[FPSPACE] US plans to deorbit the ISS by 2016: Mike Suffredini, NASA space station program manager

[Peter Pesavento]

>From the Washington Post

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/12/AR2009071201
977.html?hpid=topnews

 

Space Station Is Near Completion, Maybe the End
Plan to 'De-Orbit' in 2016 Is Criticized

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 13, 2009 

A number of times in recent weeks a bright, unblinking light has appeared in
the night sky of the nation's capital: a spaceship. Longer than a football
field, weighing 654,000 pounds, the spaceship moved swiftly across the
heavens and vanished. 

Fortunately, it was one of ours. 

The international space station is by far the largest spacecraft ever built
by earthlings. Circling the Earth every 90 minutes, it often passes over
North America and is visible from the ground when night has fallen but the
station, up high, is still bathed in sunlight. 

After more than a decade of construction, it is nearing completion and
finally has a full crew of six astronauts. The last components should be
installed by the end of next year. 

And then? 

"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. 

Suffredini raised some eyebrows when, at a public hearing last month, he
declared flatly that the plan is to de-orbit the station in 2016. He
addressed his comments to a panel chaired by former aerospace executive
Norman Augustine that is charged by the Obama administration with reviewing
the entire human spaceflight program. Everything is on the table --
missions, goals, rocket design. And right there in the mix is this big,
fancy space laboratory circling the Earth from 220 miles up. 

The cost of the station is both a liability and, paradoxically, a virtue. A
figure commonly associated with the ISS is that it will ultimately cost the
United States and its international partners about $100 billion. That may
add to the political pressure to keep the space laboratory intact and in
orbit rather than seeing it plunging back to Earth so soon after completion.


"If we've spent a hundred billion dollars, I don't think we want to shut it
down in 2015," Sen. Bill
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/n000032/>  Nelson
(D-Fla.) told Augustine's committee. 

Suffredini agrees. 

"My opinion is it would be a travesty to de-orbit this thing," he said. "If
we get rid of this darned thing in 2015, we're going to cede our leadership
in human exploration." 

NASA has a strategy built on President George W. Bush's Vision for Space
Exploration, of which a return to the moon is the next great leap. The space
station's defenders say it can provide essential research on long-duration
spaceflight. 

Suffredini argues that any long-term exploration of the universe requires an
initial step of learning how to survive in space. The best place to do that
is close to the Earth, he said. The space station sticks to low Earth orbit.
"It's also teaching us how to work together as a world, as a planet," he
said. 

Although there is no official lobbying going on to extend the mission, NASA
is conducting a thorough review of the station to see what it would take to
certify it as operational through the late 2020s, Suffredini said. Even in
the vacuum of space, things break down, get old, wear out. 

Critics have long derided the orbiting laboratory as a boondoggle.
Originally called Space Station Freedom during the Reagan years, it became
the international space station when the United States lured Russia into a
partnership in 1993, agreeing to alter the orbit of the station to make it
pass over the Russian-run space complex in Kazakhstan. That agreement helped
keep Russian scientists and engineers employed at a time when the United
States feared they would become rogue agents in a chaotic world. 

The rap on the space station has always been that it was built primarily to
give the space shuttle somewhere to go. Now, with the shuttle being retired
at the end of 2010, the station is on the spot. U.S. astronauts will be able
to reach the station only by getting rides on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft. 

The station has repeatedly been hit with budget cuts and design
modifications. Much of its science funding was cut earlier this decade. A
centrifuge had been planned as a crucial scientific component of the
station, but it didn't survive the budget axe. Until the end of May, the
station had a crew of three, barely enough for housekeeping. 

NASA officials say there will be important science performed on the station
in the years ahead. The last flight of the space shuttle will install on the
station a physics experiment called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which
will search for dark matter and antimatter. 

But a prominent critic of human spaceflight, physicist Robert L. Park of the
University of Maryland, said putting astronauts on the space station is akin
to "flagpole-sitting." He argues that the station fundamentally lacks a
mission. 

Gentler criticism comes from David Leckrone, senior project scientist for
the Hubble Space Telescope, who thinks the station is underutilized. He
fears that NASA measures the station's value solely in terms of how it might
advance the long-term "Exploration" agenda of returning to the moon, with
basic science research as an afterthought. 

"Whether it was a great investment or not to begin with, having made that
investment, I think it's imperative for the United States to extract value
-- real, honest-to-God scientific value -- out of that investment," Leckrone
said. 

Park has a different suggestion: "Give it to China. Let them support the
damn thing." 

 

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