basically throws the argument about being able to do more science in the future out the window in my estimation. It's really hard to justify big, current decisions based on 'it could happen', especially when the 'it could happen' part hinges on uncertain future commitments from the ISS partners.
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What hardware? Unless they plan to completely replace parts of the ISS, I'd thing further changes would be rather small. Although I would REALLY like if a dedicated centrifuge module was added to study the effects of less than 1 Earth gravity (but more than microgravity) on higher living organisms.

But for the sake of the commercial companies, it would be nice to make it clear whether the ISS will fly after 2020 or not.

Care to place a wager, Winner or anyone else?
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I don't know, I have to be careful about bets. I have a long standing one with my ex, which basically means that if both of us happen to be single in 2023, I'll have to marry her...
 
Hardware as in the launches required to resupply the ISS, the contracts for which are up in the air. Currently scheduled stuff will go on up until that point, but there's nothing place to continue supplying it after 2020, nor any plans to expand it beyond the inflatable Bigelow module AFAIK.
 
Yeah, I ninja edited my previous post when I realized this was probably what you meant.

BTW, about where to send the ISS if the "boost" option was chosen - I'd say anywhere where it does not interact with the atmosphere. As far as space debris is concerned, that is concentrated in a) low earth orbit (say, 200->1000 km) and 2) the ring of geostationary satellites and the adjacent graveyard orbit. I'd say anything between 2,000 km and 35,000 km should be safe if we want to keep the ISS in Earth's vicinity. If not, we could send it to L1 or L2, and keep it there as a way-station (or a safe haven) in case we man up and choose to go back to the Moon.

The problem is, the present-day inclination of ISS's orbit (~51 degrees) is pretty useless. The only reason it was chosen was for the Russians to be able to reach it (due to the high latitude location of Baikonur). This inclination makes it harder to reach it than if it was in low equatorial orbit, and it makes it impossible to use it as a way-station for travel anywhere else.

But, the magic of solar-electric propulsion is that we could send it pretty much anywhere with minimum propellant expenditure (well, relative to conventional propulsion), and while at it, we can adjust the inclination. It would take a long time, but it's better than to just throw it away. And once it stops grazing the upper atmosphere, its orbit will be stable; there won't be any risk of it falling back to Earth uncontrollably.
 
Dennis Tito is asking for help in getting his Inspiration Mars mission going.

This plan look shakier and shakier every day. I mean, he has a hard deadline (he has to launch in 2018 in order to get an efficient free-return trajectory and the next launch window after that is in 2033 or something) and no hardware lined up. There's not even a launcher capable of doing the job at the moment and I estimate very low chances that the Falcon 9 Heavy will be ready for a manned mission of this sort by 2018. To make things worse, he doesn't have the architecture sorted out (what kind of capsule and hab module to use, etc) and he's now asking for possible government assistance to get things rolling. Fat chance that's going to happen.

And turning to University teams to sort out the architecture isn't a very smart move I think either.
 
Well, how many sponsors wish to be associated with sending two people to die in space (on live TV), which is the likely result if this gets done on a shoestring budget, under extreme time pressure?

And I do not know much about this, but shouldn't a "free return" trajectory be available every 2 years? Sure, Mars's (how is this spelt? The genitive of words ending with "s", which are not in plural? It bothers me that I am not sure!) orbit is a bit more elliptical than Earth's, so the travel distances and times wary slightly, but I would *guess* (I may be horribly wrong) that the difference would marginal - likely boiling down to a few days/weeks longer transit time and/or a tonne or so more propellant.*

(*EDIT: I just realized that maybe it has more to do with how close the spacecraft approaches Mars during the flyby. It may be so that while "free return" trajectories are always possible, many may feature not-as-close-as-we-would-like flybys.)

But 2018 to get Falcon Heavy ready to launch this seems like the real deal-killer. There's no way the rocket will be "man-rated" in 5 years (it's yet to fly, and so far there have been many delays. It's not even clear at this point whether the first launch will feature the famed crossfeeding ability that boosts the payload so much).

And frankly, Falcon Heavy payload range is 53 tonnes to LEO, and about 13 tonnes to C3=0 (Earth escape). My guesstimate is that its payload to Mars encounter orbit will be about 10 tonnes. That to me is the real killer. Can we really make everything we need to keep two humans alive for 2 years in interplanetary space weigh just 10 tonnes? That's like half the mass of most ISS modules. The baseline Orion capsule weighs 9 tonnes, and that does not include the service module, with an endurance of 21 days. Dragon capsule weighs in excess of 4 tonnes alone.

Maybe if they used 2 Falcon Heavy rockets, one to lift the boost stage, one for the spacecraft, the payload to Mars transfer might be substantially better, but that would also greatly increase the mission complexity.

Oh, and 2018 and low budget means pretty much no in-flight testing. This looks more and more like a suicide trip. I doubt they will launch in 2018, because any responsible person should evaluate the risk and say "no way I am going to put people into this".
 
Free return means they don't have to make any major midcourse burns - they go off to Mars and loop around and come back to Earth without using much fuel. It's different from a typical launch window in that a normal window just means the closest distance/least fuel to get there, but doesn't put you on an automatic trajectory to return home without a massive burn at the Martian end of the journey.

The free-return window is much trickier as it depends on really precise alignments, the kind that don't happen but every so often. But it does allow you to come back home, essentially for free, such as it were. Oh, and btw, this trajectory means they will pass Mars on its night side.

Yeah, it kind of is a suicide mission as it stands now and they haven't given many signs that they can do this right if you know what I mean. They are basicay asking students like me to design their architecture (:rolleyes:), for free, no less. (:rolleyes:). Sure, it would look good on a resume and they would get to go to a conference (and it's safe to assume the $10k 'prize' is basically a grant to do more research work), but I mean, no, no thanks. I am not having their lives hang on my head, thank you very much. Any group of students who could actually pull this off correctly and while unfunded have waaaay too much free time. This isn't the kind of thing you should ask undergrads to do, nor should you expect them to be technically capable of pulling it off.

As for Mars' vs Mars's, don't ask me; I don't even know how to write Hobbs's for sure. :lol:
 
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