Oh fun. Who is Elon going to just haphazardly drop the ISS on top of?
Serious answer- SpaceX is building the deorbit vehicle then turning it over to NASA, who will have full control over it.
Whales
Wales?!?
If my brother were still there, I’d say, “yes, please”.
Conventionally Point Nemo is the target.
Honestly this seems like a way to back-door inject another $800 million into the failing starship program.
What other company or government could do this?
The space station’s orbit has been adjusted continuously over its lifetime initially by attaching a shuttle to it and doing a burn of the shuttle’s engines and later doing the same with progress modules.
My bet is the original expectation of the designers was to deorbit by attaching centaurs (or whatever) to the existing docking ports and rotate the beast to the right attitude for a deorbit burn.
NASA has more recently said they want the reentry to be as steep as possible to minimize the size of the debris field, and is using that to justify the development of a new specialized deorbit vehicle. No doubt SpaceX will declare that Starship is the proper vehicle for this, and then will plow the $800 million into the Starship program. The money they got for Artemus is already long gone and Starship has failed to demonstrate key components of the Artemus plan. Dear Moon has been cancelled so NASA and Artemus are the only customers they have left. NASA knows that without a cash injection Artemus is at risk.
One of Starship’s engines on the lowest setting would tear the station apart. Regardless of whether they make this based on Starship instead of something more reasonably sized like a Dragon or Falcon 2nd stage, it’ll still need either a new engine design or a big cluster of Dracos. It’ll be something custom.
Regarding their Artemis work- the payments are milestone based, so they get money as they pass milestones. Engine relights and ship to ship prop transfer are some of the next ones.
Regarding their other customers- the Starship manifest includes another moon cruise, several satellite launches, and a lot of Starlinks.
I was kind of hoping for Impulse Space, but they’re probably too unproven.
Maybe the countries who put it up there should have had a plan for taking it down? Or at least pay for it?
Their failure is a huge opportunity for the usual grifters.
It is been a plan for a while in the USA to shift launches from government run to private run for over a decade. This is just an implementation of that strategy.
Longer - fifteen, closer to twenty years. It took this long for there to be one or two companies that they could be sure wouldn’t just cut and run (especially given how cutthroat the aerospace industry is).
They have had a plan for it, from the very beginning. Big-budget space projects like ISS don’t get anywhere without a wrap-up plan. ISS is in LEO, and its mass contraindicates moving it into a graveyard orbit. Conventionally, stuff in LEO gets de-orbited; same thing happened with Skylab in '79.
Wait, how is Starship failing? They successfully returned from re-entry and made a soft landing with both the booster and starship itself. Seems to me that it’s well on track?
Keep in mind that “having a plan”, doesn’t say when that plan is to be executed.
If you asked me, every object launched into orbit, should have a safe de-orbit plan beforehand. Chances are, as more private entities get onboard launching space stations, there might be regulations put in place to require a de-orbit plan for the launch to get approved.
Getting a de-orbit plan for the ISS now, might be just a preemptive plan for when those regulations get enacted.
Agreed, though NASA is definitely planning to Deorbit the ISS, probably sometime after 2030.
They’re not trying to get ahead of some regulation, but want to stop having to spend so many resources on maintaining it, when they could be doing other things.
Srsly, no-one going with the “it’s free real estate” meme.
Jokingly, but also really, seems a waste. I get they don’t want the overhead, but just boost it north, perhaps to a Lagrange, maybe just high orbit, but someone will come along to salvage eventually…
ETA: Also, one of the beauties of SpaceX is that Musk doesn’t muck with it (yet), working too well without him, unlike everything else he’s bollocksed up.
There is no Lagrange point “North”.
L1 is sunwards, L2 is counter-sunwards, L3 is on the other side of the Sun, L4 is Eastwards, and L5 is Westwards.
Going from LEO to L1/L2, requires a ∆v of 7.5km/s, which is comparable to the 9.4km/s ∆v required to go from Earth surface to LEO.
Meanwhile, the ISS keeps getting slowed down by Earth’s atmosphere, and it only takes a ∆v of 1km/s or less, to plunge it into denser atmosphere for reentry.
It makes me really sad that the space station is going to be destroyed since I always really liked it, but the sheer amount of fuel needed to move it to a stable position makes me (begrudgingly) understand why they’re going to do it…
Anyone able to put the deltaV into tons of fuel needed for this manoeuvre? Extra points if you can do the full thing of getting the fuel to the station.
It really is a shame though, its such an iconic structure. Would be nice if we could class it an the 8th wonder of the world but dont know enough about classification to know if it even could be.
I was just colloquially referring to away from Earth as North.
Ah… I didn’t catch on that. Nvm then.
Endless handouts for leeches. Denial of basic human needs for everybody else.
How is this a handout? They bid for a contract and won it vs competitors.
I’m hoping we get a source selection statement soon where they spell out why companies like Northrop and Blue didn’t win.
SpaceX’s track record for orbital insertion definitely had something to do with that. When last I knew, N-G didn’t have its own launch facilities (that might’ve changed in the last few years but I doubt it).
I brought up Northrop because I’m guessing they bid a Cygnus derived deorbit vehicle.
spacex should just schedule it to be launched into space; that ought to do it
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Nasa has selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX company to bring down the International Space Station at the end of its life.The California-based company will build a vehicle capable of pushing the 430-tonne orbiting platform into the Pacific Ocean early in the next decade.A contract for the work, valued at up to $843m (£668m), was announced on Wednesday.The first elements of the space station were launched in 1998, with continuous crewed operations beginning in 2000.The station circles the Earth every 90 minutes at an altitude just above 400km (250 miles) and has been home to thousands of scientific experiments, investigating all manner of phenomena from the aging process in humans to the formula for new types of materials.
Engineers say the laboratory remains structurally sound, but plans need to be put in place now for its eventual disposal.
Without assistance, it would eventually fall back to Earth on its own, however this poses a significant risk to populations on the ground.
"Selecting a US De-orbit Vehicle for the International Space Station (ISS) will help Nasa and its international partners ensure a safe and responsible transition in low Earth orbit at the end of station operations.
Nasa has studied various options for end-of-life disposal, external.These include disassembling the station and using the younger elements in a next-generation platform.
Another idea has been to simply to hand it off to some commercial concern to run and maintain.But these solutions all have varying complications of complexity and cost, as well as the legal difficulty of having to untangle issues of ownership.Neither Nasa nor SpaceX have released details of the design for the de-orbiting “tug boat”, but it will require considerable thrust to safely guide the station into the atmosphere in the right place and at the right time.The platform’s great mass and extent - the dimensions roughly of a football pitch - mean some structures and components are bound to survive the heat of re-entry and make it all the way to the surface.Controllers will allow the orbit of the ISS to naturally decay over a period of time, and after removing the last crew will command the tugboat to execute the final de-orbit manoeuvre.Redundant spacecraft are aimed at a remote location in the Pacific known as Point Nemo.Named after the famous submarine sailor from Jules Verne’s book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the target graveyard is more than 2,500km from the nearest piece of land.Nasa is hopeful that a number of private consortia will have started launching commercial space stations by the time the ISS is brought out of the sky.The focus of the space agencies will shift to a project to build a platform called Gateway that will orbit the Moon.
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