@Horridbloke

So it will be like most government construction projects then. I've had my city completely repave my street just to completely rip it up 2 days later to install sewer pipes. Which they threw gravel on and then left it unpaved for 2 months...

I'm guessing it will be more like OK WE FINALLY COMPLETED THE ISS...five minutes later its being knocked down into earth orbit.

The REAL measurements

"Poisk arrived at the ISS carrying about 189 jubs of equipment that includes water supply gear, crew hygiene supplies, medical equipment, personal items, and spare parts. The module weighs about 864 jubs and is about 28,3 linguine long (0,43 double-deckers) and 17,4 linguine in diameter at its widest point, according to RegNASA."

Re: pounds in space

I noticed that too.... and, what's worse, pounds are units of force, not mass! That 3600kg of MASS has a WEIGHT of exactly ZERO POUNDS now.

I'm going back to sleep.

@ Julian 4. Re.: The Standard Pint?

Don't bet on it Julian 4 - US pints are about 473 cubic centimetres (16 fl. oz.); UK Pints are 568 cubic centimetres or 20 fl. oz.

That's also why one US gallon is only 0.8 of a British gallon.

I do agree that it’s about time the press stopped pandering to the US parochialism of pretending that everyone else in the world uses ‘their’ standards

Incidentally, my beer comes in half-litres, very nearly a pint.

Getting back to the ISS I’d have expected a general standardisation of docking and ingress/egress points for emergency access, as they have on submarines. Unilateralism in these things does not bode well for future cooperation in space exploration missions

Re de-orbitting the ISS

Remember that the Eiffel Tower was only supposed to stay up for a year too.

It's a shame they dumped Mir really. But by the end Mir was a godawful botch-job, full of short-circuits and riddled with a nasty type of fungus that was affecting astronauts' health and eating away at the circuitry, so it was too hard to keep it going.

Once there's enough ISS up there to do useful stuff, I expect it *will* get some real use. Crystal growth in particular is something which can be done properly in zero-G, and that's got real implications for silicon wafers and other real-world stuff. The problem until very recently is that there hasn't been enough ISS to allow more crew than required to keep the thing ticking over, so zero-G experiments just haven't been happening. Now they are, which is good.

The ISS problem at the moment is that it's in LEO which isn't a good place for most things. An ISS out at a Lagrange point would be significantly more useful. All current space-based observatories need to work 100%, and any failure tends to wipe them out. Having the ISS in reasonable proximity to WMAP or future Hubbles would solve the maintenance problem - you'd still need to send parts up the gravity well, but it'd be a lot easier if there's a maintenance crew on hand. Out at a Lagrange point, you're also outside the Earth's magnetic field, so it's a good opportunity to check how exposure to solar radiation affects people and equipment (and to test out your shielding), whilst still being close enough to get back home. As a stepping-stone to Mars, that'd be a good call.

The problem of course is how to lift it. The likely answer would be a VASIMR engine. That wouldn't generate enough impulsive thrust to affect ISS integrity, but it'd still provide enough push to move the ISS around at a reasonable rate. The ISS doesn't look much like a rocket or a space shuttle, but of course there's no need for it too - space doesn't need aerodynamics.