Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "Why keeping the ISS alive beyond 2030 is a really bad idea." video.

  1. The reason for favoring ISS over Artemis NOW is because Boeing and the established aerospace industrial complex is now known to have a bigger slice of the ISS pie than the Artemis pie. That does not dispose of the practical question, but it is important to note that the motivational base of current decisions is corrupt and irrational.
    5
  2. A major untapped ISRU concept is building an orbital infrastructure largely out of decommissioned orbiting hardware: orbital salvage, if you will. It would require some industrial infrastructure to be launched, but there is a LOT of junk flying around out there (from defunct satellites and spent boosters to dropped wrenches), and it is not mingled oxide dust like regolith, but instead refined metals, plastics, glass, and silicon; usable electronic and structural components. Despite these materials being in widely divergent orbits, concentrating them should still be much cheaper than lifting new mass from the Earth since they can be moved by high specific impulse ion thrusters. This would also mitigate the proliferation problem by making fewer and larger structures with a lower ratio of cross section to mass, making the "Kessler Syndrome" prospect less likely and severe. For this reason, it always saddens me a little when space hardware gets deorbited. (with the possible exception of LEO hardware in high traffic areas where they will fall shortly anyway. A mature salvage infrastructure could eventually recycle even these, but we need to survive to get there.) CONSIDERED IN ISOLATION, "reorbiting" rather than deorbiting the ISS may well be cheaper, but the infrastructure to do so (the ion tug), might well prove quite useful and efficient in the long run.
    1
  3.  @favesongslist  Good point.
    1