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.
Edit: why is this being downvoted? Is it because I said “someone rich”? I said that because I think rich people are the only ones with the money and willpower to get it done. I don’t like relying on them, but I don’t think most of the US population cares enough to get the government or NASA to do it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: why is this being downvoted? Is it because I said “someone rich”? I said that because I think rich people are the only ones with the money and willpower to get it done. I don’t like relying on them, but I don’t think most of the US population cares enough to get the government or NASA to do it.
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.
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.
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.
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.