Automated Transfer Vehicles

Al, I think this is one of those rare occasions where the point has
slipped right past you.

Victor wrote:

>> That gives the ATV an inside surface area of approx. 1823, and a
>> volume of approx. 5452 according to my, admittedly, bad math. Does
>> anyone else see a GREAT WASTE in filling these vehicles with trash
>> and setting them to burn up on reentry?

...to which you replied:

> The ATV has no heat shield, no parachutes, nor can it maneuver for a
> landing. Adding these would add cost and complexity. It's a system
> trade. Whether they made good choices, hard to say.

But nobody was suggesting the ATV should be landed. Victor was
suggesting (and I was tentatively agreeing that) instead the ATV should
be left on station, to increase the habitable volume.

Then Victor continued:

>> Whats wrong with our space program that, with such
>> budgetary concerns each year, they can afford to just throw away
>> such assets when they could be much better utilized in space?

...and you replied:

> If you don't get rid of the trash, the ISS will, fairly quickly,
> become completely filled with the stuff. It's not valuable, so they
> get rid of it.

Nobody was suggesting keeping the trash. Victor was talking about the
ATV, not the trash. The trash, he suggested, should be compacted into
cubes and ejected into the atmosphere.

To my tentative agreement, you wrote:

> 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.

Now THIS is a valid point. To implement Victor's idea, they would need
to solve this problem. I would probably suggest something like a "port
bus" -- a long tube with docking ports all along it. Newly arriving
vehicles either dock here, or get moved here after completing their
duties at some other docking port. Each one then becomes an additional
room for use or storage, as well as an additional source of solar power,
increased air volume to reduce the urgency of leaks, etc.

Perhaps the port bus is daisy-chainable, so when it gets full (which at
our current launch rate might be only once every year or two!), you
dedicate an extra launch to bringing up another one and bolting it on.

I realize I'm glossing over all sorts of probably-important technical
details, including how all this changes the center of mass of the
station, etc. But I also suspect that clever engineers could work those
out if they tried hard enough.

Best,
- Joe