NASA Wants To Sell Space Station To Private Buyer

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This is our chance to own the space station! Let's all get together, pool our money and buy the space station. I have no idea what we would do with it but it would be cool to just own it. ;) What would you do with the ISS if you owned it?

“NASA’s trying to develop economic development in low-earth orbit,” Hill said, speaking on a panel of NASA staff assembled to discuss the upcoming Mars mission. “Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-earth orbit, so that research can continue in low-earth orbit.”
 
Lets buy it with crowdfunding. The million dollar level lets you fly something up to it, the 10 million lets you fly yourself there.
 
Back during the Shuttle program NASA offered to sell the spent Space Shuttle external fuel tanks to anyone who wanted them. Nobody did, all 134 of them fell back down and burned up.
 
I guess it's time to call PenFed to see what kind of rates they can give me.

I'm hoping something along the lines of 0% down and financing for the next 12,000 months.
 
Apparently the author of the article doesn't proofread

so that research can continue in low-earth orbit, so that research can continue in low-earth orbit
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Since the ISS is an international collaboration, though, does NASA have the rights to sell off the whole thing? Or only the parts of it that they attached?
amddragonpc said:
I would drop a bowling ball from it and watch it burn up in the atmosphere. :D
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Um...methinks you need to brush up on your physics. If you drop a bowling ball in zero-g, it doesn't actually go anywhere (relative to you). In order for it to burn up in the atmosphere, you'd have to give it a good, (really, really) hard shove in the direction opposite the ISS's motion.
 
iss_sts119_big.jpg


enough said
 
amddragonpc said:
I would drop a bowling ball from it and watch it burn up in the atmosphere. :D
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There are other "things" I would like to see burn up in the atmosphere that would be much more satisfying to watch than melting a bowling ball to nothing.
 
I would start the first space weed farm and make part of it a distillery and make space weed whiskey. I would call it Zero Grav WeedSkey.
 
Mohonri said:
Since the ISS is an international collaboration, though, does NASA have the rights to sell off the whole thing? Or only the parts of it that they attached?

Um...methinks you need to brush up on your physics. If you drop a bowling ball in zero-g, it doesn't actually go anywhere (relative to you). In order for it to burn up in the atmosphere, you'd have to give it a good, (really, really) hard shove in the direction opposite the ISS's motion.
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It will fall. ISS is not in geosychronous orbit.
 
cyclone3d said:
There are other "things" I would like to see burn up in the atmosphere that would be much more satisfying to watch than melting a bowling ball to nothing.
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Aw c'mon. This is homage to David Letterman when he used throw stuff off a five-story building.
 
Uh no thanks...

Maybe the next space station they'll do like talked about I dunno, decades earlier?, with a spinning station so that you can simulate gravity in some way? Anyone who has ever done anything that required "collaboration" from others knows full well that when you get your part done you'll still be waiting on others dragging their ass.
 
Mohonri said:
Um...methinks you need to brush up on your physics. If you drop a bowling ball in zero-g, it doesn't actually go anywhere (relative to you). In order for it to burn up in the atmosphere, you'd have to give it a good, (really, really) hard shove in the direction opposite the ISS's motion.
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Well since you're getting all high and mighty with the physics here... I'll just correct your statement, and say a very gentle push towards Earth would work perfectly fine, since the closer it gets to Earth the faster the velocity needed to keep it in orbit, and since it only has a tangential velocity of the station where it is at a higher orbit, that bowling ball's orbit will decay and flambe bowling ball will be on the menu
 
sfsuphysics said:
Well since you're getting all high and mighty with the physics here... I'll just correct your statement, and say a very gentle push towards Earth would work perfectly fine, since the closer it gets to Earth the faster the velocity needed to keep it in orbit, and since it only has a tangential velocity of the station where it is at a higher orbit, that bowling ball's orbit will decay and flambe bowling ball will be on the menu
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You're halfway there, but not all the way correct. Assuming the ISS's orbit is nearly perfectly circular, the bowling ball *will* have a lower velocity at the same altitude as the ISS, and giving it a backwards push means that it'll descend towards the earth. However, as it descends, it'll pick up speed (going from a higher altitude to a lower altitude means it gains energy)--in fact, it's the exact same speed needed in order to maintain its (now slightly elliptical) orbit.
Quartz-1 said:
The ISS's orbit is not stable. It experiences atmospheric drag and has to be boosted back up every so often.
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True, but the effect is not large--what's left of the atmosphere at the 240km altitude of the ISS is 1/10,000,000,000,000th of the density at sea level. Without periodic boosting, it would take the ISS about 15 months to decay. So yes, the bowling ball would *eventually* burn up, but you'd be waiting a looooong time for it.

I'll just leave this here.
 
Mohonri said:
Um...methinks you need to brush up on your physics. If you drop a bowling ball in zero-g, it doesn't actually go anywhere (relative to you). In order for it to burn up in the atmosphere, you'd have to give it a good, (really, really) hard shove in the direction opposite the ISS's motion.
Click to expand...

In zero G, where's no up, you'd push yourself away from the ball, too. Then you'd hit the station's opposite wall and bump it "up" slightly.
Also, how long would the break up and heating of the station last when the orbit finally decays badly enough for drag to become an issue?
 
Mohonri said:
Since the ISS is an international collaboration, though, does NASA have the rights to sell off the whole thing? Or only the parts of it that they attached?

Um...methinks you need to brush up on your physics. If you drop a bowling ball in zero-g, it doesn't actually go anywhere (relative to you). In order for it to burn up in the atmosphere, you'd have to give it a good, (really, really) hard shove in the direction opposite the ISS's motion.
Click to expand...

OK so you use the shuttle's robot arm to lay out the pins and do some space bowling. :D
 
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