I thought it would be cool to send the station off around the solar system for future space historians to visit like an old ship wreck. Something tells me it wouldn't survive a raptor burn lol
I appreciate the spirit of the comment. I wonder if there is a physics solution that would make it feasible. While physics is an alien world to me, I do think that it’s fun to consider how the space station might be slowly pushed into a heliocentric orbit. I wonder if anyone could join the convo and add something that could help teach me if it’s physically possible or not. Teach me!
@@crowlsyong Starship could tow it by the trusses, but modules may snap off even with a single throttled raptor, so modules would need to first be secured to the trusses by cables or belts. There's a car flying around the solar system right now, and it will still be orbiting when Earth's oceans are boiled away.
@@NeonVisual Unless it hits something first. We were having a talk about that a few weeks ago and someone sim'd its orbit and in like 80 years it might hit some thing but we have those talks with 5ths of whiskey too and I do not remember.
From what I understand, it would take more fuel to put it in a permanent parking orbit than it would take to launch dozens of new ones. The rocket equation is a bitch.
@@richierich8555 That's using pathetic Russian capsules to move it. Starship is volumetrically bigger than the entire ISS, it would be a genuine tow with a burn long enough , rather than the Soyuz trying to push an elephant up a hill. Starship will be putting 150 tons into orbit. An orbital refilled starship would have no problem moving a 450 ton space station out of orbit into deep space.
I honestly hope NASA will greatly insure their odds of a safe return using Dragon... Let Starliner come back on Autopilot to get the rest of the test data that they need...
We put a huge amount of effort into getting the ISS into orbit and assembled. I sorta like the idea of shoving it into orbit around the moon so we have a safe, equipped starting point for more exploration there.
Fraser :) Why do you never acknowledge the wonderful support you receive from highly skilled and dedicated journalists in the weekly newsletter. It strikes me not just as a misrepresentation but also profoundly ungenerous. Name them, promote them. Universe today is not a one man show. It is a community of us all thousands of people. Shared value and shared hopes for the future :) xxx
I write the text in the newsletter, and then link to the writer's original story on Universe Today. I put the credit for each person with each story. And then their name is at the top of the story on Universe Today.
the ISS is a very high mileage vehicle currently. There's just a point where maintenance will become too much and too dangerous for people. Parts have lifespans and some not so easily replaceable. Sad to see it go but unfortunately it has to happen at some point.
If I heard you right where at 60% of mapping out star systems withing 30 light years distance of earth, with 40% to go. Now we need to be able to travel at 1/3 of the speed of light to get there within 100 years. (not joking) Maybe if there was an exo - planet that we could do something with (something better then Mars) and we used a generational ship, it would be possible . Thanks for that information, very helpful in rounding out my knowlege of physical universe we live in.
I really dont understand why the ISS cant be brought back piece by piece and reassembled. It is the last remaining relic of human unity. It doesnt deserve to crash and burn. It's not about it being working and functioning, Fraser, it's about its significance in human history, not just space exploration history. What it symobolises, what it means, what we had to overcome to put it there. Business doesn't care about that though, so to appeal to Elon's pocket, I suggest he buys it and builds the "ISS Museum", a museum and exhibits built around the actual ISS. It could be the greatest museum on the planet. Decades of history preserved, remembering where we came from and how. I'd be really surprised if Starship isn't functional enough by then to do the job. There were no borders on that station. Just Earth's people, working together for humanity. That doesn't exist anywhere else. We can not destroy it.
Here's my plan 1) Put docking adapter on the nose of a Falcon 9 second stage 2) Launch with Falcon Heavy to maximize onboard propellant 3) Connect to docking port on ISS 4) Start up second stage engine 5) Splashdown!
Wouldn't work, iss is way too heavy even for starship. It has to be sectioned off. In to say 100ton cargo pieces and than a refueled starship can deorbit that or take it to the moon. But if a perigee is made to land in Pacific we could possibly move larger parts slower. Also to do all of it at once would take months to a year, then boil off comes into play for reignition burns and navigation to do iss all at once with a starship. So they could probably do it, it just depends on how safe we want to be so... Its no problem, not expensive.
@@monkeynomics8995 it actually wouldnt take much to deorbit the iss. Roughly 90 m/s change in deltav to do it safely. The issue is doing a slow gentle burn so the iss doesnt break up from the acceleration. Starship is MASSIVE. An expendable starship has a payload of roughly 250 metric tons to LEO. More than half the total mass of the ISS. Launching starship empty it would have plenty of available deltav to deorbit the ISS in 1 launch.
It seems unlikely that mere black holes could account for the relatively fixed rotations of visible matter in their orbits around galaxy centers that maintain their spiral arms. This rotation would depart from the rules of Newtonian physics without the gravitational influence of the invisible dark matter whose existence we've inferred from it.
Would it not be possible to save some of the iss and return it to earth safely, for a museum for example. Surely for 849m spend on de orbiting it, sone of it can be kept for future generations to admire
Iss is just under 420 tons just break a piece of and use a refueled starship to take it to... Any where else but fire the problem is as he mentioned it has minimal radiation protection as it was to remain in Leo it would be a museum but still interesting for sure for the dyson swarmers or moon tourists. Also the water that's up there has to have some value...
I hate that they just burn stuff up during reentry or throw it into the ocean, hell I even detest all the stuff that gets thrown away during lift off like all the SLS stuff just to get a tiny module into lunar orbit, what happens to all the rest... It just ends up being tracked as more space junk, something needs to be done, someone needs to go up there and collect all the scrap and recycle it into useful things.
I keep thinking about putting Shuttle bay doors on the Starship and try to salvage the ISS. Can this whole process be done remotely from the ground, as drones work in space?
How precise does the de-orbiting need to be? Clearly we need to avoid satellites in lower orbit that we still care about, and avoid land and shipping lanes, but there is a LOT of space between satellites, so why not time and direct an explosive decompression with the atmosphere already on the station? Is there just not enough delta-V that you'd get for that massive a station, or do they need to start by getting a totally different orbit first?
If they crashed it into a desert or arctic, couldn't the wreckage it be useful for a lot of material sciences experiments on the effects of long-term space exposure?
Time Dilation, when looking into space and making observations, distances, speed & sizes do we take time dilation of the earth through space relative to the subject of our observations?
Question, you said they have plenty of supplies for quite awhile, but if i remember correctly, didn't they change the original cargo of Starliner to add more water instead of a previously planned cargo? And is that something that is still being taken into as consideration? What if they hadn't taken up extra water? Thank you for any response! I'm just curious.
As for Starliner, too bad there isn't a way we can scoop it up and put it in a cargo bay in a spacecraft like we did with the space shuttle. We need a new way to do that. Seriously. It worked.
Can't they just send up all the Dragon spacecraft and use them to de-orbit the ISS? After all, there will be no use for them after the ISS is no more, apart from one you might want to put in a museum.
Dragon can't be used to boost the station, the Cargo Dragons can deliver propellant, but the station's thrusters can't bring it down accurately and quickly enough.
Can we fill the ISS with flat earthers first? SpaceX should send a rocket up to pick up the crew of Starliner, then send Starliner back without crew, just in case.
"They should just" put a pause on all of starliner's human missions, send however many starliners they can to the ISS's docking ports and use three or four starliners to deorbit orbit the ISS. Surely three or four starliners docked at the same time have enough delta-v to deorbit it. If three or four don't I wonder if the entire contract of six would even if your meeting would have to be done in two or three different waves.
Maybe I'm just ignorant of the physical status of the ISS when I say that it would be nice if it was sent to the moon so as to establish a base there on its surface instead of forcing it into one of earth's oceans to be wasted.
Why not push iss into a much higher orbit and extending its life span while giving NASA experience with further distance logistics for eventual moon landing ... Or even further why not push it into moon orbit and do the same ?
Why don't they just make a hydrogen rocket so large that it becomes a zeppelin when its tank is empty. It could reenter without going through reentry. I just solved recyclable, reducible, reusable rockets.
You know, SpaceX might be able to use Starship to deorbit the ISS, and THEN, since it's designed for re-entry and reusability, redirect itself to a landward site (at a custom prepared landing pad on the edge of the Nulaboor Coast?), where it could later be recovered for reuse. Stranger things have happened!
Sad that the ISS is going to be dropped into the ocean. I wish they'd drive Izzy up to a graveyard orbit above geostationary to preserve it until it can be made a museum.
ISS mass+starship+fuel is 450t+120t+100t=670t, 1 single central sea lvl raptor engine with gimbal on minimum throttle is about 100t thrust, so its possible if ISS can handle 1/7g
A lot. About 17 trips to boost to geostationary orbit. More to send to a lagrange point. But salvaging just some modules to attach to the Lunar Gateway would be fewer trips and maintenance trips would be shared by already required trios for the lunar gateway.
Are they going to separate the solar panels and modules before deorbiting ISS? It seems like doing it as one object risks unexpected breakup patterns causing unpredictable landing points for the parts. The solar panels should be the most vulnerable to chaotic turbulence causing unpredictable reentry paths.
@smeeself yes, but there are inhabited islands. While none of them are particularly close to the target, the safety margin is much smaller than the whole ocean. In particular the solar panels look like they could act like large rudders during initial entry. At that point even small changes in trajectory could cause huge changes in the final destination. I assume that NASA has looked at this issue. But I have never heard anything about it. So I am curious about what their conclusions were.
@smeeself yes, but their track record is not great. Again I assume they have learned from past mistakes. I just expected some comment on this. Last time the debris field was large and this is a much larger structure.
I still don't get the arguement of "raising the orbit is impractical because we'd have to justify still using it". Raise it high enough that we don't have to maintain it's orbit for another 100+ years, and stop maintaining the station itself? It can be dead up there. Then 50-100 years in the future maybe we'll have developed a large enough orbital economy that it can be easily moved to geostationary and turned into a museum exhibit. The big thing is to save it for posterity. So that our grandkids' grandkids can float around it on a class field trip and be amazed at the relatively simple space stations we had back in our day that were considered state of the art.
@@frasercain that's a valid question. As it is now, the ISS can be repositioned slightly if we can anticipate a potential collision. Wouldn't a parking orbit up near geostationary also mean that at least for orbital debris there's not a lot of speed anymore? So the big concern then would be primarily things we couldn't anticipate but at that point all of our orbital infrastructure has similar concerns. Either way, the implication there is ongoing costs would need to be incurred for it to stay in low earth orbit because people would need to track and avoid collisions, and have either something docked that could perform maneuvers or the station still operational, both which are expensive options. That leaves it with a "push it up a ways and cross our fingers" or pay even more to push it out to geostationary orbit. Regardless, I do think it would be a worthwhile endeavor to try and save it if Starship or similar could be used to do so at a reasonable cost. With all the useless bits of human history we seem to be good at preserving I think this is one of the more valuable things from a heritage perspective.
@@kvs13156 I think it wouldn't be too hard to calculate given specific impulse and such of the vehicle used to boost it and knowing the mass of the ISS. Someone who knows a whole lot more about orbital mechanics and the most efficient ways to raise an orbit could also be able to tell how much thrust would be needed.
@@frasercain space is big ^^, we can push it very far even if it take years... I had the same museeum idea :) Idea 2 slowly push it toward the moon (could take years) then crash it on the moon surface at a precise location : tons and tons of high quality salvageable parts to potentially build a permanent moon base...
I dont understand how someone who follows a channel like this can make such an illogical statement. 80% of aviation accidents are because of human error. There are a great deal of people alive today because of the way those planes have been designed and improved over the years. It's widely known every incident ultimately makes aviation safer. Then you consider the sheer amount of Boeing planes out there. This is due to them being among the safest and reliable and efficient aircraft around. But according to you hundreds of them should be falling out of the sky every day, but they aren't, are they?! Every aircraft manufacturer has made it's fair share of mistakes. You simply can not avoid everything in mass production. And in saying that, any aircraft from any manufacturer, could have a fatal flaw in any system at any time just waiting to happen. You dont know these things until they happen then they can be identified and fixed. Sometimes they happen in development, sometimes to until well after release. So, get wise, you know? It doesn't take much. Dont reduce yourself to a cheap dig for fake internet points.
@abumohandes4487 I never claimed it was. I also never denied that corners were cut. I am debating the claim that "Boeing are good at crashing planes" and calling it out for what it is. Pure misinformation.
@@NomadUniverse It's ok, I'm also afraid Boeing might kill me if I criticize them. Stay strong! In all seriousness, over the last few years, Boeing has consistently failed in their duties to the public in every respect. Nobody is claiming that the engineers or designers are to blame. But the executive management diverts all the funds that should go into things like manufacturing, safety, and maintenance, and turn it toward themselves. They were once a great company. Now they're a bad company. I can't PROVE that they killed two whistleblowers, but there are two whistleblowers who are now mysteriously dead. Why do you feel compelled to defend this obviously evil organization?
🤔...Joking aside some variant of Starliner was probably the best option to deorbit ISS. NASA choosing SpaceX now maybe be foreshadowing Starliner is finished. I mean raising ISS's orbit was a real selling point for Starliner. Raising the orbit and deorbiting are basically the same job.
What is sick is the Government gave NASA 11 Billion dollars to build the American Space Station. NASA talked all the money away. The Government gave them 11 Billion more. Still not ONE piece of hardware was built and launched. 22 Billion Dollars spent and absolutely nothing built or launched. Nobody when to Prison for theft and corruption. Then it became the INTERNATIONAL Space Station. And everybody had a dime in it!
I get depressed about deorbiting the ISS already 😢. Seems like it's still in it's teenage years. But with wild temperature swings every 45 minutes, it's amazing it can survive this long.
@@biomechanique6874 It took nearly 100 shuttle launches to get all the parts up there, and to move it would need more than 100 starliner launches, with the first few staying as power modules, and then each getting 15 refills, to get enough fuel to raise orbit to the point it can do lunar transfer. yes you can probably do it using a few ion engines, so the fuel will have to be Xenon or Argon, to get some decent thrust, and you will need to probably quadruple the solar collector area to get the power, and it will not be habitable going through the Van Allen belts (but as a bonus it will be pretty much sterilised there, seeing as it might take 15 months to gain enough altitude to transit them), so you can probably get it into an orbit for free return, and have a 2 body orbit for it. However earth rendezvous will be harder, as it will be doing a lot more than current orbital speeds, and your spacecraft will only have very narrow launch windows to intercept it. Plus return will be so much harder, you will need to use ablative shields, as nothing currently in use will survive it more than once without damage.
It's 25 y/o, which is middle age for a spacecraft. Kepler lived 9 yrs and Cassini lived 20 yrs. Hubble and Voyager will probably live 47 yrs and 56 yrs respectively.
@@frasercain that either will happen or would be the best way to keep astronauts safe. Boeing couldn't fix the Starliner on Earth or even detect these problems on Earth. Fixing it on ISS will be far more difficult. Even if they appear to fix the known problems, what unknown or undisclosed problems still lurk in it? Boeing has been so careless and deceptive lately that the lives of astronauts shouldn't depend on Boeing's claims of safety anymore.
@@deep-fried-zombie699 Regretfully, China may be our only hope of a sample return mission. I say that in jest. The current $11B is way too much for congress. I think the original price was $2B. If we are struggling with a sample return, I don’t see any way we could ever do a human landing on Mars. A bit Sad
It would be extremely disappointing if Starship's first use was de-orbiting the ISS. I am hoping they have it working long before then. Seems like you are anticipating years of delays.
Nice thing about being a pessimist is if you're wrong, you get rewarded for it. If you're right, well at least you have that to carry. I don't understand the thought process of sending a starship all the way up to ISS and just not bringing at least a piece of it home for the museum. Honestly a crime against humanity tantamount to demolishing a historic site.
NASA cannot inhabit space without russia or china. The space race is and was about low earth orbit. Nasa can't put up its own station. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-tHdGv6qhDb4.htmlsi=vbqRiOmVCXSYWtdv
@@carltonlittle2613you do understand that it is too far fetched right. Not just in time but in distance. IIRC the nearest blakchole, BH-1 is about 1500 ly or so.
Yeah that was last week, you could've had Still stuck liner, or I wouldn't hire them to fix my car, liner, or Need more underwear liner I'm betting they didn't pack many pairs, and thats a long time to go turning pairs inside out! I wouldn't want to be there when they do return, stifling stink liner!
