Dealing with ISS trash

On 4/16/12 11:49 PM, Al Globus wrote:

> The spacecraft is dumped because there's no good place to put it and
> no good use to put it to in the immediate future. There are only a
> couple of docking ports on the ISS. If you didn't get rid of the
> Progress capsules you would, very quickly, not be able to dock with
> the ISS. If you fly the Progress free it will run out of reboost fuel
> very quickly and deorbit in some random place -- not good.

Would this change if your capsule was reusable (Dragon for example)?
The station activities would be about the same (you could even fill it
with carefully-bagged trash), but instead of burning up, it would splash
down and be recovered.

Of course I wouldn't be surprised if recovering and refurbishing a
capsule is more expensive than just building another one, even if it
does seem wasteful. Fortunately, SpaceX is likely to be keenly focused
on the bottom line, so I imagine they'll do whichever makes sense.