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0 pointsjvanderbot2y ago0 comments

I understand why people might feel this way. Esp, if you think of the ISS as "a bunch of tired astronauts in a floating lab box"

But the ISS should be considered a manned instrument bus. Consider OCO-3, a gimballed observer on the exterior of the ISS. It has revolutionized our understanding of global carbon cycles, and local carbon sink/sources.

There are numerous such missions that benefit from a common, well supported platform to operate from.

The next one should be robotic though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory_...

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baud1472582y ago· 1 in thread

but did it need to be attached to a manned space station, or could the observer run from a sattelite?

jvanderbotOP2y ago

The cost of attaching a satellite is more than attaching it to the ISS (which has large solar panels, processors, downlink equipment, etc).

We are essentially shipping up an instrument only, rather than the instrument + all the supporting equipment.

For a datacenter analogy, it's like adding a HD to a server, rather than buying a new server for more storage.

It could run from a sat, but then we'd have much fewer missions we could fly.

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