Instead of deorbiting the ISS...

Instead of deorbiting the ISS, why not just devise a mission to dock some boosters onto it and launch it out to a stable lunar orbit?

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any bump at all? is space not science?

ISS is just a grant chasing tool.

sure, but it's also an incredibly expensive grant-chasing tool. why should that boatload of money burn up in the south pacific when it can live on in lunar orbit?

with a little bit of refitting that money can actually be made useful again

ISS is huge, it would not be cheap to increase the orbital parameters and then any subsequent trip to visit it would become that much more expensive. What is the point?

to recoup the sunk costs
when you're already $150 billion dollars in, i think it makes sense to recoup that investment with a few rocket boosters.

ISS is about 249 miles from Earth.
The moon is 238,900 miles from Earth.

ISS is not very well shielded and uses the Earth's magnetosphere envelope to help shield it. Moving it to lunar orbit would mean adding a shit load of radiation shielding. It'd be cheaper to just build an underground base on the moon than do that.

because it's not worth the money

you're falling for the Sunk Cost fallacy

part of the cost of the ISS is maintaining its low-earth orbit. such an unstable orbit requires a lot of fuel and resupply. if you put it out at the moon it's much lower maintenance. if congress doesn't feel like paying for the ISS then it can just let it sit there in stable orbit.

sure, i understand that the moon is way the fuck out there, but most of the fuel cost has already been expended by putting the ISS out in orbit. it's a lot easier to move it around now that it's already out there.

as for the radiation shielding, well NASA already shielded it because they're safety nazis.

>to recoup the sunk costs

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

>In economics and business decision-making, a sunk cost is a cost that has already been incurred and CANNOT BE RECOVERED

>it's a lot easier to move it around now that it's already out there.

Not really. It all depends on the delta-v required to get it out of orbit.

>as for the radiation shielding, well NASA already shielded it because they're safety nazis.

They shielded it only minimally for where it currently resides. Put it in lunar orbit, without shielding it properly and it will kill the crew eventually. The only "well-shielded" part of ISS is the Russian part that everyone piles into when there's a big solar flare.

Someone already did the math. It isn't cheaper. Not if you want to use it, at least.

THEN DON'T RECOVER IT!
no shit the money isn't going to re-enter the US treasury or any other government for that matter.

but the truth that the fallacy doesn't take into account is that the metal has been smelted, the engineering work has been done and the fuel for the dozens of launches has been burned off. that effort can stand for years to come, or it can mean nothing at all in 2024 when de-orbit happens.

The the truth of the fallacy is that you should never dump money down the money hole.

and when or if ISS2 happens it's a legitimate argument, but it doesn't change the fact that there's an extremely expensive habitable satellite in orbit that has seven years to live.

It is very possible that boosting it up to lunar orbit would cost more than launching an ISS2 to LEO

The rocket equation is a bitch. Even though the delta V from LEO to Lunar is a lot less than surface to LEO, all the fuel that you use to boost from LEO to Lunar has to be lifted from surface. So the fuel you have at LEO is expensive as fuck compared to fuel that you have at sea level.

Side point, but those types of burns would probably tear the thing apart...unless you did very small burns. In which case it would take forever. In which case it would be very expensive.

side burns tear it apart? how?

i don't understand; there's no counter force in the space between to provide resistance against those components.

You don't burn from every point in the spacecraft simultaneously and the ISS is not perfectly rigid. You burn from thrusters at specific points on the structure. The structure then transmits that acceleration to the rest of the vehicle; often with a fair amount of oscillation and vibration.

Large burns like the kind that would take you to lunar orbit relatively quickly would place significant stress on the spindly structure of the ISS and potentially shear it apart.

The "counter force" is just inertia and momentum. You don't need any friction or gravity or anything to stress the structure under an acceleration.

I was under the impression that the ISS already takes advantage of docked craft to boos the orbit once in a while. There is atmospheric drag, and it can be mitigated by orienting the solar panels to act as sails, but that's not quite enough. Boosts are occasionally needed.

The ISS is an old piece of shit
Theres nothing to be done with it other than sink it into the ocean

It's only 400 tons of material up there, that can be replaced in 1 launch by a proper launch vehicle.

Lunar orbits are very unstable because the moon does not have even gravity fields at all. Its density changes greatly as you orbit over it, which quickly degrades the orbit until it crashes or is ejected. Either way, it will be very difficult to send supplies to it once it is out that far and it would be very risky to get people back home using the Soyuz capsules like we currently do. Basically it would become unmanned because of the high risk and inability to get supplies to it for routine repairs and would either get ejected into solar orbit, crash into the moon, or possibly even crash into Earth. Overall a very bad idea

Yeah but the ISS does 50 m/s per year. And the moon is 4 km/s of delta-v from LEO. So it would take 80 years to boost the ISS from LEO to LLO using existing stationkeeping thrusters.

If we wanted to do this, we'd need a higher thrust method.

Modules and shit are designed to be useful and safe for a given time. The Russians kept Mir up way past that time, and look at the problems they had.

That's a little harsh, but not totally inaccurate.

You contradict yourself about the stability of the orbit.

I am pretty sure the ISS is not designed with the structural strength to be boosted into lunar orbit. That's a pretty significant delta vee there...

>that effort can stand for years to come

Guys who know more about it than you or I do not believe this to be true.

>has seven years to live.

At one point there was talk of selling it to some industry with interests in space, or some nation(s) with interest in getting into space, to use it for those last few years. What became of that notion, I wonder?

Japmoot should by the damn thing.

Hopefully NASA is going to either build a "permanent" station, or get back to actually sending explorers into the solar system.

ISS has done all that it was intended to do, really. It is expensive to run, those funds might be put to better use now.

when I say existing stationkeeping thrusters, I'm including soyuz, atv, and existing attitude control thrusters

fwiw, soyuz doesn't work to a much higher altitude than the current one for esoteric reasons that only deranged russian engineers understand

>ISS can be replaced in 1 launch by a proper launch vehicle

nah m8, delta IV heavy only does 28 metric tons to LEO and it is the heaviest currently operational vehicle, so ISS is like 15 launches worth of mass

still, maybe future super heavy vehicles can do better. STS could do 122 tons and Saturn V did 140

>soyuz doesn't work to a much higher altitude than the current one

What? I am pretty sure rockets work anywhere.

idk why but soyuz has a maximum altitude rating. part of the reason the ISS is at the orbit it is at is because that is the maximum altitude that the soyuz is rated to do stationkeeping maneuvers

one of the claimed benefits of the atv is that it can boost from a higher altitude and thus they can put the iss in a higher orbit

Altitude limit is probably due to a lack of the Delta-V needed to reach the higher orbit and dock safely with the station and de-orbit.