i know the de-orbiting of the ISS has been planned for the end of 2030 for like a year now but having to read that elon musk gets to kill it. do you know what the ISS is. the international space station. what it has meant for science, for collaboration between nations, what a symbol of hope for the future it is. I hope elon musk dies before 2030 so he doesnt get to feel a damn thing about getting to put his fucking name anywhere near it.
This is worded really misleadingly. Yes, NASA has commissioned SpaceX to develop the deorbit vehicle, but that’s it.
While the company will develop the deorbit spacecraft, NASA will take ownership after development and operate it throughout its mission. Along with the space station, it is expected to destructively breakup as part of the re-entry process.
Yeah. Basically, NASA needs to stop spending so much money on the space station: they’re required by congress to be doing Moon things and it’s hard to do those things while spending most of their budget on the ISS. There’s no realistic way to bring the ISS back down (we’d need a lot of dangerous trips in shuttles we don’t have), so it needs to be destroyed. We can’t just leave it up there, because it’s in a low orbit that constantly decays. It was placed there because that made it possible for the shuttles (which we don’t have anymore) to get to it.
So if we just turn off the lights and leave it alone, it’ll end up coming down anyway. And it’s big enough that some chunks will make it to the ground, which could be bad. We don’t want to kill anybody if a big chunk of it lands in Paris or something.
So NASA is going to intentionally destroy it by deorbiting it safely. This means they can aim where it goes, so they’re gonna crash it into Point Nemo: the spot in the Pacific ocean that is farthest from human settlement.
And they’re asking Elon’s company to do it because they make Big Rockets. Don’t worry, his name will only be a footnote in the history of the ISS.
But yeah. At the end of the day, this is a positive for science. NASA has had a long time to learn cool stuff with the ISS, and now they’re trying to safely decommission it so they can move onto other stuff. They have a finite budget and they don’t want to keep paying for the ISS. It’d be nice if NASA had a bigger budget so they didn’t have to make these choices… But honestly even with much more money and no Moon Mandate they’d be looking at decommissioning the ISS by now. It’s old, and expensive, and our major partner on it is Russia, which is a bit of a political issue these days.
Yes it’d be cool if they could bring it down safely and put it in a museum but it’s kinda huge and we can’t.
Motherfucker is BIG.
My concern here is not “they shouldn’t do that”, it’s “i don’t trust a Musk company to do it safely or well”. We’ve known for a long time we were gonna have to decommission the ISS.
It’s basically their only choice at this point, sadly. The other US option is the Boeing nonsense that currently has stranded several astronauts, I don’t think the Ariane 6 can be used for this (it’s a launch vehicle, not something thing you can use to deorbit anything), they’re not allowed to use Chinese rockets, and there’s a lot of political issues with using Russian rockets.
Thus, SpaceX.
I mean, their Falcon series has a good safety record: 2 failures in 351 launches.
Starship is an outlier because they’re trying to do a rapid prototyping thing by using ENDLESS MONEY and they’re doing it very, very badly.
Like, fuck Elon Musk and all, but SpaceX actually has some good rockets.
Like, fuck Elon Musk
and all, but SpaceX actually
has some good rockets.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Soo, why isn’t the space agency building it’s own rockets? Also, are we ever going to see a replacement for the ISS?
