Is This A Good Idea? De-orbiting the International Space Station?

September 28, 2009

Most of the time, this blog strives to make a case for some grand, if outlandish, notion, such as building a space elevator, terraforming Mars or developing warp drives for spacecraft. This week, however, we’re going to change-up a bit, and instead look at something that I think is a totally dumb idea: NASA’s intention to junk its $100 billion investment in the International Space Station,just a few years after it is finished.

Huh? (Or as my ten-year-old son would say, “What the freak?”) But I kid you not. According to this recent Washington Post article, the U.S. space agency plans to get rid of the ISS, the football-field-sized satellite that is the largest and most costly spacecraft ever built.

"In the first quarter of 2016, we'll prep and de-orbit the spacecraft," says NASA's space station program manager, Michael T. Suffredini.
That's a polite way of saying that NASA will make the space station fall back into the atmosphere, where it will turn into a fireball and then crash into the Pacific Ocean. It'll be a controlled reentry, to ensure that it doesn't take out a major city. But it'll be destroyed as surely as a Lego palace obliterated by the sweeping arm of a suddenly bored kid.
This, at least, is NASA's plan, pending a change in policy. There's no long-term funding on the books for international space station operations beyond 2015.

Apparently, the big issue is cost. As this report by the advisory U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee lays out in a sobering chart, the approximately $20 billion a year that we’re presently budgeting for NASA simply isn’t enough to support the ISS—which costs the U.S. around $2 billion a year to maintain—and also build the Ares V heavy launch vehicle and the Orion spacecraft that NASA would use to send astronauts first back to the Moon and then eventually to Mars.

You may be thinking: So what? Indeed, to some of you with libertarian, anti-internationalist leanings, the ISS is probably the primo example of what’s wrong with both the space program and the U.S. government itself. When the U.S. and the Russian Federation launched the project in 1993, it was supposed to be completed by the mid-1990s and cost in the low tens of billions. Not only has it cost vastly more and taken more than a decade longer than envisioned. That’s so long that the project arguably has outlived what cynics would say were its real reasons for existence—to give the Space Shuttle program (which is due to be phased out in 2011) a destination, and to provide a steady gig for former Soviet space scientists who might otherwise go to work building missiles for third-world dictators or terrorists. Add to that the fact that, according to the web site What It Costs, the U.S. so far has shelled out $100 billion, which seems to be the lion’s share of the tab for the ISS. (Curiously, nobody seems to be able to say precisely how much the Russians contributed, though according to the news site RussianSpaceWeb.com, circa 2008 they had budgeted about a modest $3.9 billion toward the completion of their section of the ISS.)

Beyond that, some critics find the amount of science accomplished for that price on the ISS to be pretty underwhelming. In 2008 NASA compiled this report listing its experimental accomplishments, but good luck downloading it from the agency’s molasses-like server. (Try this more succinct “Uses of the ISS” article from HowStuffWorks.com instead. Indeed, as Houston Chronicle science blogger Eric Berger reports, Norman Augustine, chair of the committee that’s considering the space program’s future, has openly questioned the value of the ISS.

If one accepts that much of the scientific community believes there's no scientific value in the international space station, and setting aside international relations, I understand that its value is as a testbed for living in space and eventually going to Mars. But we've already said that the moon is our testbed for going to Mars. So why do we need the station as a testbed?

Okay. So the ISS has been incredibly expensive and so far it hasn’t accomplished all that much. But trashing it is even dumber. Some perspective here: Even at $100 billion, the ISS cost us a little more than half what taxpayers have had to spend so far to bail out American International Group, after the latter made bets on derivatives contracts that it couldn’t cover. When we’ve already spent that humongous sum, what’s a couple of billion more each year to keep it up and running for a few more years? And if the research accomplished so far hasn’t been so earthshaking, why don’t we just push the scientific community to come up with better experiments that have more of an upside, in terms of both space exploration and industrial applications on Earth? I mean, it’s a space station, for Jiminy Cricket’s sake. There’s got to be some cool stuff that we can still use it for.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

Comments

[Astroboy]

they should blow it up, instead of crashing it! That would be awesome!

[MarkV]

I think this is just a classic fundraising tactic ... the governmental agency version of 'let me play second base or I'm taking my ball and bat home!' They just want to stir up some publicity and get some earmarks as a result. They should explore some other publicity stunts, like raising money to send some light personality, like Sarah Palin, up to the ISS. Raise even more money by offering to leave her there. Or bake sales ... those usually raise some dough.

But trying to base fund-raising for Big Science on classic cost-benefit analysis is just goofy. This is what human beings are supposed to be doing all the time ... pushing the envelope and trying to do crazy stuff. We'll know what we'll learn from it after we learn it.

[Caffeine Driven Stress Magnet]

Bake sales! I like that.

[Jason G.]

Personally, I think that the ISS has been a collasal waste of money. It has done nothing to improve the lives of us here stuck to the ground. I am tired of paying for something, just so we can be friends with another country. They should send it hurtling out into space instead of crashing it. That way if its traveling in space at least maybe it will run into another civilization, and help to point them back to us. If we want to get to Mars the ISS is not the launching point. The Moon is. If politicians had gotten their heads outta thier butts the would have realized this decades ago.

[Chloe]

Why don't we sell it to the Chinese? Think of how many cheap Chinese products we could buy for $100 billion at Wal-Mart.

[Joker]

I think we should build 10 more, and string christmas lights between them!!!!!

[Wendy]

I can't believe they're going to waste all this money. Plus the thing might crash on me when it comes down.

[watch gossip girl online]

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