People have proposed saving the International Space Station. They think it cost about $200 billion to build it. However, most of those costs were the $1-2 billion spent for each Space shuttle launch. Those are sunk costs. It now costs an additional $1.3 billion per year to keep the Space Station operating. The parts were designed to last 30 years and some of the parts are now 32 years old.
Raising the space station to higher has technical risks, large costs and space impact risks. Deorbiting the space station at the end of its life is the safest and only viable method to decommission this historic symbol of science, technology, and collaboration. Saving the space station could easily cost $5-10 billion instead of the less than $1 billion to safely de-orbit. The Space Station that was saved would still need costly maintenance and it would not be designed for the new age of the SpaceX Starship. It would be far more valuable to start fresh with many new, bigger and better space stations for less cost.
Raising the Space Station orbits would require the development of new propulsive and tanker vehicles that do not currently exist. While still currently in development, vehicles such as the SpaceX Starship are being designed to deliver significant amounts of cargo to these orbits; however, there are prohibitive engineering challenges with docking such a large vehicle to the space station and being able to use its thrusters while remaining within space station structural margins. Other vehicles would require both new certifications to fly at higher altitudes and multiple flights to deliver propellant.
The other major consideration when going to a higher altitude is the orbital debris regime at each specified locale. Going above 415km has a lot more risk. Everything is old and more likely to break. why spend billions for this?
Raising the Space Station orbits would require the development of new propulsive and tanker vehicles that do not currently exist. While still currently in development, vehicles such as the SpaceX Starship are being designed to deliver significant amounts of cargo to these orbits; however, there are prohibitive engineering challenges with docking such a large vehicle to the space station and being able to use its thrusters while remaining within space station structural margins. Other vehicles would require both new certifications to fly at higher altitudes and multiple flights to deliver propellant.
The other major consideration when going to a higher altitude is the orbital debris regime at each specified locale. The risk of a penetrating or catastrophic impact to space station (i.e., that could fragment the vehicle) increases drastically above 257miles (415km). While higher altitudes provide a longer theoretical orbital life, the mean time between an impact event decreases from ~51 years at the current operational altitude to less than four years at a 497 mile (800km), ~700-year orbit. This means that the likelihood of an impact leaving station unable to maneuver or react to future threats, or even a significant impact resulting in complete fragmentation, is unacceptably high. NASA has estimated that such an impact could permanently degrade or even eliminate access to LEO for centuries.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
I agree. What we need to do, is just do better, when it comes to building “stations” off Earth. The ISS was a tinker-toy, that (amazingly) didn’t kill anyone who was aboard it. So far. Let it go, and lets move on to so much better ideas, and hardware. Oh please, because we can, and must.
[ besides a list of chances with ISS and with new space stations and comparing benefits for the budgets available or made available, there’s an emotional example for people being fascinated and interested with ‘historical connections’
“At a fire station in California, the world’s oldest light bulb has been burning for 118 years.”
“The Shelby Electrics Company in Ohio manufactured the light bulb in the 1890s. It is a common carbon filament bulb just as Thomas A. Edison produced it in 1879.
The “Centennial Light” was originally a 60 watt bulb, but is now very dim, emitting about the same light as a 4-watt nightlight, which is probably the main reason for its longevity.”
(and about seven other mentioned, being on decades of emitting light, ~2-3 others are still functional, to this date;
or combining the ‘impossible’ ‘ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eternal_Flame_Falls_2.JPG ‘)
“fascinating”, LLAP ]
Boosting the ISS to a high orbit is a straw man. The risk of debris collision makes it a non-starter. So let’s put that idea to the side.
Rather, the value of the ISS after 2030 is for a historic destination for LEO tourists who would pay a bit extra to have it maintained only as a place to visit but not be used as a research facility. Starships would dock probably at least once a month. So, just like is done now, it can be boosted periodically using any of several options as an inexpensive side-job of the routine visits.
Preserving the ISS in its current orbit as a tourist destination doesn’t preclude other commercial labs or Vast-like tourist destinations. So, let’s not dump the ISS just because a better space hotel or cheaper laboratory is a viable alternative. The value of the ISS is because if its historic nature and that cannot be replaced by anything other than bringing it to Earth intact (or as a reef) and neither of those are practical.
However, government views things from its perspective. So it can propose extension or deorbit. It can’t say that the ISS as a tourist destination is a viable alternative because it is not a tourism company and no company has stepped forward take it over like the MirCorp attempted to take over Russia’s Mir. Yet NASA hasn’t even attempted to submit an RFI or RFP for that. So, my hope is that a MirCorp-like company would step forward and offer an unsolicited proposal. And I think that Rick Tumlinson or someone like him could probably pull it together.
“Raising the Space Station orbits would require the development of new propulsive and tanker vehicles that do not currently exist.”
Such vehicles don’t exist for a new American space station either, though China seems to have specific plans to beat us there by 2030.
What specific replacement plans does the U.S. have for a new space station and how will they accomplish them?
The space shuttle was really a space truck, with a highly moveable powerful arm that could position items from its large bay onto the ISS, building it section by section. The giant starship is not suited for such delicate work. It’s not even suited for long distance space travel since it needs repeated refueling that will be even more impractical without a space-station, or maybe two – one at the Moon as well (I believe the refueling problems will never allow the Starship to reach Mars, let alone the 100s Musk predicts. Atomic rockets will be practical before Starship support is and Musk will be too old and busy with other things to do anything about that by then).
$10B is roughly the entire development cost of Starship/Superheavy. For a much more modest sum, SpaceX would build a SpaceShuttle Orbiter Starship variant for you with both a spacious crew quarters and an airlock to a large cargo bay with robotic or remote operated arms if that’s what you want.
It’s vastly more expensive to do the bespoke engineering to accommodate these cranky legacy systems for a single questionable use case than to build new designs from scratch that have lot’s of potential for other uses.
The ISS was incredibly expensive because it was built with wildly inefficient pre-starship era technology. Much more could be done with that money invested in new tech rather than saving old junk.
The ISS shouldn’t be saved. The best tribute to the spirit of the ISS is to build many new, bigger and better space stations.
Sorry to say it, but you’re wrong. We don’t need an operational ISS. We need an ISS monument.
In less than a decade, our partnership with Russia, a nation that accomplished more in space than anyone save the US, will be over.
We will be back to the Cold War…poised to end human civilization rather than raising it up.
An ISS monument will show future generations, when they look up at night, that achieving great things with an enemy is not only possible, but desirable. We cannot relegate such a legacy to a Wikipedia article.
We routinely raise the ISS orbit with simple resupply ships like Progress and Cygnus. This would be an ideal opportunity to use the souped up Dragon, refueled by Starship if necessary, to demonstrate what it can really do!
And if raising the orbit has debris risks, lowering it has risks that are at least equally bad. The reason we’ve repeatedly increased the station’s altitude is because of new debris threats. A deorbit maneuver takes us directly through the danger zone, and a single collision will create a much worse debris calamity.
Will this be more expensive?
Probably. But we really haven’t made a significant effort to find out just how expensive it really is. And we’ve spent far more on far less worthy objectives in the past.
Elon can do this. He’s said as much.
Save ISS!!
I 100% agree with Brian here. Saving the ISS is a particularly poor way to spend $10 billion.
1. Monuments are nice. But this is an eyewatering 10B for something that will just be out in space, unusable, impossible to bring back with current technology, and very likely to get destroyed by an asteroid.
2. The ISS orbit is maintained by resupply, not raised. It takes a huge amount of delta v to raise the station to a safe orbit, while only very little to maintain it or deorbit it.
3. Lowering it does not have risks that are as bad as raising it. SpaceX will develop a system capable of bringing down the station to an uninhabited area of ocean to avoid any possibility of debris hitting where we don’t want. There is no ‘danger zone’ beneath LEO, unlike in higher orbit, where detritus can remain zipping around for centuries and make swaths of orbit unusable. Everything beneath LEO slows down and usually burns up, which is why there are never any space junk collision that occur there.
4. NASA released a white paper where they went through every possible option quite seriously, including raising the orbit. As we can see, they concluded it was a bad idea.
The orbit of the ISS (or close to that) is a very bad place to leave a massive “monument”. The costs are ridiculous high and and relatively clean LEO is much more desirable.
Deorbit her at the Point Nemo (or other remote place) is the best solution.
What Brian pointed out that persuaded me is that the orbital debris issue is much worse further up, because at the ISS orbit and below things tend not to stay in orbit very long without station keeping thrust. You go up further, and the residence time in orbit without station keeping is much longer, (Which is why you’d want to store things there!) and that means there’s more debris around to hit you.
So I guess the odds of the ISS getting hit and triggering a Kessler cascade are worse further up, unless you go a lot further up. Which would be pretty expensive.
Maybe they can just save some iconic part of it for a museum.
I didn’t know the collision risk was that big further up, so I have to agree to splash it.
If they can predict the debris zone size, they could crash it in a desert, making great treasure for many a hunter.
Large pieces of Skylab are now at a museum in Australia.
The current Eternal President of Russia tried threatening the “West” with crashing the ISS into somewhere upholding sanctions against them.
[ me always wondering, if a President is a symbol for a nation because people in that nation became like they are or if a President is a role model for that nation(?)
and sometimes this reads like, if one thing happens to be involved into an incident, we would additionally slash-hammer the thing(?) with a non-rebound hammer; no
or, if one goes ‘West’ all the time (on planet Earth), better be prepared greeting the ‘East'(?)
we can offer several point of views, which one do You prefer, LLAP
(btw. What’s a Chinese version of ‘StarTrek’? greetings to Chao&Sulu) ]
[ correction: reads sledge-hammer ]
Or, stick an electrodynamic tether on there. One was supposedly built for Mir and could have saved it if it was ever taken there. After Mir fell, it was left to rot in a climate controlled hangar for years before it got scrapped.
Evacuating ISS means sufficient excess power to run a tether is available. Tether lifetime might be issue, but hoytethers mostly get over that.
All the new commercial space station designs forgo tethers. If I was a shareholder, I would be asking very pointed questions about why a substantial amount of capital is being spent on reboost propellant and equipment when a near-propellantless option could be purchased from Tethers Unlimited or similar companies.
OK, I guess that justifies junking it, since it would only be retained as a museum exhibit anyway. It would be a remarkably expensive museum exhibit.
We keep all sorts of old stuff around that does not make economic sense to do so. Be it old buildings, cars, sailing ships, battleships or space stations. It would be worth the expense to save the ISS. Future generations will thank us for doing so.
The main difference is that you can actually go and see said cars, buildings, etc. ‘Saving the ISS’ in this context means raising it even farther above the earth where in all likelihood no one will ever see it again. It’s like building a 10B box to keep your old car safe while you sink it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
“where in all likelihood no one will ever see it again.”
Now, that’s silly. Perhaps you meant, “Where anybody with a modest telescope can see it.”?
And you’re really expecting space travel to stagnate again, like it did for so long after Apollo?
You can’t actually see the ISS with an amateur telescope. It is extremely difficult to track due to its speed, and the resolving power of anything beneath a $10K telescope can’t render more than a fuzzy white blob to your eye. There’s a reason why the ISS isn’t considered a reasonable viewing target for most telescopes. This issue will only be exacerbated by doubling the space station’s orbit; why on earth would we pay $10B for it?
I sincerely hope that space exploration does not stagnate again, but we are VERY far off from a future where it’s at all conceivable to bring back the ISS for no purpose other than to put it in a museum. We can’t spend such princely sums based on our expectations of humanity centuries from now.
Perhaps I’m a bit off in my estimations because I have a friend who’s REALLY into astronomy, and has a serious personal scope.
“bring back the ISS”? I think you’re mistaking the museum proposals; The idea is generally that the orbital museum would be a museum, that’s orbital. There wouldn’t be any “bringing back” involved. Think Udvar-Hazy, only in LEO.
Note that the contract is to deorbit it in 2030, perhaps a bit after that. By then Starship should have been flying for some time, and costs to orbit will have declined enormously. At that point they might reevaluate their plans, and just build the museum around it.
The problem with the arguments on why it is impractical to save the ISS stem from the fact that the people making them have created a strawman answer that clearly leads one to conclude you should not. That’s not a good way to decide disagreements. The arguments must begin with two equally well defined and acceptable alternatives
Two mission models are needed — one to bring the ISS out of orbit, and one to bring it to an arbitrary place in LEO.
As many have pointed out, it’s unlikely that the best place in LEO are any of the most highly used orbital shells (500 to 800 km) –we’d want to bring it above that fray for current and future debris concerns. Luckily, the delta-v difference between 800 km and 1200 km is fairly small.
Calculating the gross cost delta between deorbiting the station and raising it to 1200 km should not be that hard. I highly doubt that delta comes close to the $10B some have pulled out of a black hole. In fact, NASA concluded in their study of ISS disposal that likely the safest orbit if left in space would be around 1200 km, and would require a delta V of about 400 m/s (versus deorbit delta-v of 57 m/s) or about 55,000 kg of propellant. That’s a lot of propellant but certainly within the realm of a Starship or even fully fueled a Centuar V.
Assuming those numbers are true, there’s no reason why raising the orbit would cost more than double deorbit (the deorbit contract was worth $853M according to news reporting)
So, the real question is not financial — its whether we should save thus engineering marvel for posterity, or doom it to oblivion. Can we debate that issue and not the strawman arguments put forward?
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the parts that make up ISS are 30 years old and it costs $1.3 billion per year to operate. You have not addressed why this is more valuable than entirely new space stations. Vast, Axiom, and SpaceX could make new space stations that are bigger and better and safer for far less than $1.3 billion per year.
Almost nobody is proposing to continue to operate it, Brian. The argument is just that it should be retained as an inert museum exhibit. So there are no $1.3B in operating expenses involved.
Further, since the deorbit mission isn’t planned until 2030 at the earliest, and Starship will probably be flying payloads at least in an expendable mode by next year, the expense of keeping it up there and intact needs to be figured in terms of 2030 launch costs, not today’s launch costs.
Understandably, NASA would not want to pay for doing this. If it happens it should be paid out of a separate appropriation explicitly for historical preservation purposes.