Is talking about its own space station.
It doesn’t say what the inclination would be, though. If I were them, I’d put it in the same orbit as ISS.
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Is talking about its own space station.
It doesn’t say what the inclination would be, though. If I were them, I’d put it in the same orbit as ISS.
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I hope somebody asks Joe Biden about the Indian space station.
“You mean the criss cross applesauce space station.” Said Biden.
ISS orbit is possible from Sriharikota. Due east into lowest possible inclination orbit to maximize payload goes over Southeast Asia. I wonder if ISS will be the largest old-tech space station ever built? The Chinese station will be Mir class, and the Indian station Salyut class. Gateway’s going to start out about MOL-sized. I guess if Bezos gets his way, we’ll see enormous space wheel colonies, otherwise, maybe no one will bother in the future and there’ll be domes and/or dug-in habs on asteroids…
It is great that India wants to build their own but hopefully we are approaching the time when the focus is on the activities rather than where the hardware came from. To get the most bang for their buck, India would be better off buying something from Bigelow and launched by SpaceX. That would allow India to do more actual stuff on their station.
Yeah, it would make more sense for India to go the Bigelow-SpaceX route. But it would make more sense for NASA to do that too. Good luck convincing India when we can’t even convince NASA.
Maybe soon(ish).
No, the Indians shouldn’t put their station into the same orbit as the ISS. The ISS is in a high inclination orbit so that it can be reached from the Russian launch site. Its orbit is so high that it’s useless for its originally stated purpose: launching probes or ships to the moon, Mars, or anywhere else in the plane of the ecliptic.
That’s a piece of conventional wisdom that’s not really true. The fact is, the only normal destination that’s over the equator and tips with the earth’s obliquity is GEO. To get to GEO from Florida or Kazakhstan, for example, you launch into a high incliniation GTO elipse, then change planes and cicularize at apogee, where the energetic cost is less. One of the reasons ISS orbits where it does is because of the limited capabilities of the Soyuz LV and the spacecraft it launches to LEO. An Angara 5 could launch a manned Soyuz spacecraft to an equatorial LEO orbit by launching it to GEO, changing planes. then lowering the apogee.
People seem to forget the Moon orbits a few degrees off the plane of the ecliptic and doesn’t shift with the earth’s obliquity (from the Moon’s POV, the earth serems to tip back and forth under it [actually point to a fixed spot in space as it orbits the sun]). The planets, of course, all orbit more or less on the plane of the ecliptic (except Mercury and Pluto). Apollo could have launched from Canaveral to the Moon at any time. The reason for the exact launch windows was to fly over the worst part of the Van Allen belts.