The partners who built and operate ISS-- Europe, Russia, the United States, Japan, and Canada-- not only support the Obama administration's decision to extend the lifetime of ISS to 2020, but want to extend it to at least 2028. That year would mark the 30th anniversary of the deployment of the Russian module that was the first element of the station.
The fact that ISS is modular presents an interesting possibility. As space colonization advocate Stephen Ashworth has pointed out, it's possible to maintain a modular station virtually indefinitely by replacing old modules with new ones in a systematic way. Such an approach would see the capability of a station increase as it got older-- the opposite of what happens to a human. That kind of program should also reduce the cost per module and develop a new industry that would build modules for space stations, spaceships, and other structures in space over the long term.
Replacing core modules would require some fancy flying-- taking the station apart, removing the old module, inserting the new, and putting the whole thing back together-- but such feats will be necessary if we are to develop a truly spacefaring civilization.
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About Me
- Gregory Anderson
- I am a freelance writer and a client of the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.
1 comment:
Greg, the fancy flying that you refer to is purely an artifact of the bad design of the ISS!
Consider Mir. The add-on modules of this design can be replaced at leisure. The base block is the only one to pose a problem, and not even much of a problem.
A new base block can be flown up and docked with the forward port. This is originally where the add-on modules (Priroda, Spektr, Kvant-2, Kristall) were docked. They were transferred to their side ports with the aid of a small robot arm. It wouldn't take much of a redesign of the robot arm to make it able to transfer the add-on modules from the old base block sideways a short distance to the corresponding ports on the new one. This could be done at leisure, over weeks or months.
The original Kvant module at the back end of the old base block would need to be flown around separately, or more likely could simply be trashed at the same time as the old base block and replaced with a new one after separation of the old units.
Mir is the best small space station design I know of. But unfortunately the Russians, like their American colleagues, became besotted with the dream of a huge station around 1990, not for any practical reason but simply (I suppose) because it felt good. We'd have done far better with a variety of smaller stations based on Skylab and Mir. But the monolithic ISS is what we've got, and where we have to progress from!
Stephen
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