Writing in the WaPo Sunday Outlook section, Micheal Benson suggests sending the International Space Station to infinity and beyond. Or at least the moon and Mars:
“The only problem with this $156 billion manifestation of human genius — a project as large as a football field that has been called the single most expensive thing ever built — is that it’s still going nowhere at a very high rate of speed. And as a scientific research platform, it still has virtually no purpose and is accomplishing nothing….
“The ISS, you see, is already an interplanetary spacecraft — at least potentially. It’s missing a drive system and a steerage module, but those are technicalities. Although it’s ungainly in appearance, it’s designed to be boosted periodically to a higher altitude by a shuttle, a Russian Soyuz or one of the upcoming new Constellation program Orion spacecraft. It could fairly easily be retrofitted for operations beyond low-Earth orbit. In principle, we could fly it almost anywhere within the inner solar system — to any place where it could still receive enough solar power to keep all its systems running.”
Update: WaPo has published this rebuttal, It’s a Station, Not a Ship, by Jeff Volosin, a former NASA engineer and current space agency contractor. The title pretty much says it all.
I’m not sure that it’s as simple as strapping on a rocket and sending the craft to another planet. The moon maybe, because it’s close, but to get to Mars in any reasonable amount of time you need a lot of speed, which entails a lot of fuel which is why we’ve only sent some small satellites and probes that way, let alone a 400-ton craft.
Another problem with going to Mars is the solar radiation. Any manned mars mission needs a component hardened against radiation (this is probably the easiest problem to solve, since we can just build one and attach…. the beauty of modular structures!)
The nail in the coffin here, however, is that the ISS is not “already an interplanetary spacecraft,” not even potentially. It has no long-term medical facilities and relies on constant resupply from Earth for food and spare parts. It’s a station designed for LEO, you can’t just send it to mars.
I agree. This is a pretty goofy idea. I’m not sure why the Washington Post published it.