International Space Station facing irreparable failures, Russia warns
bbc.comAs usual, it's difficult to take statements by Russian officials at face value. Russia has been demanding more funding for its continued participation, relief from sanctions etc. And meanwhile, their Nauka module threatened to spin the whole station apart last month. So is this intended to support their haggling efforts, or deflect blame for state of the station? I have no idea. But I wouldn't count on Russian officials for an unbiased technical analysis, that's for sure.
I just hope that when the whole hab is scuttled and burns up or plunges into the ocean in a year or two, they will save out the new solar panels for another project.
ISS's reason to exist went away when the Shuttle was mothballed. The ISS was, in turn, the reason to keep flying the Shuttle. They tried to come up with a similar dodge for SLS, in the moon orbit base, but SpaceX pulled the rug out from under that. That would have been a boondoggle of dven more epic proportions than STS/ISS.
We still need to find a way to shut down the F-35 without needing to cancel all the subcontracts let for parts of it. Without saving those, it will never be allowed to die. (Using the afterburner destroys parts of the rear control surfaces, that have to be replaced at a cost of, what, tens? hundreds? of $thousands after the flight... if it lands.)
> ISS's reason to exist went away when the Shuttle was mothballed. The ISS was, in turn, the reason to keep flying the Shuttle.
This is a popular idea, but it can't really be proven. The decision to have ISS comes from many people and countries, and those people have different reasons - including, among others, employing Shuttle, former Soviet engineers and an accessible space outpost to conduct space experiments.
I don't have evidence to prove it, but I was always pretty sure one of the main reasons was to keep Russian engineers working, and not selling their services to North Korea or Iran or something.
That there was nothing else for STS to do was demonstrated by it doing nothing else. And, the interaction of all experiments run there is limited to crew pushiing an "on" button, so the crew there is self-evidently superfluous, other than as cargo to carry up and back.
Ugh. Space Shuttle was proposed at the height of Cold War - way before Apollo-Soyuz joint flight - with ideas from military as well as from bean counters. After Challenger disaster US military started to come back to conventional launchers, like Titan-IV - and Gorbachev was already in the office, and USSR crashed in early 1990-s - so you're mostly right that Space Shuttle didn't have much to do for military or for making access to space less expensive.
On the other hand, STS did flew separate missions, including Hubble servicing ones. And maybe it could be repurposed for something else - there are many examples how older space systems are trained for new tricks. In case of Shuttle that could be trickier, since crew safety is at stake, but still - both Apollo and Soyuz flew successful program, and both this spacecrafts killed their earlier crew. As for automating tasks, Shuttle is way less automated than most small satellites these days, per unit of functionality - after all, Space Shuttle was designed starting in late 1960-s.
I personally think it's correct decision to retire STS, and it should have been done earlier - given that after Challenger STS didn't switch to "few person, safety abort systems for all moments in flight" vehicles. US space industry had to survive 1990-s, where not too much of results happened in the area of safe human flights, so yes, it was hard to ground shuttles earlier. Still it would be the right decision.
It may be our only refuge when Earth's going to be burning for thousands of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
Who needs government sponsored science? All hail the Musk!
"but Sir, the plane literally destroys itself when it's flying..."
"I said ship it!"
Luckily, no one is responsible if things go wrong!
Roscosmos' Rogozin is rumored to be falling out of favor with Putin, and I see him as holding back US-Russian cooperation on ISS. Not sure why I'm bring this up other than wishing that cooperation would continue, but on the other hand being stuck in low earth orbit is also getting old.
I would assume that Putin would prefer to see the ISS fail and have the Chinese-Russian cooperation efforts succeed. Is this not the case? What would suddenly disincentivize Rogozin from cooperating with NASA? I would certainly prefer to see more cooperation.
Remember, Russia still can send space tourists to ISS for very appreciated amounts of money, so dumping the station doesn't come easy.
If they replace all the parts, will we get a Space Ship (well, Station) of Theseus?