this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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The earliest modules are inseparable, maybe literally. Zarya is attached to Unity on the US side, which has the truss. Zarya has been so intertwined and might be cold welded to Unity. Zvezda, on the other side of Zarya, still handles a lot of station control. You could replace Zarya with basically a new self-sufficient space station, and, at that point, why take on the baggage of the rest of it.
Oh yeah, I forgot that was a thing. I agree, if literally the entire station is cold-welded together, that might make it too difficult. But if it's "just" Zarya and Unity that have the cold-welding problem, why not at least disconnect and reuse some of the modules on the other side of Unity, or at least some solar panels and stuff?
If you think about it, even just attempting to salvage part of the station could be an interesting and useful experiment in and of itself, regardless of whether they expect for it to be successful.
Because being attached to the legacy ISS, at least in the short term, would preserve a lot more space for activities than launching a single module standalone and letting the rest burn up? I mean, sure, if we already had a half-built replacement station in orbit right now, I'd say let the ISS go. But we don't. Right now it's very questionable whether we'd have anything flying by the time it's scheduled for de-orbit, and I find both that and the notion of replacing the relatively-gigantic ISS with something Skylab-sized (at least for a few years) to be an unacceptable downgrade.
A big part of the motivation for moving on from the ISS is simplifying maintenance and upgrading systems. That reduces the crew time and system volume needed to run the station and needs fewer different spare parts.
What's wrong with switching to multiple smaller stations? I'm not optimistic about Orbital Reef or Axiom being fully up and running by 2030, but a handful of Vast and Gravitics modules in orbit should more than cover what the ISS does now.
“Because it is hard”
I thought being hard is why we went to space to begin with!