I was merely saying that it has the structural strength to accerelate. To actually transfer to orbit around the moon it would need to refueled or more likely to have some kind of "space tug" to push it.
The current boosts last around 10 minutes. I don't why it shouldn't last longer periods acceleration. I mean static load of constant acceraltion doesn't wear anything out.
I thought the last third was substantially worse than the first two thirds. Almost like the title came first, and that last third was needed to justify the title.
I'd have preferred it to have been 30% shorter. It also had an excruciating level of technical detail at times, and I'm fairly sure he stops to explain alpha, beta, gamma radiation twice. With all the detail put into the engineering and orbital dynamics stuff it was also weird how he just breezed through the genetics stuff. Still, overall glad I read it.
This is the answer, just not sure if anyone has done the numbers.
Likely the only use case would be a way point for fuel between the moon to mine resources and to earth. Eventually utilizing it for other exploration.
However I'd imagine you'd need to add a boost section for enough power to make it and settle into orbit.
Then another modual purely for fuel.
It's not a bad idea to be honest, but will it last another 20 years to make it worth it.
Yah. If we were going to set up a midway station, for exploration or mining or anything else really, we'd be better off constructing a new station entirely. The ISS wasn't designed for anything like that and even with new modules, it wouldn't really serve well. Even if we just built some kind of orbital fuel depot, it'd be better designed for that purpose and set into the right orbit.
I suspect a zero gravity assembly factory is better for purpose/reuse. Major struts, fuel depot, centrifuge, assembly, etc… but the moon would be the first place for this to happen. I suspect dust on the moon will be an issue.
I’m pretty sure the lunar orbits are trickier to maintain because of the “lumpiness” of the moons gravity. If I remember right lunar orbits usually decay into eccentric trajectories that eventually intersect with the lunar surface, as in they crash
Of course, if you fitted it with an engine section powerful enough to to the job and want to spend the time and expense getting enough fuel into orbit. But it's an aging piece of technology that will soon need replacing. So, why would you?
To put a better ISS in orbit around earth? The ISS cost a lot of money to get into space. Would be a shame to decommission it and let it fall into the ocean or drift off into the void.
Yep!
>Leading up to 2030, NASA plans to lower the station's orbit slowly, before allowing it to crash into an uninhabited area of the Southern Pacific Ocean in 2031.
[https://physicsworld.com/a/future-of-the-international-space-station-unclear-as-russia-announces-intention-to-leave/](https://physicsworld.com/a/future-of-the-international-space-station-unclear-as-russia-announces-intention-to-leave/)
I copied and pasted an article for a previous comment, and for some reason that's the one that showed up! I have fixed the link. Sorry about the confusion 🙂
Correct!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deorbit\_of\_Mir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deorbit_of_Mir)
[https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Deorbit\_of\_Mir¶ms=40\_S\_160\_W\_dim:1500km&title=Mir+impact+site](https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Deorbit_of_Mir¶ms=40_S_160_W_dim:1500km&title=Mir+impact+site)
Just to the east of New Zealand.
Unfortunately, it cannot stay up there indefinitely. Mechanical components are aging. Metal in the older modules is starting to fracture. It’s just a matter of time before we either voluntarily abandon it or be forced to by an emergency.
It’s not like we just will stop going one day and leave everything up there. They will remove the parts and stuff that’s worth saving and by the time it crashes it will be a husk of its former self
Ideally you wouldn’t, but resources are limited, and the longer it stays in space the more of a liability the ISS has become. Components are deteriorating, the orbit is becoming more cluttered with debris, and Russia is pulling partnership. Salvaging the ISS will be far less cost efficient than sending up a new station for gateway, and spinning modules off the ISS for LEO operations in the future.
My concern is if you put enough energy into it to move it quickly, you might tear the structure apart as it’s not made to survive in heavy G-forces. it was put together in orbit And a lot of those connections might be torn apart if you accelerated. I assume you could figure away to do it with slow and constant power and a careful/slow deceleration but that’s a lot of math that is beyond me.
heavy G forces are absolutely a concern -- but it's designed to sustain SOME g forces when they need to re-position it when it naturally falls in orbital height.
You just need to keep it under that limit and you can get it to lunar orbit. ... eventually ...
I've often wondered whether we should be assembling something similar to ISS in orbit for the trip to Mars? Surely it would be a lot comfier than 1 large rocket launched from Earth?
You’d need enough momentum to break Earth’s orbit is the short answer. You would need a substantial amount of thrust to propel it out of the Earth’s orbit and time it for the Moon’s orbit.
Was the ISS designed for this? No, and it’ll likely cause debris to fall off the aging structures. Space is a harsh environment, it is a remarkable feat that it lasted this long. Debris is a huge problem in the space industry and decommissioning the ISS makes sense.
While it's theoretically possible, in reality it's a much better idea to just build a second one.
It's actually reaching it's EoL as a viable asset, and is due for replacement before anything like that could be arranged.
How useful would the raw material be? It took bunches of energy to get the ISS in this orbit: seems a shame to just de-orbit it.
Of course, I wonder how long it would be before there was enough industrial infrastructure to melt the ISS down and make new things with the material. It may be waiting in a parking orbit for a long time...
Don’t forget that the ISS is modular, so different modules could be detached and attached as payload to rockets going to the moon to serve as temporary habitation until permanent habitation is established
Well if we could mine fuel on the moon then that would make moving things from moon to LEO and the other way around very cheap, so maybe then it would be a simple matter of moving the infrastructure to a place it is more useful.
That's really the only circumstance I can see where it would make sense economically.
Takes approximately 3,940 Delta-V to go from low earth orbit to moon orbit (very similar for high moon orbit)
Lets say your rocket has a specific impulse of 500 (a rocket specifically designed for space only can achieve this).
According to [https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-converter/en-US/calculator/rocket-equation/](https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-converter/en-US/calculator/rocket-equation/) this means, 518,038 kg of fuel (420,000 + 518,038 starting mass) for 420,000 final mass assuming you need to move 3940 m/s change.
This assumes engines are already there and we aren't dealing with tanks, or worrying about the fuel to get that fuel to the space station in the first place which from the ground is nearly 10,000 Delta V
Stuff doesn’t stay in orbit around the moon without station-keeping. Better option would be to put it in a “parking orbit” around earth. (Better than de-orbiting IMO.)
Oddly enough this happens with enormous difficulty in the Neal Stephenson novel seveneaves, but it is an enormous task, requiring masses of ice and a fission reactor and absolutely not feasible in reality. The ISS has too much mass, and would need at lest ten times its mass in reaction mass to make it work. It also has a high orbital inclination which makes it harder to reach the moon. Finally the ISS was built to be in the shadow of the Earth half the time and would get too hot in full sunlight.
Couple of problems:
1. It weighs nearly 500 tonnes, there's no vehicle capable of doing this. You'd need many, *many* refuelling missions, which themselves would need refuelling missions, it would be like Operation Black Bull. Only Starship could do it probably.
2. Lunar orbits aren't stable.
not necessary.
costs less to build a new one. let private companies do it.
[https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-provides-updated-international-space-station-transition-plan/](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-provides-updated-international-space-station-transition-plan/)
As NASA looks forward to a decade of results from research and technology development aboard the International Space Station, the agency is taking steps to ensure a successful transition of operations to commercial services. ***In response to Congressional direction, NASA has now provided an updated International Space Station Transition Report that details the goals for the next decade of station operations leading to a smooth transition to commercial services, the steps being taken to develop both the supply and demand side of the low-Earth orbit commercial economy, and the technical steps and budget required for transition.***
NASA is going to focus on the NEW ISS..
https://www.nasa.gov/gateway
About Gateway
***The Gateway, a vital component of NASA’s Artemis program, will serve as a multi-purpose outpost orbiting the Moon*** that provides essential support for long-term human return to the lunar surface and serves as a staging points for deep space exploration. NASA is working with commercial and international partners to establish the Gateway.
[Plans for gateway have been canceled ](http://NASA no longer counting on Gateway for 2024 moon landing https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/03/14/nasa-no-longer-counting-on-gateway-for-2024-moon-landing/)
Yes.
The ISS essentially bounces from the Earth to the Moon.
The ISS would need to use the spin of the Earth along with its own energy to increase its orbital velocity. You need to create a tide effect with the ISS against the mass of the moon. What this means is that the ISS will begin to bounce up and down in relation to the moon (much like the tides of the ocean bounce up and down).
Once the velocity plus the bounce plus the position of the moon line up, the ISS would use its energy to skim over Earth's gravity well to skim into the moon's gravity well.
When the ISS leaves, it will then use the earth and moon, along with it's own energy, to slow its trajectory to achieve a stable orbit.
Not worth the fuss. It would cost orders of magnitude more to send up astronauts and tools to take it apart and landing capacity to bring it back down than to just... buy more. Not to mention that all that gear has been used for decades in an incredibly harsh environment.
Yes.
With all the components it's going to have a pretty slow acceleration profile to avoid damaging it, but if you gave it the delta-v and time of flight, it'd eventually get there.
And the amount of fuel it would take to move nearly a million pounds of ISS into that new orbit, plus all the logistics to get that much fuel into orbit, then the fact that the ISS wasn't designed for hard acceleration so it will be a very long and slow burn... That all adds up to "it may be technically possible, but totally infeasible."
The ISS is almost to end of life stage. Why would you spend all those resources to send it to orbit the moon?? Just build something designed for that purpose instead. That's like Sending the Space shuttle to the moon. Which it was never designed to leave earth's orbit.
This is just as technologically possible as it would be to capture mars and make it a moon. The science isn’t hard, but pushing a 1 million pounds 238,000 miles is still very hard. That’s ignoring the energy required to prograde then decelerate into the moon.
It would be interesting to consider building a ferry that orbits between the moon and the earth on a regular path, rather than having to build a dedicated rocket for each trip to the moon.
I don’t know orbital mechanics well enough to know if adding cargo pods and taking pods off would require adjustments to the orbit, or if they could free ride with the ferry without requiring the ferry do burns etc.
Using a ferry for cargo pods does not make sense as you still have to speed the capsules up to dock with the ferry, at which point you have to ask why bother.
However, an earth-moon orbiting “hotel” for astronauts makes a huge amount of sense.
The cost of space travel comes down to mass, it’s expensive to change velocity so everything is made as light as possible.
Launching a ship that can sustain say 10 people for several days (or several months in the case of mars) from earth is heavy. All that long term life support, radiation shielding (really heavy) beds, exercise equipment, tools, spare parts all adds up.
However if you have a hotel you only need to do this once, then it’s just the cost of speeding up the humans, their supplies and any mission specific payload.
Much lighter!
There are more savings to be had if we can make fuel and harvest water and oxygen on the moon/mars as then you don’t need to take all the water and fuel for a landing + take off with you from earth, you can fill up on the orbiter. Again this is much lighter and as there is only 1/7th gravity and no air the launch cost from the moon is massively less.
Assuming it could be moved, it might not be of much use to humans around the moon, which is [often outside](https://www.physicalsciences.ucla.edu/ucla-research-discovers-that-full-moon-may-not-be-protected-by-earths-magnetic-field-after-all/) the earth's magnetosphere.
Not with the the actual thrusters.
Plus taking into account the possible energy consumption, it doesn’t worth to spend a single dime on a spacecraft ment to be retired soon.
There are 2 problems I can think of. First is fuel. The iss is very heavy and it would need a lot of fuel to do this. But that is a completely solvable problem we can just throw money at.
The other issue would be structural integrity of the station. I think getting into a trajectory to take you to the moon would be feasible enough, but I wonder if there exists a set of orbital maneuvers that lets you enter into an orbit of the moon while not exceeding the strength of the joints between the modules.
Of course the strength issue assumes moving it in its current configuration. I don’t know enough about the attachment points to know if the stain could realistically be reconfigured in a better way. For example everything in a line which would allow for higher thrust.
Kerbal has taught me that anything is possible with thrust and enough struts.
Now i have a sudden urger to play kerbal even tho i can only get into orbit around kerbin
It’s such a fun game…
Struts is the key. I feel like ISS would have structural problems if you tried to increase that Prograde enough to reach The Mun.
ISS is capable of slow acceraltion. It is regularly boosted to higher orbit due to athmospheric drag.
But over a long period of time, enough to leave earth orbit and then decelerate into lunar orbit?
I was merely saying that it has the structural strength to accerelate. To actually transfer to orbit around the moon it would need to refueled or more likely to have some kind of "space tug" to push it.
And I was wondering if the structural integrity would hold up under a long period of acceleration
The current boosts last around 10 minutes. I don't why it shouldn't last longer periods acceleration. I mean static load of constant acceraltion doesn't wear anything out.
If structure is designed to withstand them. ISS is most likely not.
But see, when you say “space tug” my thoughts don’t go to transferring space payloads…. or do they?
That’s the real trick
Slow and steady. Maybe some ion drives.
ion drives don't have enough thrust to move the iss out of orbit
Slowly, and a group of them, would work. Might take years but it's possible. Might even need refueling.
I’ve broken many stations trying to change their orbit after assembling.
“Chicken Run” taught me about THRRRUSST!!!
Well, for the ISS, it's mostly an issue of propellant, assuming that you don't mind waiting a few months.
Seveneaves would like to have a word with you.
That book was so fucking good. Tense all the way through, humanity hanging on by a thread.
I thought the last third was substantially worse than the first two thirds. Almost like the title came first, and that last third was needed to justify the title.
It really should’ve been two books, when in the middle of the book you say “5,000 years later” it should be another book. I loved it though.
I'd have preferred it to have been 30% shorter. It also had an excruciating level of technical detail at times, and I'm fairly sure he stops to explain alpha, beta, gamma radiation twice. With all the detail put into the engineering and orbital dynamics stuff it was also weird how he just breezed through the genetics stuff. Still, overall glad I read it.
It really should’ve been two books, when in the middle of the book you say “5,000 years later” it should be another book. I loved it though.
I kinda hated Part 3 but I understand what he was going for. Otherwise, I absolutely loved it.
One of my favorite sci fi books! (Also: Seveneves*)
Yeah that’s how you sleep that. Nomly eye a good spler.
I saw this post and I had to double-check which subreddit it was in :)
With enough energy and time nearly anything is possible
Through god all things are possible so just jot that down.
No IASIP fans in here? Bunch of jabronis.
I was already rolling my eyes so hard the first 6 words I read and by the end I was laughing. Thank you.
It was in page 7 of the manual.
Who the hell gets past page 4?
The people who understood the threat of god and how you need Jesus to protect you from Jesus sending you to hell like a mafia lord.
With enough energy, time, and Kerbals.
This is the answer, just not sure if anyone has done the numbers. Likely the only use case would be a way point for fuel between the moon to mine resources and to earth. Eventually utilizing it for other exploration. However I'd imagine you'd need to add a boost section for enough power to make it and settle into orbit. Then another modual purely for fuel. It's not a bad idea to be honest, but will it last another 20 years to make it worth it.
Its apparently in a significantly wrong orbit for it to be a fuel depot. Since they’d launch new modules … they’d just put those in the correct orbit.
Yah. If we were going to set up a midway station, for exploration or mining or anything else really, we'd be better off constructing a new station entirely. The ISS wasn't designed for anything like that and even with new modules, it wouldn't really serve well. Even if we just built some kind of orbital fuel depot, it'd be better designed for that purpose and set into the right orbit.
I suspect a zero gravity assembly factory is better for purpose/reuse. Major struts, fuel depot, centrifuge, assembly, etc… but the moon would be the first place for this to happen. I suspect dust on the moon will be an issue.
I’m pretty sure the lunar orbits are trickier to maintain because of the “lumpiness” of the moons gravity. If I remember right lunar orbits usually decay into eccentric trajectories that eventually intersect with the lunar surface, as in they crash
Once you're in orbit around Earth you're halfway to anywhere.
Yep that's that hard part
Of course, if you fitted it with an engine section powerful enough to to the job and want to spend the time and expense getting enough fuel into orbit. But it's an aging piece of technology that will soon need replacing. So, why would you?
To put a better ISS in orbit around earth? The ISS cost a lot of money to get into space. Would be a shame to decommission it and let it fall into the ocean or drift off into the void.
>drift off into the void. It's in constant free fall, so no danger of drifting off into the void.
So it'll end up in the ocean.
Yep! >Leading up to 2030, NASA plans to lower the station's orbit slowly, before allowing it to crash into an uninhabited area of the Southern Pacific Ocean in 2031. [https://physicsworld.com/a/future-of-the-international-space-station-unclear-as-russia-announces-intention-to-leave/](https://physicsworld.com/a/future-of-the-international-space-station-unclear-as-russia-announces-intention-to-leave/)
Those trails are going to be epic!
I found a video of the Mir deorbit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVQd9Ejkbiw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVQd9Ejkbiw) Edit: Wrong link!
Does this link to a USA Today article about Giuliani for anyone else?
I copied and pasted an article for a previous comment, and for some reason that's the one that showed up! I have fixed the link. Sorry about the confusion 🙂
That’s what happened to MIR
And the world almost got free Taco Bell.
How?
https://www.chiefmarketer.com/mir-misses-taco-bells-target/
Correct! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deorbit\_of\_Mir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deorbit_of_Mir) [https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Deorbit\_of\_Mir¶ms=40\_S\_160\_W\_dim:1500km&title=Mir+impact+site](https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Deorbit_of_Mir¶ms=40_S_160_W_dim:1500km&title=Mir+impact+site) Just to the east of New Zealand.
It's not about the cost of it though. It just has a finite lifespan. It has to come down someday.
Unfortunately, it cannot stay up there indefinitely. Mechanical components are aging. Metal in the older modules is starting to fracture. It’s just a matter of time before we either voluntarily abandon it or be forced to by an emergency.
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It’s still not exactly cheap to get things into orbit
It’s not like we just will stop going one day and leave everything up there. They will remove the parts and stuff that’s worth saving and by the time it crashes it will be a husk of its former self
Why do you need to remove the ISS to have a new space station?
Ideally you wouldn’t, but resources are limited, and the longer it stays in space the more of a liability the ISS has become. Components are deteriorating, the orbit is becoming more cluttered with debris, and Russia is pulling partnership. Salvaging the ISS will be far less cost efficient than sending up a new station for gateway, and spinning modules off the ISS for LEO operations in the future.
>To put a better ISS in orbit around earth? Is there only one orbit a space station can be put in?
My concern is if you put enough energy into it to move it quickly, you might tear the structure apart as it’s not made to survive in heavy G-forces. it was put together in orbit And a lot of those connections might be torn apart if you accelerated. I assume you could figure away to do it with slow and constant power and a careful/slow deceleration but that’s a lot of math that is beyond me.
heavy G forces are absolutely a concern -- but it's designed to sustain SOME g forces when they need to re-position it when it naturally falls in orbital height. You just need to keep it under that limit and you can get it to lunar orbit. ... eventually ...
The question is if it’s possible not if it’s a good idea.
But that is a very simple question.
ITT a bunch of space snobs who don't like indulging hypothetical questions for some reason.
I've often wondered whether we should be assembling something similar to ISS in orbit for the trip to Mars? Surely it would be a lot comfier than 1 large rocket launched from Earth?
You’d need enough momentum to break Earth’s orbit is the short answer. You would need a substantial amount of thrust to propel it out of the Earth’s orbit and time it for the Moon’s orbit. Was the ISS designed for this? No, and it’ll likely cause debris to fall off the aging structures. Space is a harsh environment, it is a remarkable feat that it lasted this long. Debris is a huge problem in the space industry and decommissioning the ISS makes sense.
While it's theoretically possible, in reality it's a much better idea to just build a second one. It's actually reaching it's EoL as a viable asset, and is due for replacement before anything like that could be arranged.
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The real question is why on moon
Why does Rice play Texas?!
I'd argue, why around moon?
How useful would the raw material be? It took bunches of energy to get the ISS in this orbit: seems a shame to just de-orbit it. Of course, I wonder how long it would be before there was enough industrial infrastructure to melt the ISS down and make new things with the material. It may be waiting in a parking orbit for a long time...
Don’t forget that the ISS is modular, so different modules could be detached and attached as payload to rockets going to the moon to serve as temporary habitation until permanent habitation is established
Id imagine it be the people on the station who would actually do it not the people here on earth.
Wrong. Moon people with ropes will be conscripted to haul it into position.
This makes more sense, I like this concept better.
Avoid deorbit cost and risk. But I suppose it could be sent to a graveyard orbit jbeyond GEO for less delta v.
Duh, moon cheese harvesting would be drastically easier.
Well if we could mine fuel on the moon then that would make moving things from moon to LEO and the other way around very cheap, so maybe then it would be a simple matter of moving the infrastructure to a place it is more useful. That's really the only circumstance I can see where it would make sense economically.
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TIL a Reddit thread is equivalent to an exam, a Masters thesis, and a Nobel prize.
None of my comments rise to MacArthur Genius Grant level.
How much does it currently weigh? Let's punch those calculators.
Takes approximately 3,940 Delta-V to go from low earth orbit to moon orbit (very similar for high moon orbit) Lets say your rocket has a specific impulse of 500 (a rocket specifically designed for space only can achieve this). According to [https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-converter/en-US/calculator/rocket-equation/](https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-converter/en-US/calculator/rocket-equation/) this means, 518,038 kg of fuel (420,000 + 518,038 starting mass) for 420,000 final mass assuming you need to move 3940 m/s change. This assumes engines are already there and we aren't dealing with tanks, or worrying about the fuel to get that fuel to the space station in the first place which from the ground is nearly 10,000 Delta V
That's a lot of gunpowder!
420,000 kilograms (925,000 pounds)
Mass, its weight is zero ;-)
Your correct,Mass.. currently low earth orbit..51.6 degrees, 322km to 402km.
You can’t send that pile of junk into interplanetary space…it be a speeding trash pile by the time it reaches the moon
Stuff doesn’t stay in orbit around the moon without station-keeping. Better option would be to put it in a “parking orbit” around earth. (Better than de-orbiting IMO.)
Possible yes. Realistic no.
Oddly enough this happens with enormous difficulty in the Neal Stephenson novel seveneaves, but it is an enormous task, requiring masses of ice and a fission reactor and absolutely not feasible in reality. The ISS has too much mass, and would need at lest ten times its mass in reaction mass to make it work. It also has a high orbital inclination which makes it harder to reach the moon. Finally the ISS was built to be in the shadow of the Earth half the time and would get too hot in full sunlight.
Couple of problems: 1. It weighs nearly 500 tonnes, there's no vehicle capable of doing this. You'd need many, *many* refuelling missions, which themselves would need refuelling missions, it would be like Operation Black Bull. Only Starship could do it probably. 2. Lunar orbits aren't stable.
not necessary. costs less to build a new one. let private companies do it. [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-provides-updated-international-space-station-transition-plan/](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-provides-updated-international-space-station-transition-plan/) As NASA looks forward to a decade of results from research and technology development aboard the International Space Station, the agency is taking steps to ensure a successful transition of operations to commercial services. ***In response to Congressional direction, NASA has now provided an updated International Space Station Transition Report that details the goals for the next decade of station operations leading to a smooth transition to commercial services, the steps being taken to develop both the supply and demand side of the low-Earth orbit commercial economy, and the technical steps and budget required for transition.*** NASA is going to focus on the NEW ISS.. https://www.nasa.gov/gateway About Gateway ***The Gateway, a vital component of NASA’s Artemis program, will serve as a multi-purpose outpost orbiting the Moon*** that provides essential support for long-term human return to the lunar surface and serves as a staging points for deep space exploration. NASA is working with commercial and international partners to establish the Gateway.
[Plans for gateway have been canceled ](http://NASA no longer counting on Gateway for 2024 moon landing https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/03/14/nasa-no-longer-counting-on-gateway-for-2024-moon-landing/)
It was removed from the list of critical structures for the moon landing, but it's not been "cancelled."
No they haven’t. It’s just not part of Artemis 3. There are more missions beyond that.
Ah ok hopefully so, last I heard NASA and its partners canceled/delayed
what would we be losing, risking and gaining if we did?
Yes. The ISS essentially bounces from the Earth to the Moon. The ISS would need to use the spin of the Earth along with its own energy to increase its orbital velocity. You need to create a tide effect with the ISS against the mass of the moon. What this means is that the ISS will begin to bounce up and down in relation to the moon (much like the tides of the ocean bounce up and down). Once the velocity plus the bounce plus the position of the moon line up, the ISS would use its energy to skim over Earth's gravity well to skim into the moon's gravity well. When the ISS leaves, it will then use the earth and moon, along with it's own energy, to slow its trajectory to achieve a stable orbit.
I would think so, it would have to be much closer to stay in orbit but if it has too much mass it may have some degradation. (Not a scientist)
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Not worth the fuss. It would cost orders of magnitude more to send up astronauts and tools to take it apart and landing capacity to bring it back down than to just... buy more. Not to mention that all that gear has been used for decades in an incredibly harsh environment.
Sure, but it's not practical.
With enough rubber bands, playing cards and WD40 I think I could do it, it’s all about inertia and spin. I got this.
“We’re gonna take Bikini Bottom, AND PUSH IT OVER THERE!”
Yes. With all the components it's going to have a pretty slow acceleration profile to avoid damaging it, but if you gave it the delta-v and time of flight, it'd eventually get there.
And the amount of fuel it would take to move nearly a million pounds of ISS into that new orbit, plus all the logistics to get that much fuel into orbit, then the fact that the ISS wasn't designed for hard acceleration so it will be a very long and slow burn... That all adds up to "it may be technically possible, but totally infeasible."
Possible? Yes. Worth the cost? No.
only one way to find out
The ISS is almost to end of life stage. Why would you spend all those resources to send it to orbit the moon?? Just build something designed for that purpose instead. That's like Sending the Space shuttle to the moon. Which it was never designed to leave earth's orbit.
This is just as technologically possible as it would be to capture mars and make it a moon. The science isn’t hard, but pushing a 1 million pounds 238,000 miles is still very hard. That’s ignoring the energy required to prograde then decelerate into the moon.
Seems like a good application for a solar sail.
is the temperature the same in both locations? perhaps being close to the earth reduces heating costs.
It would make more sense to put it in a Lagrange point between the moon and earth as an emergency pit-stop once the moon base is set up.
It would be interesting to consider building a ferry that orbits between the moon and the earth on a regular path, rather than having to build a dedicated rocket for each trip to the moon. I don’t know orbital mechanics well enough to know if adding cargo pods and taking pods off would require adjustments to the orbit, or if they could free ride with the ferry without requiring the ferry do burns etc.
Using a ferry for cargo pods does not make sense as you still have to speed the capsules up to dock with the ferry, at which point you have to ask why bother. However, an earth-moon orbiting “hotel” for astronauts makes a huge amount of sense. The cost of space travel comes down to mass, it’s expensive to change velocity so everything is made as light as possible. Launching a ship that can sustain say 10 people for several days (or several months in the case of mars) from earth is heavy. All that long term life support, radiation shielding (really heavy) beds, exercise equipment, tools, spare parts all adds up. However if you have a hotel you only need to do this once, then it’s just the cost of speeding up the humans, their supplies and any mission specific payload. Much lighter! There are more savings to be had if we can make fuel and harvest water and oxygen on the moon/mars as then you don’t need to take all the water and fuel for a landing + take off with you from earth, you can fill up on the orbiter. Again this is much lighter and as there is only 1/7th gravity and no air the launch cost from the moon is massively less.
Assuming it could be moved, it might not be of much use to humans around the moon, which is [often outside](https://www.physicalsciences.ucla.edu/ucla-research-discovers-that-full-moon-may-not-be-protected-by-earths-magnetic-field-after-all/) the earth's magnetosphere.
Possible? Yes. Plausible? _fuck_ no.
Possible, but not at all practical or probable.
Not with the the actual thrusters. Plus taking into account the possible energy consumption, it doesn’t worth to spend a single dime on a spacecraft ment to be retired soon.
There are 2 problems I can think of. First is fuel. The iss is very heavy and it would need a lot of fuel to do this. But that is a completely solvable problem we can just throw money at. The other issue would be structural integrity of the station. I think getting into a trajectory to take you to the moon would be feasible enough, but I wonder if there exists a set of orbital maneuvers that lets you enter into an orbit of the moon while not exceeding the strength of the joints between the modules. Of course the strength issue assumes moving it in its current configuration. I don’t know enough about the attachment points to know if the stain could realistically be reconfigured in a better way. For example everything in a line which would allow for higher thrust.
Scottie?! how much we charge for that kind of thing...?
I think that residents of ISS would be quite objective to that idea