I’ve been thinking about ISS, and I think it may be worth SFF thinking about it too. Below are some theses on it. The last thesis is where SFF could come in. I strongly suspect that NASA can’t be reformed adequately from inside, no matter who becomes the next administrator and what their marching orders are. I think that ISS may be a good outside pressure point–if only because substantial additional funds are unlikely to be spent on manned exploration until ISS is somehow turned into something useful.
Please let me know what you think about the theses, questions, and the idea that the SFF might sponsor a serious review of ISS, aimed at recommending new directions to the new administration within the next few months. If there are several such reviews, done overlapping in time, I think it would be better if SFF were among the early ones, rather than the later ones.
Here are the theses:
- Nobody knows what the ISS could actually be useful for (if anything!).
- That’s ok, because it’s still a “newborn baby,” despite being 10 years old.
- Given the huge past investments, we should TRY to make it useful, somehow.
- Given decades since its design, and shuttle retirement, a FRESH look is needed.
- The ISS is not a NASA program, but a NASA-initiated 16-country program.
- The ISS partners may be open to big changes–IF they improve ISS utility.
- Public reviews & proposals by SEVERAL non-NASA groups seem timely.
And here are some of the questions I would love to see tackled by such groups:
- What post-shuttle logistics capabilities (plural!) should the US focus on most?
- What other enhancements (comm, hab, etc.) might the US provide to ISS?
- Should new US contributions to ISS be mostly NASA or industry-developed?
- How can useful privately-funded contributions be encouraged AND paid for?
- How can ISS become more “user friendly” to both research and commerce?
- Might “other facilities” (Chinese, Bigelow) compete with or complement ISS?
- What other countries (China, India, …) might be invited to participate in ISS?
I expect industry and political insiders to strongly steer any single “official” review, and even several of any outside reviews. But if you have enough different groups running such reviews and generating scenarios for ISS in parallel, a lot more key issues, constraints, and options are likely to surface. And I think we really need that now.
I strongly suspect that the “inside driver” for ISS was mostly creating a need to fly shuttle forever. But the shuttle era will probably end soon, either by plan or by accident, and nobody (including us!) knows what if anything should be done with this expensive shuttle marketing aid. I’d like to see vigorous discussions of “Whither ISS?” I think that such a discussion under the SFF umbrella could be one of the better ones.
We are transforming space from a government- owned bureaucratic program into a dynamic and inclusive frontier open to people. We are determined to convert the image held by many young people that the future will be worse than the present, and we reject the idea that the world's greatest moments are in its past. 
{ 5 comments }
We are already focusing a lot of effort on trying to get rid of Ares I and use the money saved for COTS-D. While killing Ares I is a worthy goal in and of itself, COTS is of fairly minor significance unless NASA, or somebody else, actually buys any services that are developed.
As things stand today, there are fairly few things that NASA is willing to pay to have transported to the ISS and many within NASA want to end the whole program as soon as politically doable. If a new raison d’être can be devised for the station that increases the market, government or otherwise, for crew and/or cargo transport to the ISS and if we succeed in keeping Ares I or a revived Shuttle from capturing the market we will have achieved something of enormous significance.
I agree enthusiastically with Joe’s proposal.
One possibility might be to use ISS as the core of an orbital propellent depot, which is an idea that’s getting some traction. If we do that, it would also make sense to use the station as a dock for space tugs.
Another idea is to turn it into an orbital construction site. NASA could slew of x-projects to demonstrate construction techniques, like assembling a space tug from propellant tanks, testing a Bigelow module, assembling a really big telescope mirror, etc.
All of this would likely screw up the precious microsgravity environment that’s so important to five or six scientists who are still using it, so serious consideration should be given to moving microgravity experiments off ISS to a freeflyer. That could be a Bigelow module or Elon’s Dragonlab.
This would basically take ISS back to the Space Operations Center that JSC proposed in the 1980′s, before Marshall screwed it up with all their science fair projects.
A big problem is that so many modules approaching End of Life, however. Someone needs to do some studies to figure out what it would actually cost to extend of the life of ISS and make some recommendations. There’s a lot of political risk there. I still think we need an independent political commision that can take the blame.
Ed makes the key point. Our reviews will be handicapped/flawed without a better sense of the lifespan. Should we first push for that political commission?
I appreciate Ed’s suggestions on possible uses. But we need to keep in mind that ISS is not a NASA facility, or even a US one. The US has managed to “tie its own hands” by signing deals with ESA, Canada, Japan, and Russia. Any changes that we propose should take into account: 1. the existing US commitments to those partners, 2. partner capabilities (transport; pieces of ISS they own) 3. their potential interests in new directions and initiatives 4. and finally, ideas that can benefit ISS, NASA, and the US. If some of the commitment details are onerous, it may better overall to negotiate mutually beneficial changes than to simply abrogate or indefinitely delay them and say “sorry.” So the real question is whether we can find enough “sexy new stuff” and use it to buy our way out of problematic parts of the agreements, as a part of turning ISS into something useful. There is little interest in microgravity work in the US, mostly because NASA provided most of the funding, and then stopped providing both funding AND flight opportunities after Columbia burned up. Other countries have not stopped, and Europe now has on ISS a small centrifuge to provide variable-gee levels for microbiology studies on ISS. The US is involved in such studies–but not through NASA, and not with NASA funding. For example, a former NASA astronaut who now works at the VA has to go to Europe to integrate her experiments with ESA to get them flown to the ISS, on a Russian vehicle. The shuttle is too busy “assembling ISS” to actually help anybody do anything useful with it, and that has been the US policy for the last ~5 years. I have heard that even a few years ago, the ISS crew actually had ~20 hours/week available to do more science–they just didn’t have any flow of supplies to do useful science with. There are specific rules on the ISS microgravity environment that I suspect nobody needs, such as the rule that ISS must provide at least 180 days/year of intervals >30 days with no reboost or vehicle dockings or other microgee disturbances. But I think that the partner interest in microgravity is serious enough that we shouldn’t focus on scenarios incompatible with it, such as spinning it to provide 1/6 or 3/8 gee to see the long-term effect on crew physiology. That’s probably worth doing, but not on ISS. Similarly, some effort has been put into making the exterior clean, and the Japanese and others are doing exposure experiments. I like the idea of a propellant depot, and agree with Ed that it is probably not very compatible with what they are doing now. But I would suggest that the propellant depot be a new facility, and ISS remain closer to what it is now. Let me propose one specific ISS change for consideration. I think that frequency of access in both directions, first for priority cargoes and perhaps later for people, is the area where one could provide the greatest improvement in ISS value for the least investment. In particular, I think that commercial entities in the US and partner countries would be FAR more likely to want to use ISS, if they could get stuff up and back frequently. Cost matters, but what may matter far more is advance knowledge that you will be able to do iterative research quickly. In fact, let me put it this way: if priority cargo can be delivered at least once a month, and modest cargoes returned at least once a month and preferably more frequently, it will be hard to keep ISS from becoming very useful. But if the transport frequency remains quarterly or less (especially payload return, which is now only by shuttle and Soyuz), microgravity and other research will remain a “cute little niche” that makes little difference in the real world. Does that seem reasonable to others? I think that frequency of transport is far more critical than size of transport, because Russia, ESA, and Japan are already providing infrequent bulk goods transport, and the key question is what the US should provide after shuttle retires. The fact that shuttle retirement will create a “shuttle shaped hole” in logistics flows doesn’t meant that the replacement system should try to fill “that particular hole.” It should just be at least as useful as doing that. NASA’s COTS program specifies that the needed up traffic must be provided by 2 to 8 vehicles/year. I think it would be far more useful to say 8 to 24/year, than 2 to 8. It doesn’t matter that a larger number of smaller vehicles will cost somewhat more, because they will be WORTH so much more. (Why do taxi companies MAKE money, while bus companies need subsidies to break even, despite their lower costs per passenger? It’s because taxis provide a far more valuable service. I think that is likely to apply to COTS.) Let me mention one other application for ISS, which it is already serving, but is generally overlooked. It seems to me that the success of a future manned Mars mission may depend at least as much on the reliability AND in-space repairability of life-support equipment, as on rockets and capsules. If there’s nothing else that we get out of ISS, we can at least get better life-support equipment out of running ISS for another decade. That’s not ALL we should do with ISS, but we should test and improve those systems with that in mind. Who has other suggestions? Maybe not a single “killer app” but some little contributions, like improving life support equipment for future long-term manned exploration missions?
I have heard that even a few years ago, the ISS crew actually had ~20 hours/week available to do more science–they just didn’t have any flow of supplies to do useful science with.
That brings up some interesting questions. Right now, NASA is hell bent to expand ISS to a crew of six. Why? What are they doing that requires six people? One the other, why only six? Why not eight, or ten, or twelve? What’s so magic about the number six? ISS has accommodated more than six, on a temporary basis, when the Shuttle was docked there. What are the real limits on ISS crew size? Aside from the lifeboat problem, what are the limiting factors? If you attached a Bigelow habitat module and solved the lifeboat problem, could the station support more than six?
SpaceX is designing Dragon to carry 7, which is considerably larger than Soyuz. If you replaced the two Soyuz lifeboats with Dragons, could ISS support a crew of 14?
What could we do with a larger crew size and frequent access?
There are probably a lot of scientists who would like to visit ISS, if it didn’t require a lifetime commitment. What if NASA offered guest researchers the chance to visit ISS for a short period of time? Say, a week or two? (Anything less than a week doesn’t make sense, since a lot of people will be spacesick for the first three or four days.) Perhaps we could replace the national laboratory model with a university model, where professors and graduate students are invited to visit ISS for short periods of time. NASA astronauts could serve as “long-term faculty” who assist and instruct the visiting faculty and students. The university model would make education an equal priority with research, which would eliminate some of the pressure to hype everything done aboard ISS as “world class” research.
The international partners might start programs in their own countries.
Comments on this entry are closed.