SpaceX's track record for orbital insertion definitely had something to do with that. When last I knew, N-G didn't have its own launch facilities (that might've changed in the last few years but I doubt it).
Keep in mind that "having a plan", doesn't say when that plan is to be executed.
If you asked me, every object launched into orbit, should have a safe de-orbit plan beforehand. Chances are, as more private entities get onboard launching space stations, there might be regulations put in place to require a de-orbit plan for the launch to get approved.
Getting a de-orbit plan for the ISS now, might be just a preemptive plan for when those regulations get enacted.
Agreed, though NASA is definitely planning to Deorbit the ISS, probably sometime after 2030.
They're not trying to get ahead of some regulation, but want to stop having to spend so many resources on maintaining it, when they could be doing other things.
Srsly, no-one going with the "it's free real estate" meme.
Jokingly, but also really, seems a waste. I get they don't want the overhead, but just boost it north, perhaps to a Lagrange, maybe just high orbit, but someone will come along to salvage eventually...
ETA: Also, one of the beauties of SpaceX is that Musk doesn't muck with it (yet), working too well without him, unlike everything else he's bollocksed up.
L1 is sunwards, L2 is counter-sunwards, L3 is on the other side of the Sun, L4 is Eastwards, and L5 is Westwards.
Going from LEO to L1/L2, requires a ∆v of 7.5km/s, which is comparable to the 9.4km/s ∆v required to go from Earth surface to LEO.
Meanwhile, the ISS keeps getting slowed down by Earth's atmosphere, and it only takes a ∆v of 1km/s or less, to plunge it into denser atmosphere for reentry.
It makes me really sad that the space station is going to be destroyed since I always really liked it, but the sheer amount of fuel needed to move it to a stable position makes me (begrudgingly) understand why they're going to do it...
Anyone able to put the deltaV into tons of fuel needed for this manoeuvre? Extra points if you can do the full thing of getting the fuel to the station.
It really is a shame though, its such an iconic structure. Would be nice if we could class it an the 8th wonder of the world but dont know enough about classification to know if it even could be.
The space station's orbit has been adjusted continuously over its lifetime initially by attaching a shuttle to it and doing a burn of the shuttle's engines and later doing the same with progress modules.
My bet is the original expectation of the designers was to deorbit by attaching centaurs (or whatever) to the existing docking ports and rotate the beast to the right attitude for a deorbit burn.
NASA has more recently said they want the reentry to be as steep as possible to minimize the size of the debris field, and is using that to justify the development of a new specialized deorbit vehicle. No doubt SpaceX will declare that Starship is the proper vehicle for this, and then will plow the $800 million into the Starship program. The money they got for Artemus is already long gone and Starship has failed to demonstrate key components of the Artemus plan. Dear Moon has been cancelled so NASA and Artemus are the only customers they have left. NASA knows that without a cash injection Artemus is at risk.
One of Starship's engines on the lowest setting would tear the station apart. Regardless of whether they make this based on Starship instead of something more reasonably sized like a Dragon or Falcon 2nd stage, it'll still need either a new engine design or a big cluster of Dracos. It'll be something custom.
Regarding their Artemis work- the payments are milestone based, so they get money as they pass milestones. Engine relights and ship to ship prop transfer are some of the next ones.
Regarding their other customers- the Starship manifest includes another moon cruise, several satellite launches, and a lot of Starlinks.
It is been a plan for a while in the USA to shift launches from government run to private run for over a decade. This is just an implementation of that strategy.
Longer - fifteen, closer to twenty years. It took this long for there to be one or two companies that they could be sure wouldn't just cut and run (especially given how cutthroat the aerospace industry is).
They have had a plan for it, from the very beginning. Big-budget space projects like ISS don't get anywhere without a wrap-up plan. ISS is in LEO, and its mass contraindicates moving it into a graveyard orbit. Conventionally, stuff in LEO gets de-orbited; same thing happened with Skylab in '79.
Wait, how is Starship failing? They successfully returned from re-entry and made a soft landing with both the booster and starship itself. Seems to me that it's well on track?
IIRC Russia was talking about detaching their modules and using them to help bootstrap some new station. So I dunno if those will get brought down.
That being said, that was also when that rather pugnacious guy was running Roscosmos, and I dunno if doing a new space station is the top of Russia's priority list for their limited budget.
The Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex (Russian: Орбитальный Пилотируемый Сборочно-Экспериментальный Комплекс, Orbital'nyj Pilotirujemyj Sborochno-Eksperimental'nyj Kompleks;[1][2] ОПСЭК, OPSEK) was a 2009–2017 proposed third-generation Russian modular space station for low Earth orbit. The concept was to use OPSEK to assemble components of crewed interplanetary spacecraft destined for the Moon, Mars, and possibly Saturn. The returning crew could also recover on the station before landing on Earth. Thus, OPSEK could form part of a future network of stations supporting crewed exploration of the Solar System.
In early plans, the station was to consist initially of several modules from the Russian Orbital Segment (ROS) of the International Space Station (ISS). However, after studying the feasibility of this, the head of Roscosmos stated in September 2017 the intention to continue working together on the ISS.[3] In April 2021, Roscosmos officials announced plans to exit from the ISS programme after 2024, stating concerns about the condition of its aging modules. The OPSEK concept had by then evolved into plans for the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS), which would be built without modules from the ISS, and was anticipated to be launched starting in the mid-2020s.[4][5]
The Russian Orbital Service Station (Russian: Российская орбитальная служебная станция, Rossiyskaya orbital'naya sluzhebnaya stantsiya) (ROSS, Russian: РОСС)[3] is a proposed Russian orbital space station scheduled to begin construction in 2027. Initially an evolution of the Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex (OPSEK) concept, ROSS developed into plans for a new standalone Russian space station built from scratch without modules from the Russian Orbital Segment of the ISS.[4]
I still dunno if they're gonna get the money for a new space station. Like, deciding to have a war in Ukraine may have kind of killed off the viability of doing a new space station.
There's no way Russia builds a new station. The timeline for them getting Nauka to orbit basically proves that it's impossible. They've been trying to buddy up with China to visit theirs, though.
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Nasa has selected Elon Musk's SpaceX company to bring down the International Space Station at the end of its life.The California-based company will build a vehicle capable of pushing the 430-tonne orbiting platform into the Pacific Ocean early in the next decade.A contract for the work, valued at up to $843m (£668m), was announced on Wednesday.The first elements of the space station were launched in 1998, with continuous crewed operations beginning in 2000.The station circles the Earth every 90 minutes at an altitude just above 400km (250 miles) and has been home to thousands of scientific experiments, investigating all manner of phenomena from the aging process in humans to the formula for new types of materials.
Engineers say the laboratory remains structurally sound, but plans need to be put in place now for its eventual disposal.
Without assistance, it would eventually fall back to Earth on its own, however this poses a significant risk to populations on the ground.
"Selecting a US De-orbit Vehicle for the International Space Station (ISS) will help Nasa and its international partners ensure a safe and responsible transition in low Earth orbit at the end of station operations.
Nasa has studied various options for end-of-life disposal, external.These include disassembling the station and using the younger elements in a next-generation platform.
Another idea has been to simply to hand it off to some commercial concern to run and maintain.But these solutions all have varying complications of complexity and cost, as well as the legal difficulty of having to untangle issues of ownership.Neither Nasa nor SpaceX have released details of the design for the de-orbiting "tug boat", but it will require considerable thrust to safely guide the station into the atmosphere in the right place and at the right time.The platform's great mass and extent - the dimensions roughly of a football pitch - mean some structures and components are bound to survive the heat of re-entry and make it all the way to the surface.Controllers will allow the orbit of the ISS to naturally decay over a period of time, and after removing the last crew will command the tugboat to execute the final de-orbit manoeuvre.Redundant spacecraft are aimed at a remote location in the Pacific known as Point Nemo.Named after the famous submarine sailor from Jules Verne's book 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the target graveyard is more than 2,500km from the nearest piece of land.Nasa is hopeful that a number of private consortia will have started launching commercial space stations by the time the ISS is brought out of the sky.The focus of the space agencies will shift to a project to build a platform called Gateway that will orbit the Moon.
Our nearest Pizza Hut delivers via Doordash whether you order direct or through DD, but if you order direct its 30% cheaper. I'm not sure who's eating the markup.
In my case, since I get DashPass through my CC (not directly paying for it), I've seen it discounted to below the price some restaurants list on their websites. I pick up all my orders myself though.
I wouldn't pay for DashPass directly, personally speaking at least. I don't use DD nearly enough to justify investing more into it vs. just ordering on the restaurant's website or calling in the order. The only reason I even use DD is because I get that as a benefit through my CC and it usually pushes the prices to same or lower as ordering directly.
Doordash charges restaurants a percentage of the gross from the sale. Rather than eat this cost, restaurants are encouraged but not forced to add a markup on the prices they give Doordash (or insert your favorite third party delivery app here). They all do it.
If you order from a store's own website though, Doordash (I don't know if other third parties do this) did not "find" or create the business/order... they are really only handling the delivery portion.
In this instance, they still have some fees but do not take the large percentage, as that is a finder or broker fee. They aren't bringing the restaurant the business, it's the other way around.
Thus, restaurants can use their normal pricing. If you can find the places near you doing this, it's a much better deal than using Doordash normally.
I feel like schemes like this warrant a law that you're failing your fiduciary duty as a company owner and can be sued by any of the stakeholders for it if you can't prove failure to at least break even is due to genuine misfortune. Not even gross incompetence, that should just get you sacked with a dunce cap on top of having the company broken off and sold to a bidder that isn't hellbent on stripping it for parts.
That or company owners are only allowed to draw funds from the company's profits and funds coming from anywhere else, including from layoffs and corner cutting, are seized at 150% the value stolen and the company owners involved get treated as though they had committed embezzling so long as the books can indicate that the executives and owners drew more in compensation than was recorded as profit.
So basically, any time a company lets people go that’s stealing, and you want there to be a court thing that judges whether any particular loss was due to mismanagement or “genuine misfortune”?
That seems like a pretty extreme response to high delivery fees don’t you think?
If the executives could have just had less pay, yes, cutting someone off from their entire livelihood is theft. Especially if there wasn't even cause like criminal behavior or inexcusable misconduct.
And I think it's perfectly fair to just assume executives are lying about everything they say since *gestures wildly at all the everything since as far back as Smedly Butler.
That's your takeaway? It's like Walmart moving into a town and undercutting indie business prices until the indie businesses close, then raising prices.
What doordash is doing is scraping restaurants' websites for prices, taking a temporary loss, then going to the restaurants saying, "We got all these orders, it's a win for both of us!" to sell the contact, then raising prices and tacking on extra fees, making money off the restaurants and the customers
Especially at the prices the bill comes out to be. I had a day years ago where my car was in the shop, so I used one of them to get lunch. A $10 sandwich ended up costing me $30, and some people do this every day. Fuck avocado toast (which is delicious), this is why people are broke.
I'm not sure the comparison is quite apt, I'm not familiar with any independent food delivery services beyond just asking your buddy to grab some snacks on the way over for a hangout or something.
But I am vaguely familiar with the idea of loss-leading and think its despicable. If no regulation is ever going stand in the way of practices, then knowing they're being exploited by folks like pizza dude makes me feel a bit better, at least.
In some ways, loss leading can be done in more or less ethical ways. For instance, a small mom n pop hardware loss leading on lumbar or hammers and taking a reasonable profit on ten penny nails. Or something, maybe a better example is the Costco 1.50 all beef foot-long dog and soda but their memberships are reasonable profit for those who would go often enough and buy enough to make it worth it. It's late and I'm tired, I hope you get the general gist. But yes, doordash is just double-dipping on the sleazy. And maybe loss leading isn't ever acceptable, but I'm simply unaware/haven't thought of reasons that make it so. I'm willing to hear any argument against any of it, though.
That's funny but I think Son is easily the dumbest billionaire. He's also the bag-holder for the whole WeWork grift. Got more dollars than brain cells.
I mean, Jesus famously overcharged on delivery and transaction fees when feeding the masses with all that miraculously created bread and fish while also losing 13 billion dollars in the process, somehow, right?
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