The ISS is now nearly two decades old, it will become a legal adult next year.
Its not the UN in space, despite the name. Its not a waypoint for missions to the moon or outside the Earth-Moon system.
Has actually done anything new or unprecedented? I mean they have a pair in space for a year… but the Soviet/Russians did some very long duration missions on Salyut and MIR, including a 400 day plus mission. So they probably already know a lot about effects of long duration missions.
Its multi-module, but so was MIR, and that did not need a very expensive Shuttle to build.
Salyuts and Skylab did a lot of the early scientific experiments that increased knowledge, looking for Sun spots for instance?
Chris Hadfield’s guitar and moustache…strike that, that was MIR too.
It was never supposed to be either of these. What it is is a space station that is and has been used by a number of countries together to do science and research in space. One thing you might not know is that China has been asking to be included in the program for several years now…so THEY think there is some worth to it, at any rate.
There is always more to learn about the effects of long duration space missions on the human body. We don’t know all there is to know by any means. There are also a lot of experiments and observations that have been done by the various crews of the ISS. Here is a brief list of what NASA says are accomplishments of the program…this was as of 2008. If you do a Google search you get a ton of hits though. I’m not sure exactly what you are looking for. The most recent thing I recall was the experiment to print a 3-D part on the station, which was pretty cool IMHO. But they are doing tests, observations and experiments every day up there…plus, learning more about and gaining experience in how to live and work there as well.
And you could add more modules to it as we go along. In fact, I think there were and maybe still are plans to add more modules to it, and not just from governments. I seem to recall that Bigelow was talking about adding one of their experimental modules at one point, but no idea if it ever went anywhere.
ISS, showed how much cheaper the Russians could make space stuff and better. its cost abiut a quarter of a trillon dollers, the Russians spent 4-5 Billion on MIR, total.
Sadly, not really even that. Nothing about the construction of the station was particularly revolutionary other than doing the utmost to automate assembly, and that becuase of the extreme difficulties of doing even simple tasks in a vacuum freefall environment. The most interesting modules were deleted due to cost, and the ISS has no faculties as a propellant depot or in situ fueling, so even if it were in a suitable orbit to serve as a staging facility for lunar or interplanetary missions it isn’t equipped to do so. At least since final assembly some peer-reviewed science has been done (now that it can support a full crew complement) but NASA has largely been promoting the educational and commercial capabilities (e.g. Nanoracks and Spaceflight, Inc.); all told, none of this has been worth the enormous price tag, and the station seems to be perpetually on the brink of failure, the current issue being the water filter elements lost with the CRS-7 launch failure.
The one thing the ISS has demonstrated is the extreme cost, difficulty, and hazard of crewed space activities, even in near Earth space under the protection of Earth’s magnetosphere, and the benefit of remote robotic assistance. So, there’s that. But we’re known that for years; it just doesn’t appeal to the human exploratory notions of space advocates.
Which raises the question, can the ISS be safely deorbited like MIR (and the Salyuts) were? Its fucking enormous, would it not likely result in fairly large debris hitting the surface?
To me, ISS was a big disappointment. I wanted to see one of those 1950s rotating doughnut type stations-the ones where you could have 1 G at the rim, and zero G at the center. they were cool.
It will break up quickly under aerothermal and dynamic loads early in reentry. Although it is a large structure, it is mostly empty space contained by a skin with little more integrity than an airliner fuselage, held together by a truss structure that would collapse in terrestrial loads. There are certain components that would probably survive reentry, so you’d want a controled deorbit over broad ocean area, but modules would not come down intact. Breaking it apart prematurely would be of no benefit as you’d then have more parts to keep track of. The bigger hazard is should it suffer a critical failure and have to be abandoned, it may not be possible to perform a controlled deorbit, and the debris flydown pattern could be much broader and cover inhabited territory.
There is little benefit for a station ostensibly to do low-G and zero-G research for that kind of rotating structure. A station permanently inhabited by long term residents would benefit from simulated gravity, but that would be a much larger and heavier structure with corresponding cost of at least an order of magnitude greater. A partial-G station would be of benefit in studying human physiology in conditions in a Martian or European gravity field (about which we have essentially no data) but again at higher cost. Realistically, we do not have the launch capability and infrastructure, either extant or proposed, to support the construction of such a station. It only makes sense to build on that scale using rerouces extracted in situ from near Earth asteroids, and to do that would require developing quasi-autonomous capability to extract space resources (i.e. mining robots) do perform all of the hard labor in the harsh vacuum and radiation environment of space.
It would be also interesting to compare the effect of artificial gravity to the real deal. While acceleration for a point may be the same, it is not the same for a mass.
