NASA just said that the return of the two astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore who have been stranded in space since June will be delayed again, and I started to wonder how Trump is going to fix this problem. Trump will be in office on Jan 20th and I predict that Trump will make a bold plan to bring these astronauts back quickly – I think Trump will ask Russia to bring the two astronauts back on the Soyuz and this will be the start of a new chapter in USA-Russia relations.
Think of it, Trump already has a good relationship with Putin, so why don’t the two of them start the new Trump term with this cordial gesture ? See, just a few months ago on September 11th, a Soyuz spacecraft carrying two Russians and an American docked at the International Space Station, so the plan can be that one Russian will go on the Soyuz to the ISS and then return with the two Americans on the Soyuz right away. For a long time, until quite recently the Space Station had both Russians and Americans so why not show the whole world that the two countries can still work together when it is needed, won’t that dial down the tensions between USA and Russia ?
After all, the International Space Station was started as a joint effort between the USA and Russia, so why not end it with joint cooperation ? The ISS has been used for research for more than two decades but everybody knew even when the ISS was launched, that some day research on the ISS would come to an end and it would have to be dismantled and decommissioned, and I think this process should be done in cooperation by both USA and Russia, really none of the other countries in the world really did anything important to make the ISS happen, it was just these two countries USA and Russia.
My personal opinion (and if you are reading this, you must be interested in my opinion) is that except for research relating to warfare i.e. how to launch weapons from space or how to neutralize ICBMs, the researchers on ISS did not really do any research that was worth more than crap. In fact it seems like researchers are wasting government grant money trying to come up with research they can do in space, and let’s be honest if none of this research was ever done, the world as a whole would not give a shit about it.
When I was doing my Masters’ research at the University of Texas at Arlington, I worked on characterizing thyratrons (BLTs) which could hold off 100 kV and conduct 50 kA, although the prime usage at the time was the Texas Superconducting Super Collider, it was understood by everyone that the BLT was a prime target for use in Space based weapons. In fact in the next room to my lab room, was the rail gun project funded by DARPA/DoD and it used an Ignitron to fire a metal pellet at supersonic speeds, but everbody knew that in space the whole thing would have to be a hell of a lot smaller and would have used the BLT I was characterizing. Sadly the Texas Superconducting Super Collider project was killed by Bill Clinton and funding for my project also collapsed and so I did my PhD research on flat band Bragg reflectors for use in Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) instead. Funnily enough, when I graduated I knew a lot more about weapons and semiconductors than most “researchers” in the DoD, yet the DoD would not hire me, instead they hire people with a Bachelor’s degree and that tells you why our weapons programs cost so much to design/manufacture and why they suck compared to so many other of our enemies, the DoD needs to hire PhDs like me!
So anyway, coming back to International Space Station, I hope Trump asks Russia to bring back the Americans on the ISS right away, then Trump & Putin should decommission the ISS and take it out of orbit. Then Trump should divert all the money being spent on the ISS to making better weapon systems on the ground, right here in the USA !