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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.
ISS is done in (maybe max) 6 years?! We getting a new one for Christmas anytime soon? Gotta be much more… science to do up there that’s inconvenient in a space tent or even a teardrop or something.
Totally took it for granted.
Well, yes we’re getting a better one. I worked on Artemis adjacent projects and NASA isn’t just dreaming, they have plans for an actual moon base. It might take a decade or two, but it represents much more sustainable research and more beneficial research than what we have now in the ISS.
For those interested, I worked as an intern on a few lunar soil related projects and the plan is to actually build stuff with it. If you’re interested, AMA
🔥
You NASA folks just might be used to a challenge here and there:
Blow my mind with lunar soil in one sentence?
Not sure what will blow your mind but here’s some fun facts I feel like people don’t commonly know:
- Lunar regolith isn’t shallow, in many areas the regolith is 5m deep in the highlands and in craters and other areas it can be as much as 15m deep
- The regolith contains agglutinates, particles of rock that have been melted together by meteor impacts. They’re basically rock glass that contributes to the high abrasion of the regolith. We don’t have much of that stuff on earth and it’s very hard to make ourselves.
- Due to the lack of atmosphere, much of the dust is charged statically and will cling to astronauts and machines. I knew teams working on a sort of pulsing electricity in a grid of wires to repel the dust off of panels and suits.
So earth has a moon which is covered in rock. Meteors slam into it which melts that rock together into very angular (sharp) rock glass.
Rocks on the moon don't just pile up a little bit. They might be 15 meters deep in certain craters. Almost as helpful as quicksand for those who want to walk or drive over it.
Some of the smallest rocks on the moon cause trouble for astronauts: statically charged dust. It sticks to people and equipment, and creative solutions (pulsingly charged wire grids) have been necessary to mitigate it.
Oh yeah - that’s cool!! Thanks for sharing :)
No problem! Glad you found it interesting :)
What could that glass be used for, other than building houses? Can you sink in the deeper parts like NASA feared when they send the first people up?
The glass just has high angularity like the other particles it comes from so while in and of itself it isn’t useful, highly angular particles make for better interlocking when made into cements.
And I don’t think they’re as worried about the depth of the dust in the highlands but it definitely makes exploring craters on foot impossible with the regolith present. You could absolutely get buried in it if the depth of the dust is 10m deep in some spots. We have a lot of concerns with the dust and how we can make long term survivable hardware which is part of what I worked on.
but it definitely makes exploring craters on foot impossible with the regolith present
But the rovers with their oversized wheels are fine?
Theres some cool reasons behind that and I encourage you to look into it but the summary is that a lot of our rovers use those oversized wheels so they don’t sink and instead spread their weight over the top of it. The regolith does get more compact as you go down, so that also helps prevent sinking all the way to the bottom.
The other part is that both for rovers and astronauts we map out areas of high risk and avoid them. The Apollo astronauts landed in a specific spot and had certain areas to explore for that exact reason.
Then when it comes to the LRV (the moon buggy) that we brought up there, that thing has very lightweight tires that are essentially just mesh wire. Helps to spread the load and they deform easily to get better traction in the loose rock.
I had the pleasure of handling engineering replicas of the tires on the LRV and also newer generation martian rover tires. Including another engineering sample of the wheels on perseverance. NASA has a giant soil bin with a material that mimics the regolith that they use to test those wheels to prevent the rovers from sinking. Basically just attaching the wheels to a fake rover rig, loading it with weights, and then they drive it and track it in real time 3D space to measure slip and sinkage and all that.
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.
I just found out that the ISS is protected from some cosmic rays by the Earth's magnetosphere! Hurrah for only getting 90 chest x-rays worth during your stay there, instead of say, 100! Small victories.