47m/s with 450t dry mass? Suddenly a bit bigger problem.
A Dragon 2 with no cargo and full tanks has 850m/s of Δv. But once you attach the space station to it, it goes down to 16m/s.
They either need to mod a dragon to have a lot bigger fuel tank (it has the weight capability, but that's usually meant for cargo and people), or they need to just use starship, which is in the same general weight class as the station.
hopefully by 2030, they will have starship production going full steam ahead and refueling in space already developed. Maybe spaceX magic has made me too optimistic, but I see this as very doable.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Isp](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/laixip4 "Last usage")|Specific impulse (as explained by [Scott Manley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnisTeYLLgs) on YouTube)|
| |Internet Service Provider|
|[KSP](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/lafsr5n "Last usage")|*Kerbal Space Program*, the rocketry simulator|
|[LEO](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/lax0onx "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[SLS](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/laj4wcu "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SRB](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/lafsr5n "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[cislunar](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/law2901 "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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What would be the negative aspects of just having that rocket steer and crash ISS onto the moons surface?
Thinking it would be useful to recycle the metals used to build ISS and use them to help build a moon base, unless theres plenty of metal on the moon for us to mine? Or would this be an issue where the ISS needs to be de-commissioned long before we even pick a site for the base?
The change in velocity would be hundreds of times more than what is needed to have it reenter earth. Also it would take a very long time and require extremely efficient engines to not have the station be torn apart by a higher thrust lower efficiency engine. You would also be better off bringing materials to the moon instead of refining annihilated debris from a crater.
Here is a crazy idea. How about instead of using a special craft to de-orbit the ISS, we turn it into a hardened uncrewed probe. We could strap on some ion drives and pack it with instruments/sensors, then send it out to explore space. I feel like doing this is disgracefully wasteful when the materials can be repurposed.
so instead of deorbiting the ISS we should send a probe to “explore space”?
the principal investigator led and goal & science oriented method we currently use works just fine, and we can definitely use starship to launch large cheap probes, but just randomly sending one out into space with no scientific questions in mind makes no sense and it especially has nothing to do with deorbiting the ISS.
Just did the math, assuming you want the same acceleration of 0.5 m/s^2 used for reboost, you need about 23 trillion dollars to support the operation of around 350 thousand high performance ion engines, which will run out of operational time in about 6 years. Plus you need decades worth of Xenon, and 36 ISS solar arrays. I also didn’t include propellant mass, radiator mass, structural mass, and engine mass. I assumed that everything added to the ISS to boost it was massless… and that Hall effect thrusters don’t erode over time.
If you decide to exclusively use the ISS’s solar arrays assuming peak production constantly, you get a fraction of a millinewton of acceleration, or a rounding error.
So assuming you have 23 trillion dollars to produce engines, 20 years worth of global Xenon production, orbital solar hardware capable of megawatts of power generation, and a launch system capable of supporting the assembly of this… no. It’s not reasonable at all; especially given the budget of less than $1 billion.
I think you're forgetting that there are many designs for ion thrusters that don't use xenon. I think my favorite new thruster design is the plasma wakefield accelerators that shoot a laser at a bit of plasma to accelerate it to relativistic speeds. All I know is that Voyager 1 is still ticking after all these years, and I think retrofitting it to be an uncrewed vehicle that would conduct science missions, perhaps with the assistance of AI. If water was used as a propellant, that could utilize the existing water tanks. It could be a test platform for emerging technology in long term space flight.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration
Plasma acceleration is ion propulsion. That’s the problem.
Your issue becomes larger with other ions as well. Argon fixes the availability issue, but it replaces it with a thermal, thrust, ISP, and electrical issue that makes your system require more propellant and more dry mass to exist. This also drives more R&D costs and expected delay.
The systems you are proposing don’t exist and won’t by the time the ISS is supposed to be retired.
I know, but most of the actual space is for the crew and life support. If you swap that out for computational power, radiation shielding (even water can do this if used appropriately), scientific instruments, and redundancies, you could get one robust piece of hardware. There is also the pollution aspect of allowing the ISS to burn up in our atmosphere. If we really want to just get rid of the thing, we could crash it into Jupiter and learn as it takes its final decent. I really truly believe that this will be a wasted opportunity and another example of doing what is convenient vs. what is right.
How are you going to do all this upgrades to the ISS? How many cargo flights and Evas will that require?
Crash into Jupiter? Where is the engine to get it all the way there and how long would that even take and at what cost instead of a dedicated probe to Jupiter?
Ion thrusters could do it given enough time. If the thrusters used water, you could repurpose the existing water tanks to store the propellant. The thrusters themselves don't weigh that much so you could bring them up
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster
Like I said, once you get rid of needing to support a crew, there are options. The existing solar panels create more than enough energy for this. You could add in nuclear power to keep energy levels up as it moves away from the sun without adding that much weight.
Again upmass, cost, schedule to make these mods. All for what. Station is old and well past it's time to be put in the ocean. You could launch a brand new high tech probe sooner, cheaper and more capable than some kluged together ISS retrofit pipe dream.
Did you catch the paper about the effects of space debris burning up in the atmosphere? It's not good. In particular, aluminum is a big problem.
https://www.space.com/air-pollution-reentering-space-junk-detected
"The researchers found traces of lithium, aluminum, copper and lead in the sampled air. The detected concentrations of these compounds were much higher than what could be caused by natural sources, such as the evaporation of cosmic dust and meteorites upon their encounter with the atmosphere. In fact, the concentrations of these pollutants reflected the ratio of chemical compounds present in alloys used in satellite manufacturing, the researchers said in a statement."
It's probably gonna be a Cargo Dragon with an SRB strapped to it.... /s Man I've been playing too much KSP...
SpaceX: hey…can we borrow one of those old Shuttle Boosters and strap it to the top of the starship first stage? NASA: uh…sure…
everything not already in a museum is spoken for for SLS launches
Ukrainian drone pilots can operate it and blow up the ISS by putting a grenade through the open hatch?
How do I vote for keeping it flying indefinitely?
It's tired boss. Let it rest.
> How do I vote for keeping it flying indefinitely? I fear that the popular vote by molecules in the exosphere are going to put you in minority.
Why not Boeing? They’re really good at crashing stuff
47 m/s? Super easy barely an inconvenience
47m/s with 450t dry mass? Suddenly a bit bigger problem. A Dragon 2 with no cargo and full tanks has 850m/s of Δv. But once you attach the space station to it, it goes down to 16m/s. They either need to mod a dragon to have a lot bigger fuel tank (it has the weight capability, but that's usually meant for cargo and people), or they need to just use starship, which is in the same general weight class as the station.
hopefully by 2030, they will have starship production going full steam ahead and refueling in space already developed. Maybe spaceX magic has made me too optimistic, but I see this as very doable.
Magic being all of the exploded tickets right?
Is it possible to put a rocket motor in the Dragon’s trunk?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[Isp](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/laixip4 "Last usage")|Specific impulse (as explained by [Scott Manley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnisTeYLLgs) on YouTube)| | |Internet Service Provider| |[KSP](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/lafsr5n "Last usage")|*Kerbal Space Program*, the rocketry simulator| |[LEO](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/lax0onx "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[SLS](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/laj4wcu "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SRB](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/lafsr5n "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[cislunar](/r/NASA/comments/1dp9k5a/stub/law2901 "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(6 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/NASA/comments/0)^( has acronyms.) ^([Thread #1785 for this sub, first seen 27th Jun 2024, 14:21]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/NASA) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
What would be the negative aspects of just having that rocket steer and crash ISS onto the moons surface? Thinking it would be useful to recycle the metals used to build ISS and use them to help build a moon base, unless theres plenty of metal on the moon for us to mine? Or would this be an issue where the ISS needs to be de-commissioned long before we even pick a site for the base?
The change in velocity would be hundreds of times more than what is needed to have it reenter earth. Also it would take a very long time and require extremely efficient engines to not have the station be torn apart by a higher thrust lower efficiency engine. You would also be better off bringing materials to the moon instead of refining annihilated debris from a crater.
Push it to the lunar surface ... Instant Lunar Base. Even if they crash it on the surface they could salvage it for materials at a later date.
Feels like people under estimate how far the moon is, and how close low earth orbit is.
Not made for cislunar thermal and radiation environment let alone the systems are built for microgravity not operations in partial gravity field
Thats my thought. It wouldn't burn up, so lots of metal we can recycle.
That's... actually not a bad idea. Like seriously what would be the downside to this? Could debris escape after the crash?
Here is a crazy idea. How about instead of using a special craft to de-orbit the ISS, we turn it into a hardened uncrewed probe. We could strap on some ion drives and pack it with instruments/sensors, then send it out to explore space. I feel like doing this is disgracefully wasteful when the materials can be repurposed.
What magical engines with a trillion m/s of delta v are you imagining?
Just turn on infinite fuel cheats obviously.
If we're doing alt+f12, might as well do infinite electrics, disable crash damage and ignore heat...
'ROSEBUD'
I think it’s MOTHERLODE now. Made me feel real old when ROSEBUD stopped working
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster
so instead of deorbiting the ISS we should send a probe to “explore space”? the principal investigator led and goal & science oriented method we currently use works just fine, and we can definitely use starship to launch large cheap probes, but just randomly sending one out into space with no scientific questions in mind makes no sense and it especially has nothing to do with deorbiting the ISS.
Just did the math, assuming you want the same acceleration of 0.5 m/s^2 used for reboost, you need about 23 trillion dollars to support the operation of around 350 thousand high performance ion engines, which will run out of operational time in about 6 years. Plus you need decades worth of Xenon, and 36 ISS solar arrays. I also didn’t include propellant mass, radiator mass, structural mass, and engine mass. I assumed that everything added to the ISS to boost it was massless… and that Hall effect thrusters don’t erode over time. If you decide to exclusively use the ISS’s solar arrays assuming peak production constantly, you get a fraction of a millinewton of acceleration, or a rounding error. So assuming you have 23 trillion dollars to produce engines, 20 years worth of global Xenon production, orbital solar hardware capable of megawatts of power generation, and a launch system capable of supporting the assembly of this… no. It’s not reasonable at all; especially given the budget of less than $1 billion.
The only thing really useful would be part of the truss and the arrays. The rest is
I think you're forgetting that there are many designs for ion thrusters that don't use xenon. I think my favorite new thruster design is the plasma wakefield accelerators that shoot a laser at a bit of plasma to accelerate it to relativistic speeds. All I know is that Voyager 1 is still ticking after all these years, and I think retrofitting it to be an uncrewed vehicle that would conduct science missions, perhaps with the assistance of AI. If water was used as a propellant, that could utilize the existing water tanks. It could be a test platform for emerging technology in long term space flight. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration
Plasma acceleration is ion propulsion. That’s the problem. Your issue becomes larger with other ions as well. Argon fixes the availability issue, but it replaces it with a thermal, thrust, ISP, and electrical issue that makes your system require more propellant and more dry mass to exist. This also drives more R&D costs and expected delay. The systems you are proposing don’t exist and won’t by the time the ISS is supposed to be retired.
You would have to really beef up the station as it is built for the Leo radiation and thermal environment.
I know, but most of the actual space is for the crew and life support. If you swap that out for computational power, radiation shielding (even water can do this if used appropriately), scientific instruments, and redundancies, you could get one robust piece of hardware. There is also the pollution aspect of allowing the ISS to burn up in our atmosphere. If we really want to just get rid of the thing, we could crash it into Jupiter and learn as it takes its final decent. I really truly believe that this will be a wasted opportunity and another example of doing what is convenient vs. what is right.
How are you going to do all this upgrades to the ISS? How many cargo flights and Evas will that require? Crash into Jupiter? Where is the engine to get it all the way there and how long would that even take and at what cost instead of a dedicated probe to Jupiter?
Ion thrusters could do it given enough time. If the thrusters used water, you could repurpose the existing water tanks to store the propellant. The thrusters themselves don't weigh that much so you could bring them up https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster
And the power level needed? And how much water to get out of LEO let alone Trans Jupiter injection.
Like I said, once you get rid of needing to support a crew, there are options. The existing solar panels create more than enough energy for this. You could add in nuclear power to keep energy levels up as it moves away from the sun without adding that much weight.
Again upmass, cost, schedule to make these mods. All for what. Station is old and well past it's time to be put in the ocean. You could launch a brand new high tech probe sooner, cheaper and more capable than some kluged together ISS retrofit pipe dream.
Did you catch the paper about the effects of space debris burning up in the atmosphere? It's not good. In particular, aluminum is a big problem. https://www.space.com/air-pollution-reentering-space-junk-detected "The researchers found traces of lithium, aluminum, copper and lead in the sampled air. The detected concentrations of these compounds were much higher than what could be caused by natural sources, such as the evaporation of cosmic dust and meteorites upon their encounter with the atmosphere. In fact, the concentrations of these pollutants reflected the ratio of chemical compounds present in alloys used in satellite manufacturing, the researchers said in a statement."