SpaceX will make a giant version of the Dragon spacecraft with 6 times the propellant and four times the power for a precise and controlled deorbit of the space station.
There will be 46 Draco engines on the upgraded vehicle. It will be almost two vehicles in one and will be ready in 2028.
It will deliver 10,000 newtons of thrust.
The de-orbit breakup will have three events.
1. The solar arrays and radiation will have separation.
2. Intact modules and truss segment will go next
3. Individual modules will fragment and loss of structural integrity. The external skin will then melt and the internal hardware will rapidly heat and melt. There will be some parts that survive re-entry and crash into the ocean.
With 6x more propellant and 4x the power of today’s Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX was selected to design and develop the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle for a precise, controlled deorbit of the @Space_Station https://t.co/GgtuplTwqQ pic.twitter.com/E23sS7CE4U
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 17, 2024
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.
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Why not keep it and use it for parts?
the parts are about 30 years old. They will start failing badly. I have written a new article explaining how old and busted the ISS will be and the costs to try to save it.
SpaceX should offer to purchase the ISS at the rate of 1 free F9 launch per module a country contributed. Instead of ISS paying SpaceX for a disposal tractor to de-orbit the ISS, they get to walk away with some valuable launch credits, and SpaceX gets a fixer-upper they can boost, attach several large Bigelow habs to as new staging areas while they clear out and upgrade existing modules, solar arrays, life support, etc. – could be a win-Win-WIN. Good by ISS hello SpaceX methane fuel depo, rentable space habs, orbital mule parking lot, Starlink orbital control (etc.).
SpaceX wouldn’t even need to purchase it. They were only contracted to destroy it after nobody agreed to take care of it past 2030.
Unfortunately, the reason why SpaceX, or anyone else for that matter, doesn’t want the ISS is because there’s no way to make money off of it. We spend over a billion a year maintaining it, and its economic value is dubious at best, certainly nowhere near achieving ROI.
I don’t think it’s worthwhile to save it. NASA released a white paper going through all the options and it would be significantly more expensive to boost it into a higher orbit. On top of this, you rely on the pipe dream that in a hundred years or so, humanity will have the capabilities and will safely recover it so they can oggle at it. A cute idea, but not worth $100 million. The design of the ISS is well documented, and there are plenty of videos of what it’s like on board. And it’s true that 100 million is pennies compared to the cost of sending it up there, but that’s the sunk-cost fallacy. 100 million is still a boatload of money that is not well spent on giving humanity the opportunity 100 years down the line to recover a glorified space trinket.
One would think that hundreds of tons of advanced building material in NEO would be worth a lot. The asteroid mining projects can have it as practice ground. If they can’t extract value out of that pile of concentrated metals, there is not much hope for the plans they are trying to sell.
Interesting, it’s so large the only options for launching this is Falcon Heavy or Starship.
Albeit if it was my choice, I’d raise the ISS into a long term parking orbit., where it could sit for centuries for someone to recover it. But I presume the fear of it breaking down uncontrollably is making them destroy it now.
On “The Steel Breeze” novel by Alastair Reynolds, the cupola segment is part of a café on the Moon. Seems that will never come to happen.
It is “international” literally – multiple owners, much of it belongs to Russia. Any basis for this thing to exist has been lost. I suppose from Russian “poetic justice” perspective the best way it should end the way “Mir” was ended – ceremonially burnt and drowned in front of a million cameras, not turned into an eternal memorial or “Smithsonian Institution orbital exhibition”. NASA and SpaceX would not have commissioned the deorbiting hardware design unless it was approved by all ISS owners, especially Russia.
There’s still time for somebody in a position of authority to point out that a deorbit vehicle could also boost the orbit.
Brian, could you or someone explain how this is a good thing? It seems that the structural members would be of value in the futureas salvage, not to mention the historical value, if it were to be boosted into a higher orbit. I’m thinking of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, or the aircraft graveyard north of Tucson,AZ. How should this destruction, of that which cost us taxpayers so much to get up there in the first place, be viewed? What am I missing?
I was about to ask the same thing.
If you push it higher you only need to bring fuel, the shuttles own thruster can do the job.
It’s now at 400 km. At 800 km it can stay up for over 100 years.
It’s still below the van Allan belt at 1000 km.
It weighs 400 ton. Does anyone know the isp of the station thrusters?
Cost, raison d’etre, age and orbital rot.
The station is an unreasonably expensive solution to the problem of “Where is this overpriced shuttle going to go to?”
Both shuttle and station have done great things regardless, make no mistake, but neither was designed to be economically sustainable on its own.
And age…
Hundreds of tons of obsolete custom parts spread out over hundreds of feet leveraging through dozens of narrower connections. That won’t end well when the station inevitably starts to tumble without guidance.
And rot…
Metal, crystal, semiconductors and synthetics swinging through a quarter-century of day/night cycles in a light but persistent bath of atomic oxygen.
The station COULD be salvaged for parts now but we don’t have the orbital infrastructure in place to make that economical yet.
And the ships that will eventually make such a salvaging infrastructure possible will at first just make it easier… and cheaper… to throw up multiple new stations first.
I agree that salvaging it for use is probably impractical, for the reasons you suggest. But the suggestion is to salvage it for a *museum exhibit*. Museum exhibits aren’t preserved to be used, they’re preserved to be shown.
Push it into a higher orbit, and wrap it in a foil sun shade, and it will be good long enough to still be available when somebody builds an orbital museum.
Aside from the fact that spmehow wrapping the station up in order to “mothball” it isn’t really dealing with the various issues involved, you are still leaving out the “C” word.
Cost.
If I were being VERY optimistic I’d guess hundreds of millions to implement and millions yearly in order to maintain the hulk.
And I’m not that optimistic.
Shouldn’t be *that* expensive.
By 2030 Starship should be in regular service. Send one up modified to dock with the station, refuel it to give it sufficient oomph, and send the station up to a higher orbit. However much it costs, it’ll be less than the $800+ million they’re paying to deorbit it.
It will cost far more to send it to a higher orbit. Plus moving it up to a higher orbit would put a lot of strain on the truss. It could break apart in the attempt.