International Space Station To "De-Orbit" In 2016 Due To Lack Of Long-Term Funding

Washington Post:

A number of times in recent weeks a bright, unblinking light has appeared in the night sky of the nation's capital: a spaceship. Longer than a football field, weighing 654,000 pounds, the spaceship moved swiftly across the heavens and vanished.

Read the whole story: Washington Post

Comments

[zitlight73]

01:52 PM on 07/13/2009

Maybe they could sell on E-Bay. A zero-g bridal suite could be rented out for big bucks.

[Brett1981]

01:24 PM on 07/13/2009

Get rid of the empire and keep the space station.

[Artos]

01:19 PM on 07/13/2009

Part II.
The Work vehicles I spoke of are like the ones used to work outside of the Discovery 1 exploration vessel and which Bowman uses to retrieve Pooles body. I think at least one would fit inside the bay of a shuttle. These would be handy for working around the ISS. The ISS could then be employed additionally as a Construction Platform for a future Moon or Mars Exploration Craft. The Astronaut/ Mechanics/ Engineers would assemble out of Parts sent via rocket from Earth, a craft that would then be able to travel to either the Moon or Mars. With all the space now available on the ISS you would be able to house a team of Astronauts who could accomplish that job.The ISS would then have plenty of purpose. To de orbit it now would be a stupid thing to do and an absolute waste. It would also demonstrate a complete lack of imagination and resolve on the part of everyone.

[Artos]

01:10 PM on 07/13/2009

While I doubt very much humans will ever get outside of our Solar System and probably not do much more then put a small working station on Mars, I do think the idea of keeping ourselves involved in the adventure is worthwhile. The only thing that prevents us from making use of what we have built so far is our lack of interest, imagination or drive. We are pretty much obsessed with doing every thing in our power to destroy ourselves here on Earth, so Space Exploration is kind of just a idle diversion that makes our short lives interesting. Now were it up to me, I would first of all leave both or all three of the Shuttles in orbit with the Space Station on a permanent basis. They would add extra space for work and living. I would also build a harnessing yoke onto the ISS to which to attach the Hubble Telescope permanently. That way it could be maintained on a regular basis by the astronauts on board the ISS. They could keep it operational and focused. The Shuttles would be used for Orbiting flights to do cleanups perhaps. Our near Space is getting awfully cluttered. In addition they could be retrofitted for possible Asteroid killing. When they go up for the last time they should take as much gear with them as possible for the ISS. One or two small work vehicles could be taken up in them ie 2001 A Space Odyssey.

[RTIII]

11:26 AM on 07/17/2009

Very good ideas...
.

[jsarets]

01:09 PM on 07/13/2009

I love the really old picture attached to this story. The ISS is now 3 or 4 times that size. See the array of four solar panels on the left/foreground that's much bigger than the other arrays? There's now SIX of those arrays on the ISS!

[truenortherner]

12:54 PM on 07/13/2009

This all fits in with my pet conspiracy theory from the 1990s when the station was being built.
The station will not be de-orbited (though they might give us a fireworks show to pull the wool over our eyes).
Remember back when the station was being built, the Russian contractor didn't have one of the 'nodes' ready for the scheduled launch. All of a sudden, the U.S. military just happened to have a spare sitting around and gave it to NASA (I think it was the navy).
In 2016, the space station will be 'signed over' to the military and a few unneeded capsules will be sent into earth atmosphere to scam us.
Nice theory?

[viperhawk2k4]

02:13 PM on 07/13/2009

Actually, It Makes for a great Scifi action flick! lol

[upwing]

12:53 PM on 07/13/2009

every rotation causes extreme temprature changes,tearing that thing apart at the molecular level, theve known about this,weather thev've told congress, or not, sell it to china, but for scrap, cause thats what its become.

[Coinyer101]

12:07 PM on 07/13/2009

they should give it to someone else, instead.

[rbenjamin]

11:42 AM on 07/13/2009

The International Space Station was the original Bridge to Nowhere, or alternatively, the world's most expensive night light. There is no commercial value to the enterprise and the science and engineering payoffs could have been achieved at far lower cost. The ISS consumed NASA dollars that could have been much better spent on unmanned planetary probes and earth orbiting observatories, but then, the same could be said of the Space Shuttle. Manned space missions make little sense until the cost per pound of achieving Earth orbit goes down a few orders of magnitude. NASA needs to get its R&D priorities straight. One final thought - why wait until 2016 to end the folly?

[jsarets]

11:58 AM on 07/13/2009

The cost per mass to LEO won't go down until the mass to LEO goes up. Flight rate is EVERYTHING.

Shuttle was designed to be cost-effective at 40-50 flights per year. We never made the commitment to launch that much stuff, so the fixed costs overwhelmed the variable costs and the program remained extremely uneconomical.

[rbenjamin]

02:29 PM on 07/13/2009

Good point, but I'd hasten to add that the 40-50 flights per year threshold was never realistic. A space elevator would be a real game changer.

[RRoadrunner]

11:41 AM on 07/13/2009

Black mail? Seems kind of silly to give up on it now.

[dagdavid]

11:36 AM on 07/13/2009

What a freaking waste of money

[WilliePilgrim]

11:27 AM on 07/13/2009

While I'm not terribly sentimental over the space station..it really never was a very good space station and barely qualified for "space" as it was actually just LEO "low earth orbit"..I find it hard to believe that this opportunity to salvage what is never the less a significant piece of human history will not produce alternate plans by commercial companies eager to find a way to get into the space business, which our government should support. The result of the last 50 years of space developement in concert with the military and its budgetary process has left us with a very expensive white elephant and a system so impaired by a multitude of various forms of institurtional arthritis, it is time to open the doors to competitive commercial operations. Savaging the Space Station could serve as a good primer on this, and lead to a deeper space station using better more economical systems emerging from the research engineering community and sponsored by contract/prize seeking commercial companies.
I beseach anyone with input to forego efforts to create a station on the moon from earth. It would be expensive and difficult..and much easier to do from a station designed for inter-space operation which would allow for genuine space scaled engineering without the need for heavy lifting.
I look forward to seeing the Space Station serve as the nucleus for a museum dedicated to our earliers ventures into the neighborhood of our planetary system.

[JScott]

11:10 AM on 07/13/2009

Jeez seems it's completed after a long time to build it and not even in completed state would it be used long enough what a waste of taxpayer money the .56% of the budget anyway. Must be someway to justify it. It seems such a waste to de orbit it so soon.

[Tungsten f]

11:17 AM on 07/13/2009

The point here is that NASA can't operate it if Congress does not fund it. NASA is at the mercy of what Congress is willing to pay. They cant operate the ISS on vapor and good will. If you want to see it continue tell your congresscritter, not NASA.

"This, at least, is NASA's plan, pending a change in policy. There's no long-term funding on the books for international space station operations beyond 2015. "

[jahzilla]

11:09 AM on 07/13/2009

Standard NASA doom-and-gloom, "blackmail" posturing. If and when the global economy regains footing, they'll get their funding. Remember the Hubble and VLA programs death chatter? Blah, blah, blah . . . .

[BlackWidowPilot]

11:57 AM on 07/13/2009

The Pentagon squanders billions of taxpayer dollars on $435 claw hammers ("Multi-Directional Impact Generators") and $1000 toilet seats and weapon systems that never work (DIVAD, V-22, ad nauseum), yet NASA is forced to beg like the orphan for enough watered-down gruel so as not to starve.

"Doom and gloom?" I'd like to see anyone survive on a proportional budget as NASA has had, especially during the previous eight years of Bushevik misrule.

Any civilization that loses its curiosity about what is beyond the next horizon, is a society that has doomed itself to eventual self-disposal on the garbage heap of history, from Rome to Manchu China ad nauseum.

IMHO We ignore science and scientific exploration at our collective peril.

Leland R. Erickson

Citizen

[RTIII]

02:14 PM on 07/13/2009

You SURE got that right. I happen to know a lot about it. On the Earth Science side, Last Year Clinton to Last Year Bush there was (including devaluation of the dollar) almost exactly a 50% funding CUT.

The rest of NASA didn't fair much better - except, of course, those operations that were directly connected to the military.
.

[RegalPlatypus]

11:04 AM on 07/13/2009

The Dept. of Defense plus the Global War on Terror accounts for 21.6% of the 2009 federal budget.

NASA is eating up 0.58%.

...I think I can imagine a source by which to increase NASA's funding.