In Defense Of The Space Station

so there's been a little bit of drama this week Elon got into a fight with a couple of astronauts and the biggest thing that concerns me is uh proposing retiring the ISS as soon as possible preferably in two years by 2027 and I'm sure that like me there's lots of folks out there who are a little depressed and discouraged by the thought of that but when it comes to the International Space Station that has had quite a few problems over the past couple of years there's been lots of leaks mainly from the the Russian segment there's even been a couple of problems with the organization that manages the experiments that go up to the International Space Station at least you know managing the American experiments uh that organization is called Cassis there certainly have been some things that probably could have been done better and just in the whole idea of you know doing things more efficiently and accountably there probably are some things that could definitely be looked at to improve the program no doubt about that how however that being said I'm quite discouraged at the thought of retiring it sooner than 2030 because it puts a quite a few other programs in doubt as well a lot of the prog the companies that are working on building space station modules to replace the International Space Station through the Leo destinations program some of them might be ready by sometime next year if not launching some demos uh but before the end of this year I don't think any of them are going to be ready to start taking over any sort of major operations in 2027 if this plan does come to pass I don't know how you guys feel but the only way that I would be okay with that sort of plan is if we have something to replace it and give those NASA folks something to do basically I would have two requirements for deorbiting the the the ISS and the first would be something to replace it or a plan at least with a with a solid schedule Engineers have thought out all of the steps that and they've got manufacturing facilities available and waiting like all right we're going to deorbit in 5 years and we've already got a company started and and there they bending metal to to be able to have something in place in hand to be able to make that transition from no ISS and no space station to they've got to cross paths at some some date and not have this big Valley in between number two is the organization that is going to support that into the future it's all well and good to say that we've got you know vast and whoever else that are going to make things to go up there but we need something in place that kind of wrangles all these together now it doesn't have to be NASA and I want to make that clear it does not have to be NASA although that is what NASA I believe should be doing is coordinating all of these different various aspects of engineering and research and Science and uh Humanities and all that but some thing needs to be able to regulate all of these things and make the decisions about where each participating company should Point their efforts and they should all have a long-term plan and somebody in place in order to be able to to make decisions and keep everybody on track and have penalties for being late and things of that nature absolutely Jared what do you think about these developments the I I'm very much onard B with the idea that replacing the International Space Station without something present without a ability to continue your human presence is shortsighted and a bad idea people who are proposing this decision are not those who hold the purse and are not going to be the ones who make that kind of a decision in addition to that the purse is not held by the United States the purse is held by partner as well that we operate the International Space Station with so that is a very big problem um in addition to that a lot of commercial providers that were supposed to have their commercial stations up and operational by now aren't and obviously you know hashtag that's Aerospace so in the grand scheme of things you can grand stand all you want you could throw dates out all you want but ultimately if you're not the one who gets to make the decision you don't get to make that decision Ryan I would like to get some of your thoughts about this what do you what do you think about these I started off with three then I had four so I don't know how many points I'll have but I have some points that I would like to bring up uh the first one is the ISS is older than its launch date right the US side uh a lot of that started construction back in the space station Freedom days you know the 1980s a lot of the Russian side started construction back in the mere 2 days right back when it was the Soviet Union we were talking about right so a lot of the stuff on board the ISS isn't 27 years old it's older right so it does make sense why we want to retire this station one day because it's not young you know to put it nicely it's not young it's been up there for a fair little while in Earth the next point I wanted to mention is that I don't think leaving or deorbiting the ISS before we have an operational replacement is a good idea because 10 years ago 15 years ago it was proven that when we end a US operational Space Program without an operational replacement we're going to be sitting on the ground for 10 years without the ability to launch us astronauts on a US rocket from us soil you know that was the line Jim brightenstein liked to keep banging on about in 2020 right if we if we deorbit the ISS before there is a commercial us operated alternative the US will not have a space station the us will lose low earth orbit to the Chinese you know how is that going to play in the political world I don't think that's going to play very well in the political world because the tiangong space station will be the only operational space station and then International Partners might start looking over to the other side and saying hey we've we've got this science that we really want to fly China can we fly it on your space station I honestly do not believe in the political sense any politicians in the US would be a a big fan of that idea right so I think that's the second important thing the third thing is I spoke with Eric berer uh last Thursday and he said that he heard that apparently Ted Cruz isn't very happy about the comments Elon made about deorbiting the ISS early he's a a big fan of the ISS program something that Ted Cruz happens to be in charge of uh is organizing the Committees which you know maybe assign the next NASA administ tror so perhaps that's something that now might not go as smoothly as it could have gone before if Elon hadn't have made these comments at least that's that's the that's the drift I I was getting from from Eric and then finally the last thing is SpaceX I don't think SpaceX would exist without the International Space Station you know NASA got sorry SpaceX got all the funding in the early days from NASA because they were tasked to develop a commercial cargo resupply vehicle and the Falcon 9 which was designed to launch cargo Dragon the First Flight of the Falcon 9 launched a boilerplate Dragon SpaceX would have completely died off in my opinion in those early days had NASA not supported them through the commercial cargo and subsequently the commercial crew program both of which launched to the International Space Station Elon Musk saying that he wants to kill off the International Space Station before any commercial space stations are ready before the uh commercial low earth orbit economy is thriving you're just cutting it off early you need to nurture this economy and it kind of seems this is pure speculation but Elon Musk who has the most who owns who founded and is the chief of the most successful rocket launching company in history saying that we should scrap the ISS which is nurturing the current low earth orbit economy it just kind of seems like he wants to kind of cut everything off for everyone else and just leave SpaceX to be the only big space company that there is right at least that's how it kind of seems to me yeah I would agree with that I mean there hasn't been anything official yet but there's definitely a Vibe out there that I mean with his comments about saying that the Moon is a distraction and you know looking we've talked you know quite a bit about you know cancelling SLS and potentially the entire aremis program including including the Gateway station and as much as I would like to see us go to Mars I don't want it to be at the expense of everything else yeah and uh there's there's definitely something to be said about not biting the hand that feeds you you know so you kind of kind of don't want to don't want to do that uh it is a matter of public record at a multitude of of big pressers uh with Elon saying that SpaceX would not exist without NASA so I kind of figure you might want to retain a customer uh that kind of works really well with you there so just just kind of saying something else I do want to bring up is that we are lucky that the ISS is still around it was supposed to have been deorbited already in 2020 and you know we've kept delaying it and pushing it back you know beyond the the warranties that everyone said that it would work well and sure enough after that problem started happening and so we are lucky that it's still even around but I think a lot of us had kind of got this in our head of 2030s and even Russia you know kind of dragged their feet of you know continuing their commitment um right now it's officially 2028 but they've talked about you know continuing it on you know all the way to 2030 especially since you know the vesda module is so critical to being able to raise its orbit and even deflect pieces of space junk you know every every so often whenever they have emergencies like that not not emergencies but you know what I mean warnings it's okay Mike we bought the extended warranty is that what all those lobbyists were for we're here to sell you an extended warranty I could just hear a crew Dragon docking and then they open up the hatch and there's no there's just a tape recorder inside been trying to reach you about your Extended space module warranty that's great if anything that just shows that it was overbuilt it's going to be a shame that we deorbit the uh International Space Station when the time comes I would love to I would love to see the materials just stay in space and we just rework them into something else but that's just me I'm very big into in space manufacturing and things like that so my like look at that you've got a whole Space Station worth of material there watch to just work with it so but you know that's all it seems like uh it's very often wishful thinking on on my part for what I want to see call up the Spirit Halloween store [Laughter] yep well they had a capsule last year it was pretty good so he