Space News by Debra Werner — July 5, 2018
Since President Trump’s 2019 budget called for ending International Space Station funding in 2025, Congress held hearings, NASA published an ISS Transition Report and U.S. companies advertised plans for new outposts. Still, it’s not clear how that transition will occur, a fact highlighted by the recent confusion over NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine’s comments to The Washington Post about companies taking over ISS operations. For clues on the space station’s current status and the transition ahead, SpaceNews spoke with Sam Scimemi, ISS director at NASA headquarters.
ISS was built over many years. Are there parts of the structure that require more maintenance and other parts that require less?
We are getting a lot of good run time on all our systems. Our electrical power systems have generally performed quite well and are performing beyond their mean time between failures. Some of our life support systems have had not as much luck. However, other parts of our life support systems like the oxygen generation system has pretty much performed as it was designed. Some parts are doing better than expected other parts are not doing as well as expected.
It is all certified through 2024 at least. We’ve been working with international partners to have everything certified all the way to 2028. It doesn’t mean every single nut and bolt is certified that way. A lot of systems can be replaced along the way. Not everything was designed to last that long.
People talk about dismantling ISS and keeping pieces of it? Is that possible?
It’s certainly possible. Some people have been looking at that. We have not looked at a specific configuration. But if you’ve followed the assembly, we’ve reconfigured station many times. Some elements weren’t launched until 2009, 2010, 2011. You add 30 years to that and some parts of station could last all the way to the year 2040. There will be a lot of life left in any of these elements in the next decade.
This is called out in the ISS Transition Report. We talk about possible futures in low Earth orbit (LEO): continue station the way it is; continue station with private industry elements; reconfigure station with private-industry elements along with elements that already exist or new free flight elements. All those things are open right now.
Is it important to NASA to ensure there’s no gap in human presence in LEO?
Have you read the ISS Transition Report? We have several principles for ISS transition in LEO. One is continuity in human spaceflight. It means we have continuity in our mission. We expect to have continual access to LEO. But for deep space, if we go to the moon, we don’t expect to have access all that often, maybe once a year. Having a human spaceflight program only once a year is probably not a sustainable thing based on NASA’s requirements and the requirements of all of our international partners on station. We think the leadership aspect is important for the continuity, not only for the mission but also for the industrial base, having an industrial base that is able to build rockets, build crew capsules, cargo vehicles, on-orbit spacecraft. It’s important that we also keep continuity in our industrial base and knowledge here on the ground in order to continue spaceflight across multiple decades.
What else should people know about the transition from ISS to something else in LEO whether it happens in 2024, 2028 or some other time?
More:
http://spacenews.com/trump-wants-nasa-out-of-the-iss-operations-business-easier-said-than-done/
