Isn't it the Russian modules that keep leaking atmosphere? Maybe its time to jettison them? I honestly have no idea what the Russian modules are or what purposes are are served by them.

However, that does bring to mind something I never thought about. There is talk of privatizing ISS since NASA doesn't want to continue funding it. How do you privatize something made by multiple nations? Or is that precisely why the privatization isn't taken seriously?

There have been some incidents with Russian modules and spacecraft over the years demonstrating the gradual decline in their capability, but so far it hasn't been determined to br worth the effort of figuring out if the sides can even be disconnected anymore.

The talk about private space stations isn't really about privatizing the existing ISS. There are private trips to there every once in a while (required to be led by any former astronaut at the ISS though).

Besides that maybe you're thinking of Axiom's space station, which is intended to have modules docking to the American side of the station and gradually building off of it until their modules can handle being independent, at which point the ISS modules would be disconnected and deorbited, leaving their private space station on its own.

One of the purposes of ISS, and other space programs (Apollo-Soyuz for example) was showcasing how nations can work together, and bringing hope for peace during the cold war. May sound naive, but that's the reason why nobody should be jettisoned off the space station - even if there are embargoes on the ground.

Obviously, the /s was meant to be implied. To think it was even remotely considered not /s is pretty sad.

“I’m just trolling.” Don’t do that here.

It's a silly comment leading into a more serious question. Everyone focuses on the least important part of the comment, and then feels self righteous

The edit window is still open.

> but that's the reason why nobody should be jettisoned off the space station

The PRC is banned from the ISS, due to NASA being legally forbidden from dealing with them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment#History

> half the station is Russian and habdles orbit raising

The orbit raising has been performed by the Progress resupply vehicles from Russia and Shuttle and other vehicles from the US. As of 2018 the Cygnus resupply vehicle from the US was capable of performing the orbit raising mission.

While the Cygnus was still docked at the space station's Unity module on Tuesday (July 10), the spacecraft fired its main engine for 50 seconds as part of a test to determine whether the cargo ship can be used to raise the space station's orbit, Frank DeMauro, Vice President of Advanced Programs at NGIS, told Space.com.

About the size of a short bus, the Cygnus may look puny compared to the ISS, which is as big as a football field. But its powerful Delta-V engine provided enough thrust to raise the space station by about 282 feet (86 meters). "The burn went extremely well," DeMauro said. "The spacecraft behaved exactly as we expected."

https://www.space.com/41172-cygnus-leaves-space-station-orbi...

IIRC, NASA and SpaceX are working on a study to see if Dragon can do station keeping for this exact reason. NASA is doing a great job hedging their bets in a very tricky political climate.

NASA replacement stations are totally underfunded by congress, non are close. Don't expect a solution from that anyime soon.

If Starship delivers even half of what they're promising, we'll have a bunch of commercial space stations up even without NASA support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_space_stati...

Building a commercial station isn't very easy. And if you are not investing a a couple billion your not even in the game.

Non of those companies will invest billions on their own. All of those companies investment is predicated on NASA support.

Do you really believe Northrop Grumman will invest billions of its own money?

The Startups are to small an inexperienced.

And Bezos has already said they will not do this unless they get NASA investment.

To just link to a bunch 'commercial' stations is missing the point. These concept exists because NASA has announced they will fund multiple 'commercial' station. But unfortunately Congress has not given NASA the budget for these.

There's quite a gulf between what's promised and what's been tested. Despite the backfilling about just a test and total success there's were a LOT of big failures in that first launch test.

But what's the market for those, without NASA funding? Maybe one Salyut-sized station for "space tourism" (that is to say, 1-3 day stays for like 3 people at a time), and maybe one similarly sized station for space manufacturing (which is currently just optical fiber) and commercial 0g experiments. You could dock both together to share some systems. But what's the market demand for anything beyond those two stations, never mind any station comparable to the ISS?

Starship economics change everything. Today, it costs on the order of $1500/kg to hoist something to orbit with a Falcon 9. Even if you add a zero to Elon's predictions of $15/kg with Starship, you're still reducing costs by 10x, which means zero-gravity manufacturing at scale, space tourism for 100 people at a time, etc etc becomes possible.

I'm pretty sure the number of people who'd be willing to pay money to vacation in LEO is considerably larger than what a single Salyut-sized station can house - even before considering the rise in demand from lowered costs.

That said, I think the real money-maker will come from factories in lunar orbit. Even if the economics of Terra importing goods from Luna never quite pan out, being able to build even some (let alone most, let alone all) of a spacecraft in space from spaceborne materials would be a game-changer for exploration and eventual colonization of the Solar System and beyond.

They should at the very least partner with ESA which also built some ISS modules.

>can’t get a replacement station

Ok, let’s break this down from the start. Russia has launched 10 space stations. The ISS was built using modules that were built for the Mir-2 station. The ISS was built on top of Russian modules.

Meanwhile, NASA wasn’t even able to fly their own astronauts to the ISS for a decade until Musk stepped in.

Russia has also demonstrated that they continue to have this capability as they added the first expansion to the ISS in over two decades recently.

I would hazard a guess that Russia’s capability in this area is much more… capable than the US at this time. They are also far more likely to be able to come to a collaboration agreement with china than the US is at this time. They also helped india kickstart their space program recently.

In conclusion: Russia bad? Maybe. But they weren’t stupid enough to outsource their manufacturing and allow the loss of institutional knowledge that the US has.

Russia added a module that had been sitting around for 13 years and was only finally launched because warranties on some parts would've begun expiring. Then the first thing that module did was flip the station. While yes, they have a history of doing better than the US on space stations, the point is that their space industry is a shadow of what it used to be.

This can be seen from how many next generation rockets, rocket engines and crewed vehicles they've announced over the years which have never really ended up amounting to much. For instance, the timeline on Orel makes Orion seem like a speedy development.

Finally, while the US did make that mistake at first, they've very obviously more than recovered that knowledge considering how many different engines, launch vehicles, spacecraft etc are in actual (as in having working hardware to show and not just mockups and promises) development by several different American companies.

Plus, much of the former Soviet space program can be attributed just as much to Ukraine, where a lot of the R&D happened ;)

Indeed. Though Rogozin was a net benefit to Roscosmos over the past decade, as can be seen by their current launch record, with 100 successful launches in a row over the past few years. However, he is definitely not a Musk type visionary. From what I know of him, he's a "fixer", that was sent in to clean up the ridiculous amounts of waste and corruption in the system.

Under Borisov's management there are rumors that they are building a new satellite factory that should be starting production soon.

And realistically, let's not forget that the US has always significantly lagged Russia in this field. If it wasn't for Operation Paperclip they would not have been competitive at all.

>Ukraine

Let's be honest here: Ukraine has existed as a state for less than 40 years in it's entire history. The geographic location of current Ukraine has nothing to do with the accomplishments of the former USSR. This is evidenced by the complete and utter lack of any accomplishment in the field by Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR.

Side note: Gotta love this tweet threatening Musk for praising the Russian space program: https://twitter.com/KristiTalmadge/status/110375176440949555...

I'm not holding my breath for Russia collaborating with China on a space station. China already has a space station. Before it launched there were talks of a collaboration with Russia, but China put their station in an orbit with quite a low inclination, which makes it practically impossible to reach from Russian launch sites. That indicates that China is not at all interested in working together with the Russians.

Russian and China signed a deal collaborating on the creation of a new station last year.