The Moons gravity is more lumpy than the Earths due to variety ofnear surface terrains. I doubt whether a closein orbit would be stable for a long period of time.
Some of the modules were smashed into the surface to provide seismic sources of a known momentum.
Great. Now we should fund an effort to locate it and, at some point, recover it and tug it back to either the surface, to start a museum near the first settlements, or LEO, to join the ISS as artifacts of an orbital museum.
Better move quickly because we plan to de-orbit the ISS soon…
Personally I think we should just tug the ISS up a decent bit higher (50 to 100 year decay?) on the final crewed mission, and then mothball it. So we have enough time to build a big enough, actually permanent, space station that the ISS can be put inside that as a museum exhibit.
I also think Hubble deserves a robot tug boost too because that’s another priceless artefact with a retirement plan of “burn up over the South Pacific”
> I think we should just tug the ISS up a decent bit higher
Both are really bad ideas. Every time something hits the ISS there will be some high-speed fragment coming off on a weird trajectory. The higher the ISS is, the higher the chance those fragments will not deorbit themselves.
Everything parked in orbit is a potential source of high-velocity impactors for everything else parked at a similar altitude.
It'd be nice if we could deorbit it whole inside the cargo compartment of a "Galaxy class SpaceX Starship", much bigger than the current one and going to space on top of a Ultraheavy, composed of 3 attached Superheavy boosters.
We could also surround it with lots (and LOTS) of inflatable heat shields to slow it down and then parachute it to a sensible landing site.
If we get Starship functional before the ISS's demise, we can even think of doing that kind of stunt.
Imagine it whole hanging from the ceiling of a museum.
Or, if a propulsive landing is possible, imagine it hanging from the ceiling of a museum in Shackleton City.
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The Hubble would also need a visit to upgrade and replace some components too. Maybe sending a Starship to bring it back, then relaunch it after an upgrade on land.
It's crazy how the economics of Starship make even ludicrous ideas like these look perfectly doable.
As neat as the various intact de-orbit scenarios for the ISS are, the majority fail to take into account its design as a zero G structure. The totality of the ISS was never designed for gravity loading, or major loads at all really.
The only way to get it back down to Earth (or even somewhere on the moon) would be in pieces. Disassemble the non essential modules of the station using the arm and ferry them off with Starship flights and then once it’s small enough start folding back up the solar arrays (they were all designed to retract), break down the truss segments, bring them back, bring the arrays back, then finally the core modules, pretty much the reverse of how they assembled it in the first place. Though the political logistics would be a nightmare as technically each country owns their modules and would have to agree to all this in the first place.
The fate of smaller space heritage items however looks less dire, as the starship could in theory be setup to retrieve Hubble, the Apollo 11 ascent stage, and a number of other interesting historical space objects that have yet to de-orbit. It just becomes a matter of money.
Personally I’ve always thought it would be neat to build a high delta-v largeish cubesat size mission to retrieve Telstar 1 would be a neat salvage demonstration since the satellite is small enough to be brought inside the ISS airlock meaning you could in theory bring it back to earth aboard a pressurised Dragon cargo flight. The obvious buyer being Intesat, until their bankruptcy last year that is.
> Every time something hits the ISS there will be some high-speed fragment coming off on a weird trajectory.
Is this true? My KSP intuition tells me that a single impulse occurring in LEO always results in a an object that passes into LEO and thus will deorbit relatively quickly.
Both ideas are great! So how much rocket billionaire cash would these plans require ? Tell Bezos and Musk they can have nameplates attached, and merch revenues.
Something like Starship should be able to bring it back to earth, in fact looking at the economy for starship this mission might not cost more than what it cost to send up Musk’s roadster.
How cool would it be to attach an ion engine to it, bring it back, aerobrake it gently back into earth orbit, scoop it up with a starship maw, and land it?
tl;dw: Things left adrift in lunar orbit tend to crash into the moon before long both because the moon is gravitationally not spherical, and because the moon is in a complicated dance with the sun and the earth.
But there is a substantial chance that it hasn't crashed yet, and it's interesting why.
Right, this is a bit clickbaity so I was skeptical at first, but it's a Scott Manley video, and it's pretty interesting to watch, with a few comments on the tools used, and simulation visualizations.
Up to you entirely, but for most of the things on Hacker News, the answer to any one question is not very interesting, but the process of answering that question is very interesting.
OG Game Developer Chris Crawford, when discussing the design of his economic/geopolitical simulation game “Balance of Power,” said roughly:
“The actual GDP of Ghana is not interesting. The mechanisms that drive the GDP of Ghana are very interesting, and that’s what the game tries to explore."
That's kind of a weird claim, because other than direct economic and military aid and pro-/anti-government military intervention from superpowers and trade and defense agreements with them, BoP didn't surface any potential drivers of GDP, nor GDP itself, nor any effects of GDP other than stability and geopolitical alignment of the government.
Whatever was going on underneath, BoP was much more of a geopolitical than economic simulation in what was exposed to the player.
I don’t disagree with you, but he made the quote in the context of explaining why he was trying to make a game about indirectly creating outcomes, which in the major revision went multi-polar so that countries had their own tensions between themselves independently of the two major powers.
Thank you. There are also 1-para summaries here that provide not just the answer, and some insight into the whys of it, but also reasons for when to follow up by watching the whole video. That you did not.
Very true, but if you want to ask a question and only get an answer to your question, that’s StackOverflow, where moderators are there to ensure that questions and answers don’t become conversations. On a less-structured forum like this, the XY Problem is in full-effect:
“How do I X?”
“You seem to actually want to Y, and X actually isn’t a good way to achieve Y.”
Classic example:
“How do I ace a whiteboard coding test?”
StackOverflow: “Be sure to ask questions about requirements. State all your assumptions aloud. &c. &c.”
Hacker News: “Walk out. They’re idiots and you don’t want to work for them.”
I am going to write an article about "Should you use yes-no questions as the titles of articles about complex systems? The answer might not surprise you.".
In fact, let me make it a 15-minute video instead. That will really help people get to grips with it.
The initial assumption was "no" due to the moon's gravity field having strong local variations that usually destabilize orbits and cause orbiting objects to crash into the moon.
However, simulations based on original data and hundreds of variations to account for uncertainty show that there is a high likelihood that the orbit remained stable for at least 10 years (not sure if they actually simulated until today).
There are many other things that can influence an orbit and simulations aren't perfect, so it's a "maybe".
Adding to this: there are a few other conditions which apply. The initial orbital parameters may not be accurate (there are known major errors), there are volatiles which were onboard which may have outgassed (affecting trajectory) or exploded (affecting integrity). The orbital mechanics (and simulator) elements are quite informative and well done.
But there's reasonably good odds much of the ascent stage is intact and in orbit.
Other Apollo missions are mentioned. Apollo 10 (which executed a near-surface approach but no landing) executed a burn resulting in solar orbit insertion with a highly probably matching asteroid having recently been found. After Apollo 11, subsequent ascent stages were intentionally directed into lunar terrain as part of seismographic (selenographic?) studies.
Manly does a good job of presenting significant credible information. I'm not an uncritical fan of video but this one rewards attention.
