Move the ISS to the moon? Hmmmm.

This is a great idea, once the ISS is finished add some thrusters and control deck and use the ISS as a base in lunar orbit to revisit the moon.

What do you think?

When were done building on the moon sling shot the ISS towards Mars and put it in orbit there to assit with Mars exploration.

Maybe we could save a few hundred billion dollars by using the ISS on several missions instead of letting it fall back to earth as junk.

By Michael Benson
Sunday, July 13, 2008; B03

Consider the International Space Station, that marvel of incremental engineering.

It has close to 15,000 cubic feet of livable space.

10 modules, or living and working areas; a Canadian robot arm that can repair the station from outside.

And the capacity to keep five astronauts (including the occasional wealthy rubbernecking space tourist) in good health for long periods.

It has gleaming, underused laboratories; its bathroom is fully repaired; and its exercycle is ready for vigorous mandatory workouts.

Send the ISS somewhere.

The ISS, you see, is already an interplanetary spacecraft -- at least potentially.

It's missing a drive system and a steerage module, but those are technicalities.

Although it's ungainly in appearance, it's designed to be boosted periodically to a higher altitude by a shuttle, a Russian Soyuz or one of the upcoming new Constellation program Orion spacecraft.

It could fairly easily be retrofitted for operations beyond low-Earth orbit.

In principle, we could fly it almost anywhere within the inner solar system -- to any place where it could still receive enough solar power to keep all its systems running.

www.washingtonpost.com...

I agree, this would be a great idea. Although using it as an orbital construction platform above the earth to assemble craft like you propose would also be another great use for it. Heck lets just build another 2 and have one here, midway between the moon and one orbiting the moon itself.

It's not possible to move the ISS to the moon. First is the issue of radiation shielding. If, as the author suggests, you use an ion drive to move the station, it's going to be a slow, long trip through the Van Allen belts, which will fry the occupants and the avionics. Second, the ISS thermal protection system is designed for low Earth orbit, where the Earth takes up a big portion of the sky and acts as a heat shield. It simply wouldn't function in deep space.

It makes far more sense to develop an orbiting moon base/deep space vehicle from the ground up to meet the challenges it will face, rather than trying to retrofit the ISS.