From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Tue Feb 04 2003 - 07:06:51 PST
----- Original Message -----
From: Bruce Moomaw
Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 2:37 AM
To: planetary_sciences_at_yahoogroups.com
Cc: Europa Icepick; Simon Mansfield
Subject: Space Station news
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/04/science/space/04STAT.html :
Perhaps the biggest question, if the delays persist, is how to keep the
200-ton device - as capacious as a three-bedroom house - from sinking out of
orbit altogether and incinerating as Columbia did.
It has been routine for each shuttle that delivers a fresh crew or the
latest truss or module to boost the expanding assemblage about eight miles
upward, countering the steady sinking caused as the station's broad surfaces
encounter drag exerted by diffuse molecules of air.
The Russian Progress spacecraft can haul fuel to boost the station, as well,
but they will not be visiting nearly enough this year to compensate for the
absence of space shuttles, five of which were to have docked before 2004,
including one in November that would carried a teacher, Barbara Morgan.
The station has its own store of propellant to keep properly positioned, but
even those supplies could be depleted eventually, space experts said.
This leads to the troubling calculus about keeping the station in space,
said John E. Pike, a space technology expert and director of
globalsecurity.org, a Washington research group.
"Everybody's going to be looking closely at the inventory of Progresses and
Soyuz boosters to put them up, and running that against the need to reboost
the station," Mr. Pike said. "Maybe the answer is that there's more than
enough, or just enough, or more than enough for this year, but after that
there's a real problem."
He said that if the Russian craft could not fill the bill, NASA might have
to try to cobble together a tanker of some sort.
If the station is not continually boosted higher into space, though, he
said, trouble will be inevitable, and will intensify the lower the station
drifts.
"The lower you go, the less time you've got," he said...
Calling the space station "a key and essential staging ground for what comes
next," Maj. Gen. Michael C. Kostelnik, the NASA deputy associate
administrator for the space station and space shuttle, said the Bush
administration was committed to seeing it expand...
General Kostelnik said critics of the station's costs should not lose sight
of the significance of its existence and prospects.
Someday, he said, "if we looked back in history and were accounting for the
wonders of the world, the International Space Station, for its technical
achievements, would certainly be in that category."
__________
__________
Yep. Just like the Pyramids.
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