GP:
In our dysfunctional world, practically the only instance of collaboration between the nuclear powers US and Russia is in Space, most notably in the International Space Station (ISS).
But the aging craft is not designed to live forever – in fact, in less than a decade the station will be dragged back to earth where most of it will burn up in the atmosphere and the rest will plunge in the Ocean. more
Does it have a 3 meter exhaust port?
More US tax dollars burnt up.
^^^^^^
A lot better spent there than the Uke. We will see some advances in technology at least.
The piece mentions nine other space stations to continue on the work done with this one. I looked it up quickly, it looks like NASA has outsourced the space station activity to a number of commercial enterprises. A lot of it looks like space tourism and not much science. Here’s an article from NASA from October.
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2024/10/commercial-space-stations/
For future astronauts, I suggest that NASA hire a bunch of pygmies, munchkins, dwarfs, midgets, height-challenged, or whatever the word-de-jour in for short people and train them well for outer space expeditions.
In space, they don’t take up much space. They eat less, use less water, produce less waste products, breath less air. All good.
Let it be pulled down by gravity on its own if blowing it up creates another thousand pieces of long, and/or variable-term, “Space Junk”.
Dang. It would be a shame to throw away all that energy.
It would be a good thing if SpaceX could come up with a way to dismantle the ISS and then make multiple bundles of the parts, each of sufficiently low mass to make it possible to boost them into a higher non-decaying orbit. There’s a lot of valuable scrap there, with most of the value in the form of the energy it took to put them in orbit.
Unless Elon already has plans in place to make the raising to orbit of raw materials even cheaper than today. For the long term there’s asteroid mining but that’s a quite a way out there yet.
Yeah, but it’s an EV space station…
“Dangerous Cracks and Leaks”
Ran out of duct tape and JB Weld?
Musk: “Didn’t want to invite me to yer EV Summit uh?
Hold my beer!