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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-international-space-station-cant-operate-forever

    The ISS has gone through multiple reboosts to gain altitude because there is a small amount of atmospheric drag in its orbit. That’s not the limiting factor though.

    The structure is aluminum. Aluminum accumulates fatigue damage every time it flexes. Every time the iss goes from sunlight to the earths shadow, there is significant thermal expansion/contraction. This fatigues the structure. The repeated docking maneuvers also stress the structure. Radiation and atomic oxygen also cause degredation. All those factors are relatively minor in any given year, but are always accumulating. The ISS is getting less safe and the risk of a structural failure is increasing.

    On top of that all, a bunch of the systems on board were designed 30 years ago. There have been major changes in communications, power systems, etc. in the time since the modules were built. Even though new experiments are built all the time, they are still constrained by capabilities of the capsules they operate in. So there are also science advantages to moving to a newer platform.


  • You say that air doesn’t weigh much but 1 atmosphere of pressure is already 14.7 pounds pee square inch at sea level. That’s enough to flatten a steel barrel if a vacuum is pulled inside it. The consequences of increased atmospheric pressure at the earths surface alone would be nothing short of a mass extinction event. Every planet would become a gas giant, and potentially even brown dwarfs if not stars in their own rights. I bet Saturn and Jupiter would ignite at the very least.

    If we thought global warming was bad, the heating of the gas accretion combined with the insulating effects of a thicc atmosphere would likely completely eradicate all life.

    On the plus side, it would be one hell of a show before all life burns out of existence.




  • That depends on your client. Connect for lemmy shows a placeholder for comments from blocked instances. You can click to show the comment anyway or just blissfully ignore the high probability rage bait.

    I actually like that implementation, because the obnoxiousness of hexbear users is context dependent. On posts about gardening and nolawns I’ll usually see what they have to say. On political posts, I usually regret reading their comments. So it’s somewhat nice to opt-in to comments on a case by case basis.