[Infowarrior] - Plan to 'De-Orbit' ISS in 2016 Is Criticized

[Richard Forno]

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

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/12/AR2009071201977_pf.html

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 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."