NASA plans to retire the ISS by 2031 by crashing it into the Pacific Ocean • Hacker News Board

Re: NASA plans to retire the ISS by 2031 by crashing it into the Pacific Ocean

#61

Post by rtkwe » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

jqpabc123 wrote: post #59

rtkwe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes lots of diseases manifest as malformed proteins, to understand them you need to know the structure of the protein which is commonly done using x-ray crystallography which requires growing a crystal made of the thing you're studying. It's the way we learned the shape of DNA and a fundamental process for studying a lot of biological systems. Growing those crystals is tough on Earth because of gravity so they grew s…

...they grew some on ISS they'd never managed to grow on Earth. It's nice they were able to grow some crystals that never occur on earth because of --- gravity. But is this valuable in any way back on earth? Highly doubtful. Probably about as productive as funding for an anti-gravity device on earth --- which the military is doing by the way.

I've said it 2 times now basically but I'll spell it out I guess. With the crystals they can determine the structure of errant proteins and develop treatments to target them to help people with the diseases these proteins create. Without the structure of the protein this is on the scale of extremely difficult to impossible.

Re: NASA plans to retire the ISS by 2031 by crashing it into the Pacific Ocean

#62

Post by rtkwe » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

Kye wrote: post #60

rtkwe wrote: post #14

I believe it when there's a replacement launched, it's been about to be decommissioned for the last 2 decades with the same idea that there will be a commercial station to replace it and it always gets pushed back because space is still too damn expensive for anyone other than a government to put people up there. Maybe NASA's hand will be forced by the slow degradation of the structure from heat cycling causing leaks…

The ISS was years from being finished two decades ago. It was still getting new modules in the 2010s. Your timeline is way off, so you might want to double check whatever your basis is for thinking this is a recurring call over two decades. For historical context: the first module didn't launch until November 1998. The Cupola everyone loves to see in photos was 2010. The current tech boom is older than the finished I…

Feels like longer but the date is always changing just recently back in 2018 the plan under the Trump admin was to halt funding in 2025 [0], in 2008 the planned date was 2016 [1]. It seems like the decommissioning is always planned for the next administration to deal with.

With anything space in particular I don't hold my breath for anything planned beyond the current administration unless it's something fairly small like a rover or satellite [-1] because every administration comes in and wants to have their own project be the one so they "reevaluate" and "reassess" the plans to make them more or less grandiose as suits their current economic stance.

[-1] They're usually small enough they can get a nice big cash infusion right up front so there's a sunk cost to keep funding where plans are relatively cheap.

[0] https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/05/20/nasa-wrestles-with-wha...

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-GAO-08-581T/h... ^F "planned decommissioning in fiscal year 2016."

Re: NASA plans to retire the ISS by 2031 by crashing it into the Pacific Ocean

#63

Post by Fatnino » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 7:10 PM UTC

CookiesOnMyDesk wrote: post #49

oceanplexian wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire ISS could be launched in 3, maybe 4 SpaceX Starship launches assuming Elon is correct about his claims for the payload. To put in in perspective, the ISS required 36 Space Shuttle launches at a cost of $1.5B per launch ($54B). For that cost, assuming a pessimistic cost for Starship of $10M per launch (5,400/4 launches), you could launch 1,350 International Space Stations for the same price as the ISS cost…

That would also be the first time Elon is correct about his claims, then.

His claims about falcon 9 mostly line up with reality.