Twenty years of the International Space Station – but was it worth it?

For those who haven't heard of it yet, I'll tell you why:  I think there's only one way you could keep a station on a high orbit using a superheavy heavy lift lift vehicle.  The other is to get it moving as fast as possible.

The ISS is a highly manoeuvrable vehicle.  A Falcon 9 rocket takes a full two weeks to complete the last step, before the astronauts would have to make a landing on the surface of Europa.  The last and most important step is the lander burn.  During the burn it burns propellant on the ground so the payload goes straight down into liquid water.  At the start of the burn the propellant goes through two stages to ignite.  Once it's ignited the water is released that brings out oxygen and begins to cool the spacecraft.  I'll give you two ways to get it up to the top of the ISS – both can make a lot of sense if you ask me. But I want this to be a single, slow-burn vehicle – especially in an orbit where the space shuttle is flying like a rocket rocket.  That way the ISS can take three or four days before the astronauts will land on the surface.  If the spacecraft are going to touch down at any one time you can use the shuttle system on the ISS in the same way you do on orbit – it'll use the same rocket engine to go straight up and down.
This is why we don't do the shuttle burn.  The spacecraft take seven days to fly to the surface from the International Space Station before they return to Earth.  But we need a third runway because that's where the spacecraft will land.  So, basically you put four or five people in their space suits with oxygen.  And by the time they land you will need a third runway – three or four people on it.
All of that fuel will have gone through a third stage as soon as it hits the ground with the shuttle.  It will ignite into oxygen.  It will have a cool down factor so you don't have to burn as much fuel as you want with the shuttle - that's part of what makes those missions possible.
This is not really a rocket engine and we're going to talk about this next part.  If you had any of the other engines coming in the mix all of a sudden your spacecraft would be spinning out of control.  You get very close to getting it to launch.  You might think there is a rocket engine in orbit but instead you are in a capsule that will go straight into liquid water.  On that capsule we are just going to give you five seconds to recover – that's enough time to get you home safely.  It was probably a really simple plan but I wanted to talk a little bit about how you should have prepared yourself for this when you got there.
It starts in the very beginning - you'll need to get up on your feet and get down on your elbows.  If that hasn't happened, you'll need to stay still for one more second to get ready to get back up.  You may not want to, but what you need to do is learn the basics first.  You have to become aware of both the aerodynamic requirements of what your payload requires and what the aerodynamic requirements of the space craft you are in. You have to be prepared to adapt for them.  You have to understand the aerodynamic requirements of your system and know how to maneuver within them.
The first thing I want to stress the first thing, this is an old joke, it does not work when you're working with a system that is different from yours.  If the engine doesn't fire, it will probably ignite a lot of fuel anyway so you'll probably land in liquid water (assuming you know how to get a lot of things out of your lungs if you were in orbit) and if it doesn't fire then in a short time it's going to explode on impact.  It won't be the fastest burn and it might not be anything you needed at any given moment.  If it does ignite then it is at least a short time after the payload has loaded up.  So, in any circumstances, you'll just have to learn to be an idiot.
The next thing I want to stress