Comment on We really should have all seen this coming.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 4 weeks ago
Man, I really hope someone rich steps up before the ISS gets deorbited and pays to have the modules separated and sent back one-by-one, instead of just tossing it into the atmosphere and letting it burn up. It feels like a crime against humanity to just abandon it like that. At the very least, surely we could come up with a strap-on heat shield and parachute system so the parts could splash-down and get recovered, repaired, and stored in a museum.
simplejack@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Well, that’s not for another 6 years. That is, if the replacements are on schedule. We need to figure this starliner thing first.
A lot of the ISS wasn’t really engineered with reentry in mind. You’d need to basically reverse what was done. Building it was like 30 missions, 40 flights, and an over decade of work.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
ISS is done in (maybe max) 6 years?! We getting a new one for Christmas anytime soon? Gotta be much more… science to do up there that’s inconvenient in a space tent or even a teardrop or something.
Totally took it for granted.
CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Well, yes we’re getting a better one. I worked on Artemis adjacent projects and NASA isn’t just dreaming, they have plans for an actual moon base. It might take a decade or two, but it represents much more sustainable research and more beneficial research than what we have now in the ISS.
For those interested, I worked as an intern on a few lunar soil related projects and the plan is to actually build stuff with it. If you’re interested, AMA
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
🔥
You NASA folks just might be used to a challenge here and there:
Blow my mind with lunar soil in one sentence?
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 4 weeks ago
Yeah. I’m not sure how well it’d survive reentry either, but personally, I kinda think broken but repairable is better that fully vaporized.
Another possibility I considered is welding some steel beams to the outside, vacating the internal atmosphere and then pushing it into a stable orbit; or even pushing it into the moon’s orbit (if it was in the moon’s orbit then you wouldn’t have to worry as much about debris generated by collisions). Then it could sit there until we have the technology to either repair and recommission it, tow it back to earth, or renovate it and turn it into a tourist attraction (yanno, hoping we survive long enough for space tourism to be an actual thing).
That said, I have no idea if it’d be able to survive deceleration if you tried to put it in the moon’s orbit though. While acceleration could probably be slow and gentle, the deceleration required to keep it in the moon’s orbit might be too much for it.
DesertCreosote@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Unfortunately the amount of delta-V you’d need to boost it to a parking orbit of some kind, or to the moon, would be deeply impractical. And it doesn’t have the shielding required to support any sort of deep space habitation.
I’d love to see some or all of it returned to be displayed in a museum, but it would probably be more expensive to do that than it was to build it in the first place. The vehicles to return it in whole or in pieces simply don’t exist right now, and on-orbit disassembly would be incredibly difficult and dangerous for astronauts to carry out.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 4 weeks ago
I mean, my idea was that it would be effectively mothballed until we have the technology to restore it or something, so the shielding doesn’t really matter. But yeah, the delta-v would probably destroy it. I kinda doubt it could handle it.
verity_kindle@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I just found out that the ISS is protected from some cosmic rays by the Earth’s magnetosphere! Hurrah for only getting 90 chest x-rays worth during your stay there, instead of say, 100! Small victories.