
NASA official warns private sector: We’re moving on from low-Earth orbit - cryptoz
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/nasa-official-warns-private-sector-were-moving-on-from-low-earth-orbit/
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snowwrestler
Why would we ever de-orbit the ISS? It took far more money and effort to get
it there than it takes to operate it. The long-term value of ISS is unclear,
but so is the long-term value of going to the moon or Mars.

Imagine if the people who founded Jamestown said, "hey, we're ready to start
moving deeper in the continent, so let's burn Jamestown and push it into the
ocean first." Why give up a beach head?

Our reach on single missions is constrained by our rocket size. Therefore to
do bigger missions, we will need to assemble and supply spacecraft in space
over multiple launches, as we have assembled the ISS. If nothing else, the ISS
would be useful for "worker housing" during such assembly projects.

~~~
dogma1138
For the same reason that they de-orbited MIR it will eventually outlive it's
purpose.

The modules have a life span, the ISS's mission has already been extended
beyond it's original scope, eventually it will come to a point where you can
not maintain it and it actually becomes a risk to the astronauts (we didn't
had major incidents with the ISS, MIR had a few including a fire, but no major
casualties, but after nearly 20 years things can start to break down and a
catastrophic failure can very likely result in loss of the entire crew).

The ISS is also limited in terms of what you can bring to it, what type of
experiments you can run and how can you extend it so in some sense it limits
our capabilities. When something outlives it's purpose sometimes it's best to
discard it because having it and investing resources into it prevents you from
expanding and building something new.

We'll eventually have to build a bigger station that could be used for bigger
experiments like micro gravity sustainable agriculture, industrial
manufacturing and more. As well as potentially actually simulating gravity and
other things.

Ideally you'll also want a space station quite further away from earth like
maybe a 1/3rd of the distance to the moon which can be used as a launch
platform and a future space dock.

Projects like that are going to be very expensive and giving up on the ISS
could actually release quite a bit of funding as well as drive the need for a
new space station because "well we got the ISS do we really need a new one?"
is quite often used as an excuse just like orbiter development was hindered
due to the shuttle being in operation for so long.

~~~
Shivetya
well the idea that is built with modules should imply that we can swap out the
pieces as they age and as the mission changes.

if anything the real reason to abandon the ISS is the same reason we needed to
abandon the shuttle program. Nostalgic money pits tend to stick around
preventing progress and investment in new and better systems.

I still think one of the best things to happen to NASA in the last ten plus
years was having the shuttle program shut down. Yeah it lead to years with
lack of capability but it was that shuttle which held back such development
and others have stepped in.

I would prefer to get to the moon, having a solid surface under you would have
some great benefits, let alone being able to dig deep and hide.

~~~
motoboi
You must remember that a space station is not something like an Army
fortification or a building which stands by itself or require very little
maintenance, which could be done by a stationed unit.

* The ISS is actually falling back to earth and needs to be lifted from time to time. You need fuel for that.

* The personnel must be changed frequently (too much time in microgravity is harmful to the body). You need to take people in and out.

* The station itself is very little compared to a building. You can't store years of supplies there, just 12 months or so. You need to send up supplies.

So, you must send fuel, people and supplies very often to the ISS. This is
very very expensive.

So, it comes a time where you should consider shutting it down or keep using
it.

Keep using it for what? That is the question.

~~~
dogma1138
Those are general arguments against pretty much any long term space habitat
and they are completely wrong.

The ISS is constantly supplied and refueled that's not a reason why not to
maintain it, it's an argument why we should not have built it in the first
place which is a very silly argument to make.

We need space stations the more the merrier, China and India are getting into
the game, Russia wants a new one of their own, and the public sector is also
looking at such platforms for everything from micro-gravity manufacturing of
drugs to space hotels.

The argument that people in favor of decommissioning the ISS should make is we
need a bigger, better, further away one that we could use to go cheaply to the
moon, asteroid belt, mars, and the Jovian and Saturnian moons.

~~~
motoboi
> The argument that people in favor of decommissioning the ISS should make is
> we need a bigger, better, further away one that we could use to go cheaply
> to the moon, asteroid belt, mars, and the Jovian and Saturnian moons.

That is the answer to my question. Should we sink the ship because it is old
and we have no use for it or should we sink it because we need another one and
can't bear the cost of maintaining two?

If someone is willing to use it, then they must pay for it's maintenance. For
NASA it's mission was accomplished, and it's time to move on.

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stcredzero
I think NASA should capture an asteroid and place it into a stable Lagrange
point. The mass of the asteroid could provide resources, radiation shielding,
and additional gravitational stability for other facilities/assets at the same
Lagrange point.

If suitable engineering is done, stations could undock from the radiation
shield and updated stations docked in place, so the investment in delta-v and
materiel could be preserved.

~~~
orik
why not the moon?

~~~
stephengillie
Why not halfway between us and the moon? It could be an easy-to-reach halfway
point for the Moon, a refueling station and very-low-g launchpad other points,
internet relay base, and also have commercial, industrial, and housing areas.

This could be an interesting new step in human modification of the environment
- "orbitforming" (like terraforming?) a better solar system. It's like razing
a hill to make way for farmland or better city building conditions.

An asteroid that's easy for vacationing billionaires, mining companies, and
highly-pollutant industry to reach would be a great next step for humankind.

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binarymax
Naive question: why can't it be boosted out of low earth orbit and used
further out in space?

~~~
cryptoz
There are many reasons, but one key reason is solar radiation. The current
orbit of the ISS means that is mostly protected from harmful radiation by
Earth's magnetic field. If you moved it away from Earth, you would not have
that protection and the station would become very dangerous.

Another reason is resupply. The station can only run for a few months or a
year without resupply, and the further you move it away the more difficult and
expensive resupply becomes.

There are a host of other reasons, but they all stem from the fact that the
ISS was engineered to always be close to Earth, and the space environment
elsewhere is sufficiently different that the ISS basically can't work in a
dramatically different orbit.

~~~
binarymax
Thanks - those make sense. I wonder if there is any opportunity to keep it in
use or relevant. We spent $140 billion putting it up there, so if its not
viable to spend 2% of that per year keeping it going then I understand the
need to deorbit.

~~~
niels_olson
Yeah, we can keep B-52s flying for 50 years with insane numbers of launch-land
cycles, I'm pretty sure the ISS can fly for a very long time. SpaceX can
already resupply it. I don't see why they wouldn't take it over.

~~~
rtkwe
B52s can be completely disassembled in a shirt sleeves environment and we've
barely explored on orbit construction. The ISS can't be stripped down so far
which is actually causing an issue with bacterial growth in places that can be
reached on orbit to be cleaned. At a certain point things that are
hard/impossible to reach will reach the end of their lifespan and the
inhabitants are in too much danger.

[https://www.rt.com/news/iss-bacteria-mir-
mutation-765/](https://www.rt.com/news/iss-bacteria-mir-mutation-765/)

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mcguire
" _' We’re going to get out of ISS as quickly as we can,' said William
Gerstenmaier, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight, last week._"

If NASA gets out of ISS, it will not longer have a manned spaceflight program.
It's not going anywhere without a launch vehicle, which it doesn't currently
have.

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MCRed
We need to move on from NASA anyway. As a government organization it is always
going to be somewhat capricious and compromised by the needs of politics (eg:
part of the reason the Space Shuttle was so expensive is that it was spread
out all over the country so each politician could claim jobs from it.)

NASA needs to get out of the way, and congress needs to get out of the way.
Yes, some civilians will die in private spacecraft, but that doesn't mean that
space tourism is not a valid thing. Civilians have died on cruise ships!

We need sub orbit, then orbit, then hotels, then a base from which trips to
the moon can be considered. When all of this is an economically viable
industry, then the civilization can consider the possibility of visiting
another planet and not having all of our eggheads in one gravity well.

Government will not get us there, and at this point, given the hurdles put in
front of Virgin Galactic, they are a hinderance-- at least part of the time.

~~~
Aloha
I'd disagree on politics making the space shuttle more expensive - the shuttle
would have cost about the same no matter where the factories went to built it
- it was a deeply flawed concept from the start, and one borne largely out of
politics.

~~~
dogma1138
It's really not you had parts built all over due to politics each with a
different quality control process which lead to issues of major parts not
fitting properly because they were manufactured to slightly different
tolerances, about 40% of the tiles have had to be rejects due to this for
example, major engine components also have had this issues. Also due to
politics the shuttles have had to be assembled in California and then flown to
Florida which was very expensive process. Government projects are tend to be
designed as too big to fail and bring as much work to as many states as
possible because that what gets you the vote. This isn't an argument against
NASA, NASA is very much needed there are a few fields you do not want to hand
off to the private industry completely (and ideally not at all) and space
exploration is one of them.

SpaceX is for the time being more or less a unicorn because it is privately
held and for the time being Elon Musk does not have to answer on every
decision to shareholders when it will come to that the overall level of
innovation will slow down, commercial space flight isn't a bad idea but
commercial altruistic space exploration is a pipe dream in the long run. You
will not find many companies that will be willing to take on a 20-30 years
Mars project for nothing than their own fame, yes working for NASA on such
projects is very lucrative but in the absence of NASA it just wont work
because there will be very little financial drive to do so. ULA/LM doesn't
want to go to Mars they want NASA to choose Orion and their launcher to go to
Mars and pay them heavily to develop and build it even if it never gets used.

~~~
Aloha
I'd as much argue that the poor quality is a result of poor oversight on
contractors and the overall contracting process.

~~~
dogma1138
When you have different manufacturing facilities you will always have this
issues even when you are building to the same spec. Your manufacturing process
will have different tolerance biases that's unavoidable. The problem happens
when you stack tolerances in an additive manner for example when you have a
nut which is built to spec in plant one and is 0.005% too big (which is well
within the tolerance limit) and you have the bolts built in plant 2 and they
come out 0.005% too small (which on their own is still within the spec) you
get an overall tolerance shift of 0.01% which all of a sudden is out of spec.
This just happens in manufacturing all the time the parts are in spec
individually but the end result just doesn't work.

I actually deal with this all the time in hobby electronics you buy various
parts which all of them have a spec with +- certain percent and you when you
buy them from a single batch you can be quite out of luck and find out that
when you add them all together the tolerances just stack against your initial
design.

~~~
jonmrodriguez
Speaking as an engineer, you're supposed to design for the worst-case
tolerance stack to be viable...

If 0.01% is out of spec then you need tighter tolerance specs on your
individual components or otherwise your design does not mathematically make
sense.

This sounds like a design and process control issue as much as anything.

~~~
dogma1138
It is a process control issue, the problem is that controlling the process
when you have 100 of sub contractors manufacturing parts which are pre-
assembled in 10 different locations and then sent for final assembly isn't
that easy. And even if you add tighter tolerances to the spec you can still
end up with things not working properly.

Not to mention that increased tolerances means higher costs and there's a
point where you can't adhere to them physically and as far as real world
manufacturing goes the tighter your tolerances are the tighter the control and
QA needs to be which results only in diminishing returns.

When you end up manufacturing things tolerances can be skewed by a 100
different reasons from a slightly different zero and certification process to
different CAD/CNC software which rounds up thing slightly differently. The ISS
development actually learned quite a few things with that and they've both
adjusted their process segmented the manufacturing by entire modules rather
than individual parts then the only thing you need to really worry about are
the tolerances for the actual dock which have quite a bit of wiggle room. If
you had to make the frame for the cupola in Italy, the outer housing in France
the Windows in Germany, the Shutters in the Netherlands and assemble them in
the UK you would ended up with similar problems.

Saying there's nothing wrong with X you just need a better process can be said
for pretty much everything but that argument rarely holds water when you deal
with real world applications, there's a reason why there are entire
engineering disciplines for manufacturing and process control.

So no as an Engineer you need to design tolerances not for the worse case
scenario but for the actual manufacturing process you are using and the
controls you can enact on that process. When that process is then spread out
across as many parties as possible it's no longer the process you've started
with and quite likely isn't neither and ideal process nor one you could ever
really optimize.

There's a good reason why some of the worlds most advanced engineering parts
are still quite often hand fitted at the end, and that's when you work with a
single manufacturing process in a single factory. When you spread that out you
end up with parts that sometimes can't even be hand fitted anymore.

