Automated Transfer Vehicles

On Mar 1, 2011, at 9:50 AM, Joe Strout wrote:

> I think it's a good idea (worth considering further, anyway). And I
> also agree with your general principle, which I'd put this way: once
> you
> have some habitable volume in orbit, you KEEP it there; you don't
> throw
> it away. That's valuable real estate.

The ISS has a limited number of ports where vehicles can dock. If you
keep everything that comes up docked, you very quickly run out of
ports and cannot bring anything up ever again.

The International Space Station's (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr.
Tito going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was a terrific space
station, but by the time of Tito's trip it was also old, smelly,
crowded and probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shiny,
much more roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing
accounts of how great space is. Would his experience have been as good
on Mir?

Al Globus
http://alglobus.net

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.