International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

SpaceNut · 2012-07-01 11:15:47

Medical, Scientific Breakthroughs Via The ISS

Since 2000, researchers have been using it to study the impact of the near-zero-gravity environment, making new discoveries in the life sciences, biomedicine and materials science

GW Johnson · 2012-07-02 11:45:48

The ISS is well worth it. I just wish they'd gone ahead with the medical centrifuge module. We could have gotten from it an answer to "how much gee is enough?" for the Mars trip.

GW

louis · 2012-07-02 13:12:39

Excuse me, I remain a sceptic. I recall the graph showing just how much of the NASA budget was being gobbled up by the ISS (in addition to the Space Shuttle that is). For all that investment we could have set shop on Moon and Mars and visited Ceres and Titan as well.

GW Johnson · 2012-07-02 13:31:03

Hi Louis:

What you say is true. However, things always change. The price to LEO via shuttle was about $27,000 per pound delivered, in 25 metric ton lots, higher price if smaller delivery. That's because each launch was $1.5B cost.

Right now with Atlas 5 and Delta 4, at their max capabilities of 25 and 20 metric tons, the unit price is near $2,500 per pound, and just about the same in 10-ton deliveries for Falcon-9. That $100B ISS would have cost nearer $10B if built today with these rockets, instead back then with shuttle. Same 10- to mostly-25 ton modules, too.

So we built it back then. Shuttle alone would have eaten up enough money to prevent manned missions beyond LEO. Shuttle plus ISS was just worse, but at least it was more serial expenditures than parallel. It was an experiment, one mandated years before, when Apollo was cancelled in the middle of the landings. Hindsight is always 20-20, foresight is not.

We sure do need that partial-gee-that-is-therapeutic answer. Those experiments have still never been done, not in 50 years of manned spaceflight. Hindsight again, but very clear.

BTW, during Gemini mid 1960's, the Mars mission was on the books for 1983. By the time of the Apollo landings, that had been pushed back to the 1987 opposition. The preferred launch vehicle was to be Saturn-5 with the S-IVB third stage replaced by a NERVA-powered nuclear upper stage. This would have doubled LEO delivery from over 100 metric tons to just under 250 tons. They were trying to find a way to do one-launch/one-mission, but it was becoming a little bit clearer that LEO assembly was required.

All that activity died when Nixon cancelled Apollo (and all manned spaceflight outside LEO !!!!!) by executive order in 1972. He had been talked into shuttle-then-space station as prerequisites to going to Mars, when they really were not. He just thought it would be cheaper, and (unlike LBJ) was no fan of NASA or manned space. Hindsight again.

GW

Impaler · 2012-07-03 06:12:04

Come now GW you should be able to do your homework better then that. At 1.5 Billion per Shuttle and assuming full utilization of 16 mt (largest segment shuttle ever delivered) and divided over 410 mt (approximate mass of US portion) is 25 launches. Actual segment delivery shuttle launches totaled 27. That totals only 40 Billion to LAUNCH the ISS, the reaming 60% of that 100 Billion price tag represents the actual cost of the segments and the systems that fill them and presumably crew training and other ground and logistical activities unrelated to the launch vehicle.

So sure would we have saved money by using an EELV to launch everything (or better yet the Proton) at 10% of the shuttles cost per pound, sure but it would only reduce the cost, by about a third of the total. And of course their would also be the need to engineer each segment as an independent autonomous flying and docking ship as the Russians have always done with their station technology, their is some marginal cost in each segments performance in doing that (but it might still be worth it in the end for the vastly reduced EVA assembly hassle).

Saying that the ISS or ANY space-venture comes down in total cost in direct proportion to reduction in launch costs is patently absurd.

Last edited by Impaler (2012-07-03 06:13:16)

GW Johnson · 2012-07-04 09:11:07

Impaler is right, launch costs are not the only costs in a complete program. How things are book-kept varies from outfit to outfit. But, most of the development and production costs plus an overhead and a profit are amortized into an anticipated production run, on almost any product you care to name, so they're not missing, either. So these things really are at least partly in the quoted launch prices per vehicle that we see. For a lean organization, I would expect the sum-of-launch-prices to be a larger fraction of an overall lower program price; for a bloated organization, a smaller fraction of a higher overall program price. We've seen that effect before, in all walks of life.

The point I was trying to make is that doing the same job today would be significantly cheaper, no matter who did it, and maybe a lot cheaper if the right entities were selected to do the job. The launch prices are but outer-limit "bounds" on what will really happen. Very poor bounds, but bounds, nonetheless.

Big is usually associated with bloated in most of our minds, but that is an oversimplification. You do have to be big enough to do the job: the local mom-and-pop grocery store cannot feed the entire city. On the other hand, too big is a problem, because bigness and inefficiency-of-bloat do really correlate. For example, no one today would ask Boeing to build and market a new Piper Cub. They would never be able to do it for a reasonable price. A small outfit could.

I would never expect today's NASA or its favorite contractor suite to come up with anything reasonably priced to go to Mars or anywhere else outside LEO as a manned mission. They're too big, too entrenched in doing things the same way they always did. Something reasonable is going to come from new kids on the block like Spacex, who are just barely big enough to do the job (as evidenced by the jobs they are already doing). We need more just like them.

I really thought some of those shuttle payloads were 25 tons. The launch price figure I'm pretty sure was $1.5B, which for a 25 metric ton payload, is $27K/lb. It's higher by far if you fly lightly-loaded, which is why it is wise to select the right launch vehicle for your payload. One-size-fits-all is a bad idea, until some sort of future warp drive makes launch dirt cheap. We're certainly a long way from that.

GW

SpaceNut · 2012-07-04 10:58:46

We currently have 3 known launchers with the capability still in the plausiblity arrena with a 4 th in the Falcon 9 heavy coming soon. So where is the hardware for the centrifuge if any was built and what would it cost to build if it does not exist.....

GW Johnson · 2012-07-04 17:52:04

Spacenut:

I honestly don't know. I know there was a centrifuge module, and I know it was cancelled. Whether any hardware was actually built, I don't know.

GW

JonClarke · 2012-07-05 00:24:31

The module was built and resides in Japan.

Kibo has some centrifuges onboard http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stati … /CBEF.html

There is also a nanoracks centrifuge experiment to be launched http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.asp … 426744.xml

Impaler · 2012-07-05 03:32:46

GW Johnson wrote:

Impaler is right, launch costs are not the only costs in a complete program. How things are book-kept varies from outfit to outfit. But, most of the development and production costs plus an overhead and a profit are amortized into an anticipated production run, on almost any product you care to name, so they're not missing, either. So these things really are at least partly in the quoted launch prices per vehicle that we see. For a lean organization, I would expect the sum-of-launch-prices to be a larger fraction of an overall lower program price; for a bloated organization, a smaller fraction of a higher overall program price. We've seen that effect before, in all walks of life.
The point I was trying to make is that doing the same job today would be significantly cheaper, no matter who did it, and maybe a lot cheaper if the right entities were selected to do the job. The launch prices are but outer-limit "bounds" on what will really happen. Very poor bounds, but bounds, nonetheless.
Big is usually associated with bloated in most of our minds, but that is an oversimplification. You do have to be big enough to do the job: the local mom-and-pop grocery store cannot feed the entire city. On the other hand, too big is a problem, because bigness and inefficiency-of-bloat do really correlate. For example, no one today would ask Boeing to build and market a new Piper Cub. They would never be able to do it for a reasonable price. A small outfit could.
I would never expect today's NASA or its favorite contractor suite to come up with anything reasonably priced to go to Mars or anywhere else outside LEO as a manned mission. They're too big, too entrenched in doing things the same way they always did. Something reasonable is going to come from new kids on the block like Spacex, who are just barely big enough to do the job (as evidenced by the jobs they are already doing). We need more just like them.
I really thought some of those shuttle payloads were 25 tons. The launch price figure I'm pretty sure was $1.5B, which for a 25 metric ton payload, is $27K/lb. It's higher by far if you fly lightly-loaded, which is why it is wise to select the right launch vehicle for your payload. One-size-fits-all is a bad idea, until some sort of future warp drive makes launch dirt cheap. We're certainly a long way from that.
GW

Oh I completely agree it COULD be done a lot cheaper now (I don't agree that the usual-suspects would do it cheaper), Space-X gives great launch cost reduction but an equivalent reduction in hardware cost is also needed, Bigelow certainly wants to be that company supplying the payload but they are far from proven and their key technology is really just an improved pressure-vessel, you need LOTS more systems to create a real vehicle/station etc etc. The 'new space' folks will need to expand into ALL the key space technologies and create an entirely turnkey vehicle/mission/system in-order to get the kinds of cost reduction that will be necessary.

Bigger is indeed generally better/more cost effective but only up to a point (cost effectiveness is always a downward parabola aka 'saddle'). SLS at 120+ mt is a classic example of blowing right past the point of diminishing return and into negative returns as was the Shuttle before it. For the last few decades 20 mt was the sweet spot, Proton and Ariane 5 being the cheapest per pound rockets in the world. Space-X thinks they can push the sweet spot out to ~50 which I think is quite reasonable. Russia and China are aiming for near that range in their next generation launch vehicles, Angara 7 (40 mt) and Long March 5 (25 mt).

Shuttles 25 mt 'capacity' was I believe based on at 24 degree inclination, and (I suspect) a short consumable duration too. When the shuttle went to the Station it delivery capacity dropped substantially. As the Russian space program has always gone to similar inclination and altitudes the often quoted 20 mt for Proton really IS what it can bring to ISS in the form of modules like Zarya/Zvezda which were right at 19 mt, the largest Shuttle load comes in at 15.9 mt for the solar wings though I guess their was likely some food/water and other consumables offloaded and possibly some re-boosting but I don't know what that would represent. I think this is one of those details that NASA keeps a bit Hush-Hush by this apples-2-oranges comparison, that the Russians actually had the worlds largest launch vehicle during the whole Shuttle program AND it cost 1% as much.

Last edited by Impaler (2012-07-05 03:37:45)

Rune · 2012-07-05 05:22:59

Impaler wrote:

Come now GW you should be able to do your homework better then that. At 1.5 Billion per Shuttle and assuming full utilization of 16 mt (largest segment shuttle ever delivered) and divided over 410 mt (approximate mass of US portion) is 25 launches. Actual segment delivery shuttle launches totaled 27. That totals only 40 Billion to LAUNCH the ISS, the reaming 60% of that 100 Billion price tag represents the actual cost of the segments and the systems that fill them and presumably crew training and other ground and logistical activities unrelated to the launch vehicle.
So sure would we have saved money by using an EELV to launch everything (or better yet the Proton) at 10% of the shuttles cost per pound, sure but it would only reduce the cost, by about a third of the total. And of course their would also be the need to engineer each segment as an independent autonomous flying and docking ship as the Russians have always done with their station technology, their is some marginal cost in each segments performance in doing that (but it might still be worth it in the end for the vastly reduced EVA assembly hassle).
Saying that the ISS or ANY space-venture comes down in total cost in direct proportion to reduction in launch costs is patently absurd.

And yet, historically, the price of boosters is about 30-50% of the total launch cost, no matter what launcher or payload you are talking about (although I am sure you can find some exceptions, generally speaking it's like that). Even the shuttle lies somewhere in there, a you have shown (and I had my doubts, shuttle is such a unique case in almost every aspect). There is a reason, too: you are not going to waste ~150 million bucks to launch a cheap satellite built for a couple grand, you go back to the drawing board, and cram enough tech and engineering hours in there to see the price raise into the hundreds of millions.

Cheap launchers would be a very strong incentive to launch cheap payloads. There may not be any physical law that says so, and yet I believe this trend of boosters costing slightly less than payloads will be a constant as long as expendable rockets exist, just because "humans work that way", if you will. You could also argue it's an economics thing, probably, but that's not my field.

Of course, ground support is more or less a fixed cost, and it works quite differently compared with payloads or boosters. It is mostly a function of mission complexity, I would say, at least at first approximation. And yet I look at the "mission control in a trailer" SpaceX started with (before they tried to approach the ISS and their red tape shielding), compare it to routine shuttle operations, and I see that the overall... ¿cost climate, shall we say? also has a hand in there. If you don't a have billions of bucks to build a rocket, you don't bother designing mission controls employing hundreds of people.

As to the later comments on "saddles", totally in agreement, only I would argue the saddle function changes with the market size: when you are launching tens of tons a year, a 10mT launcher makes sense. When you are launching millions of tons a year... see where I'm going? There is an alternate universe where Sea Dragon is a standard-size rocket.

And a shame what happened to the CAM. Not that that experiment couldn't have been performed much cheaper, and probably better, with an independent free flyer, like the one the Mars society wanted to try with tethers and small animals. The micro-gravity scientists complain enough of vibrations on ISS already.

Rune. Is that thing still going forward, BTW?

JonClarke · 2012-07-06 05:34:05

Rune wrote:

And yet, historically, the price of boosters is about 30-50% of the total launch cost, no matter what launcher or payload you are talking about...

More like 5-30%. Launch costs are largely a red herring. It is the payload that costs.

Last edited by JonClarke (2012-07-06 05:41:13)

Rune · 2012-07-06 07:35:41

JonClarke wrote:

Rune wrote:
And yet, historically, the price of boosters is about 30-50% of the total launch cost, no matter what launcher or payload you are talking about...
More like 5-30%. Launch costs are largely a red herring. It is the payload that costs.

With 5% for one-of-a-kind stuff like MSL and JWST, right? I said there would be exceptions. I'm referring more to the real space economy drivers, the ones that have to make some economical sense. The constellations in LEO and GEO, which is what 99% of space really is, these days, are launched by rockets costing 50-150 million bucks (though some estimates on the big deltas are closer to 250). The big GEO birds cost about a few hundred million, and LEO constellations, like GPS, are slightly cheaper (the best I can come up with for the cost of a single GPS sat is around 100-150 million), but they use cheaper rockets too.

Rune. Never forget, there have been a shitload of launches to date, in the thousands. Manned space and science is almost anecdotal, if not for the share of funding it takes.

JonClarke · 2012-07-06 16:55:00

Thirty percent is the launch cost farction of the comparatively mass produced items, still a smaller that the cost of building. You can find exceptions no doubt.

It amazes me the obsession over reducing launch costs and nothing like the interest in reudicng construction costs, which is the largest component

Impaler · 2012-07-06 17:23:19

JC: Spot on. like I said earlier we need a 'Space-X of Payloads' to bring the total cost down. Still their is some justification in the notion that high launch costs invariably lead to high per kg costs in the Payload because given the cost to get a kg to orbit your total efficiency is boosted by putting lots of high cost exotica into the payload, any kind of science or manned flight is basically 'exotica' by definition.

The problem is that with telecom satellites being the bulk of the market the launch industry has been getting the snot beat out of it by Moore's law. Each kg of Satellite today can do phantasmagorical more then they used to be able too that even though the demand for telecom services in terms of bits per second is growing exponentially the actual tonnage that needs to be launched each year has hardly moved (and has even crashed after the dot-com bubble). And with the payload so profitable their is virtually no pressure to reduce launch costs.

AlphaJ · 2012-07-15 01:32:57

Without reading any of this....we built a rocket that went to Mars, in the 60s. Wasn't that difficult, the fuel was very expensive to refine, but.... makes one wonder where all this money is actually going, doesn't it?
I know for a fact that various connected NASA people stole all the glory as well as the money, the pensions etc.etc. ....all the benefits that accrue from same...while the people who did the actual difficult dangerous work got buried, degraded, tortured, run around and generally buggered....and no end in sight.
So SIEG HEIL, the lot of ya.

falkor · 2012-10-21 16:09:47

cheers Alpha

cIclops wrote:

Imaged from Endeavour during separation 24 Mar 2008
High rez
Just a cool image.

cool image alright, must be incredible being onboard there, has any Astronaut been injured going on there to date?

cIclops · 2013-03-24 08:02:31

Latest update ....

Current ISS Commander Chris Hadfield singing where no man has sung before! (youtube)

SpaceNut · 2013-12-14 19:18:00

With the cooling system going down on wednesday NASA managers want to restore the lost redundancy as soon as possible for the 6 person crew. Expedition 38, which first deployed in November 2013 and is scheduled to go until March 2014.

A shutdown of some of the space station’s non-essential systems has taken place—a necessary step, since those systems risk overheating in turn without a functioning cooling system to keep their temperatures down. The crew has consequently had to scale back its operations while it awaits word on how to proceed with restoring the damaged system.

ISS managers mull coolant system repair options

Engineers are running tests to figure out what is affecting the operation of a critical valve inside a coolant pump aboard the International Space Station that has forced flight controllers to shut down non-essential systems, curtailing science operations and disrupting the crew's schedule. Engineers are trying to figure out how to fix a balky flow control valve used to regulate the temperature of ammonia coolant in an external thermal control system loop aboard the International Space Station.The valve in question is located inside a pump module, noted above, that is part of coolant loop A, one of two critical systems used to keep station components from over heating.
Three spare pump modules, supplied by Boeing, the station's prime contractor, are mounted on cargo pallets attached to the lab's power truss. If a spacewalk is required, it likely would be carried out by Rick Mastracchio, a veteran spacewalker, and first-time flier Mike Hopkins, with Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata operating the station's robot arm.
The pump module "is a difficult box to maneuver with, it's a big, unwieldy object," space station Flight Director Courtenay McMillan said before the 2010 pump replacement. "None of that part of it is technically difficult, but it's just very time consuming and takes a lot of focus."
Amid the troubleshooting, station planners also are considering what to do about the planned launch of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket next week carrying a Cygnus cargo capsule on the company's first operational space station resupply mission. Several flight rules require two operational coolant loops for the capsule's berthing and if the problem is not resolved soon, NASA may be forced to delay the mission.
Launch is targeted for Dec. 18, but NASA managers met Thursday and deferred making a go/no-go decision "until we get a little bit more information on this particular issue," Todd said.

SpaceNut · 2014-01-12 19:24:20

Cygnus is loaded with science experiments, computer supplies, spacewalk tools, food, water, clothing and experimental hardware.

Cygnus is a commercially developed resupply freighter stocked with 1.5 tons of vital research experiments, crew provisions and student science projects that serves as an indispensible “lifeline” to keep the massive orbiting outpost alive and humming with the science for which it was designed.

The Orbital -1 spaceship is conducting the first of 8 operational cargo logistics flights scheduled under Orbital Sciences’ multi-year $1.9 Billion Commercial Resupply Services contract (CRS) with NASA that runs through 2016.

Ant colonies from three US states are also aboard, living inside 8 habitats. The ants will be among the first to be unloaded from Cygnus to insure the critters are well fed for their expedition on how they fare and adapt in zero gravity.

33 cubesats are also aboard that will be deployed from the Japanese Experiment Module airlock.

“One newly arrived investigation will study the decreased effectiveness of antibiotics during spaceflight. Another will examine how different fuel samples burn in microgravity, which could inform future design for spacecraft materials,” said NASA in a statement.

Cygnus is currently scheduled to remain berthed at the ISS for 37 days until February 18.

The crew will reload it with all manner of no longer need trash and then send it off to a fiery and destructive atmospheric reentry so it will burn up high over the Pacific Ocean.

Cygnus departure is required to make way for the next cargo freighter – the SpaceX Dragon, slated to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Feb. 22 atop the company’s upgraded Falcon 9.

SpaceNut · 2014-01-12 20:17:56

A Longer Life for the Space Station

The plan had been to allow the station to plunge into the ocean in 2020.
Very little research was conducted during the 13 years the station was being built; research has only been going at a significant clip since 2011. Allowing the space station to operate to 2024, and possibly beyond, would provide more time for scientific and commercial experiments.
American space officials hope that other international partners, including the European Space Agency, Russia and Japan, will support the extension, but said that if necessary the United States will go it alone.
The move will not be cheap. Operating the space station currently costs the United States about $3 billion a year, a big chunk of the space agency’s proposed $17 billion budget, and that cost could grow. Congress has yet to appropriate funds for specific agencies, so NASA’s financial prospects for the coming year remain uncertain.

Why do this is more than the cost to put it up there.

Perhaps most important, it will allow NASA to complete the research that is deemed necessary for preparing for long-duration flights beyond low-Earth orbit, including planned human missions to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s. The research is looking for ways to mitigate many of the health hazards of long-duration flight and will test technologies that are needed to operate safely and productively in deep space.

Then why did we ever have a 2020 date if it can be safe through the date of 2028.

But eventually, Congress will need to decide whether to keep operating the station for as long as its key components last, possibly through 2028 or beyond, use the money for other manned and robotic space missions or supply enough money to do it all.

SpaceNut · 2014-01-12 21:03:32

Comtract info for Orbital and Spacex

Orbital eventually won a $1.9 billion contract to launch at least eight station resupply flights to deliver about 40,000 pounds of cargo and supplies.

SpaceX holds a $1.6 billion contract for 12 flights to deliver more than 44,000 pounds of equipment.

Terraformer · 2014-01-13 04:21:45

If they need the station to do research relevant to deep spaceflight, why cancel the centrifuge?

SpaceNut · 2014-01-13 13:14:46

http://galaxywire.net/2009/04/25/left-o … on-module/

It was done to defy costs for the Japanese module but its time to build and put it up there

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge … ons_Module

If the partially built shell is intact then why not finish it.

Last edited by SpaceNut (2014-01-13 13:23:20)

SpaceNut · 2014-01-26 11:45:38

Now that we are going to get more time to use the ISS Making Better Use of an Orbital Outpost but what are the barriers that make it so that more work can be done onboard?

Nasa hired the Florida-based group -- the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, or CASIS in 2011 to manage the part of the station designated as a U.S. national laboratory and to entice non-NASA researchers to do their work there but little has been done as of yet by this process.

New Mars Forums

Announcement

#201 2012-07-01 11:15:47

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

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Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

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#217 2012-10-21 16:09:47

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#218 2013-03-24 08:02:31

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#219 2013-12-14 19:18:00

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#220 2014-01-12 19:24:20

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#221 2014-01-12 20:17:56

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#222 2014-01-12 21:03:32

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#223 2014-01-13 04:21:45

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#224 2014-01-13 13:14:46

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

#225 2014-01-26 11:45:38

Re: International Space Station (ISS / Alpha)

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