As long as were passing credit around I’ll say that most of what I’ve learned about how the ISS works is from watching Scott Manley.
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The systems that keep the orbit stable are Russian.
Regardless of the timeframe his threat is really just kind of saber rattling and ultimately empty. If we had to, we could safely deorbit the ISS, I am sure. In a lot of ways this thread is one of the good ones for letting off steam because it is the least of all the threats to choose from to focus on
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Wait, so if I don’t actually know anything…and you don’t actually know anything…what if Scott is just watching OTHER people on YouTube,and they are just watching other other people…what if it’s turtles all the way down and nobody actually knows anything?!
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LOL.
Actually I did do some research (I Googled) and found authoritative sources (NASA’s website), so I can claim to have at least some primary sources behind my posts, so we are safe, nihilism has been averted.
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The ISS does not fly over Russia, so all the risks are yours.
Yeah, about that: as he said that, it’s flying over Russia the same day. This is the emptiest bullshit.
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Couldn’t it just be pushed back or into a more harmless position by folks using the Dragon capsule?
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I don’t know that we have the ability to get it anywhere that it would not eventually come back down without constant adjustment. It’s a LOT of mass, so I am pretty sure we can’t like get it out of orbit or anything like that. But I am pretty sure that the Russian systems are not the only way to deorbit it safely. It’s probably just a time/money calculation.
But, like the man behind the money behind the Dragon capsule, I am just talking out of my ass and don’t really know anything
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In fairness, choosing an object that’s already been launched, rather than one that would need to be, is probably a sound play given the state of Roscosmos at this point.
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Short answer, no. The ISS is a little larger than a football field, area-wise and has a lot of mass. The dragon capsule is about the size of a semi-truck, weighing about 4 tons plus cargo and propellant. It has enough fuel to allow it to deorbit, and not much more than that. Even if was placed in an ideal position to use its propellant to raise the altitude of the ISS, it would give a few months of added life at most.
Math: the ISS is boosted about every 3-6 weeks or so, depending on how active the solar cycle is. Burns last about 10 minutes, using about 300kg of fuel, and that only imparts about 1.5m/s of delta-V. The dragon capsule has about 1300 kg of fuel, so youd think enough for four reboosts of ISS, but not all fuels have the same specific impulse and the dragon and ISS use different fuels.
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The ISS is the only reason for the Russian manned space programme. The US withdrawing from it would be a blow to their astronauts, but far from fatal. Losing it would mean the Russian lose a huge amount of income and any reason for their antiquated Soyuz.
Speaking of which - how are the Federation capsule and manned Angara going? They make the SLS look like a competent programme.
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Apropos of the current situation; do you know who is in charge of kicking off the station-keeping burn?
Given that the station was designed for prolonged operation in an orbit so low it practically has an atmosphere; it has reasonably solid onboard abilities to modify its trajectory(within limits, it’s not going to Mars without assistance; but those limits definitely include “maintain current orbit/move to de-orbit” and “move to de-orbit hopefully over some ocean or thinly settled area/try for a maximum jerk move kinetic kill de-orbit”); so discussion of shoving it around by launching other craft seems pretty secondary to who has admin access to the control systems.
If it’s automated or dual-custody, using the station’s own systems against it might be nontrivial. If the security model was designed on the (understandable; but always a bad idea for security models) theory that ‘surely nobody would ever want to do something like that’; and anyone at either US or Russian mission control is free to just shove some new parameters in and hit ‘go’; it gets a lot more relevant.
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Which makes a lot more sense considering that “astronauts”, certainly for the time being, haven’t gone anywhere near other stars. (Not any more than the rest of us, anyway.)
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Reboosts are not automatic. They are initiated from the ground and done when fluctuations in atmospheric density demand it.
The ISS does not have enough fuel to do a sudden deorbit in a way that would return it to ground within a few days. That requires a lot of fuel. Also you’d need to move the zvezda module to the opposite end of the station since you’re trying to lower the orbit instead of boosting it. Even then with the onboard fuel it could only do a slight lowering of the station into a slightly denser atmosphere, so the eventual crash would still take many months
Paradoxically It takes less fuel to boost the station to higher and higher orbits.
I was interested to read that the most recent resupply mission used a ukrainian rocket with russian engines to launch a US payload. Irony is not dead.
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Not sure if it has been confirmed, but there are reports that Russia has targeted both the Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash facilities in Dnipro where the Antares first stage is built.
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Nothing yet from the gobshites in Westminster about cancelling the remaining Soyuz launches for the OneWeb satellite constellation - of which the UK taxpayer is a 20% owner. So much for the toughest sanctions possible.
OneWeb is one of the few remaining commercial customers for Soyuz and Roskosmos and it seems crazy that the UK is pumping hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ money straight into the corrupt pockets of one of Putin’s cronies.
Yes looking for another launcher would take time, but does the world need satellite internet that badly? And ending the contract with what has become a hostile state would only be speeding the inevitable demise of the Russian space business that has been hollowed out by rampant corruption at the very top.
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And how much of the USA is empty space?. Farms, fields, forest.
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But none of those are Mar-a-Lago 
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