/sci/ - Science & Math

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the international space station

$100 billion cost

no great scientific breakthroughs

really cool pictures from space

Now that we've spent the money and fuel to get them up there, it'd be a waste to let them burn up when the ISS is decomissioned.

What about designing a deep space vehicle that integrates the ISS modules? Something like the Discovery from 2001, but with the modules docked along the body.

A manned deep space vehicle would remove the need to design, build and launch a new custom space vehicle for every different mission we want to do. That upcoming asteroid mission? Do it with a reusable deep space vehicle. Mission to the Moon? To Mars? Deep space vehicle.

And having ongoing missions with a famous crew onboard a free roaming spaceship would ignite public interest way more than the space station if only because it's mobile. It's always going someplace new, not just hanging overhead doing the same bullshit microgravity experiments we were doing on the shuttles back in the 80s.

The ISS can't bear the stresses of acceleration/deceleration anyway as it's not designed to, but the superstructure of the vessel that the modules are attached to could be. This approach would save a great deal of money and provide a much more spacious, well equipped vessel for the price. Thoughts? And where would you have us send it first, assuming a VASIMR engine cluster and a small onboard nuclear reactor to power it.