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ISS Construction Resumes
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sun Aug 20, 2006 08:37 PM
from the old-meets-new dept.
from the old-meets-new dept.
avtchillsboro writes "The NY Times has an article detailing new construction on the International Space Station (ISS) and the additions via coming Space Shuttle missions through 2010. From the article: 'For more than three years, the International Space Station has floated half-built above the Earth. Maintained by a skeleton crew, the station — an assemblage of modules and girders — has not come close to its stated goal of becoming a world-class research outpost. But now construction, which has hung in limbo since NASA's space shuttle fleet was grounded after the 2003 Columbia disaster, is scheduled to resume. The shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to lift off next Sunday carrying a bus-size segment of the station's backbone that includes a new set of solar-power arrays.'"
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Cost Versus Utility (Score:4, Interesting)
According the Wikipedia entry, NASA spends $5 billion annually on the ISS. I guess I hope to hear more news of discoveries from ISS and scientific advancements once it nears completion but I have not seen much in the news as of late. In fact, Hubble seems to be the best investment we've made next to the ISS. Is this just a proof of concept that we can work together with other nations on space exploration? What do we envision for the ISS in our future?
I know that this is an easy thing to complain about and I'm not the first to ask if it's really worth it. But can anyone tell me what $5 billion of our tax payer dollars has done for us? And why is it that construction grinds to a halt when only one of the member nations involved grounds its shuttles? Is this really an "international" space station? Also, doesn't this leave the United States eternally committed to developing this project? Will we ever be able to opt out of this even after its completion?
With the current administration in the United States, spending doesn't seem to worry them [cbsnews.com] at all. And with the National Debt Clock [brillig.com] ticking at around $8.5 trillion these days, I guess I should expect nothing more. Why is it that "small government conservatives" have the knack to make that clock jump by large percentages?
Re:Cost Versus Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
It is the government's job to finance the future potentially useful tasks. To drag out a tired example, it's a modern Columbus. It is a cost that is most likely going to return nothing, but if it does, the potential rewards will make it all worth it.
That really ran on.
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Re:Cost Versus Utility (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right, of course. Thing is, the space station isn't one of those things. It may have been had it been built as originally planned, but it's a mere shadow of its aspirational self. When you evicerate a project the way this one has, you're left with a huge bill and no return. If the original plan was to build somewhere for millionaires to holiday while waiting for Branson to get is arse in gear (and, indeed, space), then fine. However, it was build as a science station, and the science it's doing - and will do for the foreseeable future - is negligible.
I'm not a fan of using starving etheopians/national debts/shambolic foreign adventures/whatever to cavil about the cost of any particular project, but there are many, many ways NASA and ESA and everyone else could've spent the money. It's nearly forty years since the moon landings; we should be going to war with Mars now as it declares independence. Instead, we're left with a freefalling white elephant that's got all the utility of a fingerless campanologist.
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Re:Cost Versus Utility (Score:4, Insightful)
But, in todays society, if they scrapped the ISS, I could never see them starting a new one. At least, with this white elephant, the bean counters could possibly be swayed with the "we've invested this much, lets invest some more and get something out of it" argument, where I cannot see this mentality starting from nothing. Especially since they will have the "failed white elephant" of the ISS to hold up as an example of why it will never work.
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Re:Cost Versus Utility (Score:5, Informative)
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Behold rde, the new BadAnalogyGuy!
"fingerless campanologist" (Score:3, Funny)
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Columbus was financed for conquest (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some things that just should be done, and damn the cost.
That's an emotional argument, not a logical one. It's little better than "the end justifies the means", and it is very cliche; all the time, the answer to "why are we doing this" is "because it's there!" That's great if you're spending your own bucks to go climb Everest- I wish you the best of luck. But if you're going to spend trillions of dollars, I need something much more concrete. Go google "waggonauts" some time, and read for an INSIDER's view of how stupid human space exploration is. Seriously- it was written by NASA people...
You need to stop and realize that most space exploration hasn't been for research or the betterment of mankind. It's all a bragging rights/land grab game between nations, while lining the pockets of defense contractors. Why do you think Kennedy put people on the moon? Because the Russians were the first to put people in space- dozens of them- before the US put Glen up. The race to put a man in space also helped quite a bit with refining nuclear missile technology. Why do you think Bush got interested in the Moon and Mars? Only because China got interested in the moon, and "the world's greatest superpower" can't be outdone...
Did you ever notice that countries that were not involved in the space and weapons races have remarkably better socities and infrastructure, because they devoted resources to taking care of their people?
To drag out a tired example, it's a modern Columbus. It is a cost that is most likely going to return nothing, but if it does, the potential rewards will make it all worth it.
Spain financed Columbus because he was in search of conquest; gold, shorter trade routes, etc. It was a bit of a crapshoot, but they figured that if he came back at all, they stood a great chance of making a killing, and they were right. The difference here is that we have nothing to gain from exploration of Mars or the Moon; it's a childish pipe-dream to think we'll find anything practical in terms of natural resources on either planets. Putting a couple hundred people on 3 ships for a few months PALES in comparison to the challenges involved in a manned trip to Mars. There is no giant cache of gold on the moon or mars, and even if there was- the economics just don't add up, and they don't get better as you throw more money at the problem. People with a space exploration fetish concoct the most amazing chains of "if we..." arguments to justify exploration...
It's also a common fallacy that space exploration brought us wonders like zero-g pens, velcro, orange tang, and remote medical monitoring. All existed before the manned space program. I know slashdot readers hate to think it, but we've gotten very little out of space "exploration", especially the manned kind.
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Re:Columbus was financed for conquest (Score:4, Insightful)
First, let me point out that I agree with your original premise - the ISS is a boondoggle.
The comparison with Columbus is flawed; more accurately one would ask if the 'Columbus' venture would have made sense had they outfitted him with gold-plated ships, silken sails, the highest-paid crew...and then asked him to 'test the capability for long term voyaging' by floating 100 miles offshore for a month. You are right that the investment is staggering and gross, for a mission that's tentative and whose value is questionable.
However, I'm going to take serious issue with your rationale. You question the value of space exploration; really? Are you prepared to live in a Logan's Run world where people are terminated at the end of their useful age? Or perhaps a Soylent Green world? Because, I think it's an unquestionable fact that the earth is a closed system. Resources are finite. However, population keeps increasing, the standard of living for everyone is also increasing, and people's lifespans are increasing. Where are you willing to impose the brake? Have any idea what sort of governance and enforcement will be required to STOP people from having children?
Personally, I see it as a Hobson's choice: either we accept that there are limited resources on the planet and resign ourselves to being trapped here. Or, we spend huge sums of money NOW in the hopes that will parlay into someting akin to the discovery of the New World of the 15th century. Can we bank on it? No, obviously not. But I don't see much of an alternative, maybe you prefer a police-state existence.
Is space exploration hideously expensive? Yep. But you trivialize the challenges of the 15th century mariner when you say that "Putting a couple hundred people on 3 ships for a few months PALES in comparison to the challenges involved in a manned trip to Mars." - that's a joke. We can calculate with a reasonable degree of certainty what's involved, they had ABSOLUTELY no idea. They had a significant expectation that they would NOT be coming back, at least of them surely WOULD die on the trip. You might think it's insignificant that a bunch of dirty, uneducated sailors risked their lives but I assure you it mattered to THEM. Welcome to 2006 - we substitute money for risk.
And finally, your 'comparison' is specious: "Did you ever notice that countries that were not involved in the space and weapons races have remarkably better socities and infrastructure, because they devoted resources to taking care of their people?"
Did you ever notice that the countries that were not involved in the space and weapons races spent the last 40 years being protected by the countries that DID? Duh. Although I can sense behind your words that you probably thought the Cold War was just a trivial dispute between esoteric philosophies.
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Re:Cost Versus Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
In proyects such as the ISS, there are always inventions and advances that are not cost effective in the foreseeable future, but that benefit mankind tremendously in future generations.
To drag out a tired example, it's a modern Columbus.
FWIW, the King of Portugal invested in one fruitless expedition after another to circumnavigate Africa, but sailor's superstitions got in the way every time. I believe it was in the fourteenth attempt that the crew was caught up in a nasty storm and, after it had abated, discovered to their surprise that they were way south of Cape Bojador, according to legend, ends of the Earth. This was the turning point. Every single expedition after that progressed fearlessly further and further, bringing back paydirt each time. In the early XV Century, the King of Portugal set the stage for Columbus.
Here's another example: In medieval times, the alchemical process of creating lenses, perfecting the techniques of polishing them so that they would be as near perfect as possible. Meanwhile, all around, plagues and misery bedeviled society, which made lenses a pointless and costly exercise in trivial matters, according to the pundits of the age.
Little did the pundits know that from this work, among other things, the microscope would come to being, the discovery of the source of diseases was only a matter of time.
For the majority, things always make much more sense in retrospect. For now, in the matter of the ISS, we need faith in the future fruits of peaceful labor on an epic scale.
Yes, bureaucracy inflates expenses so that these things seem like pork barrel proyects. However, isn't the cost still a fraction of the money that goes down the black hole known as the Military Industry, which needs to invent wars in order to dispose of aging weaponry and keep the money-go-round in motion? For the time being, this is what we need to question, instead of peaceful endeavours of knowledge.
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Re:Cost Versus Utility (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Cost Versus Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone once said that building things like the supercollider have nothing to do with the defense of the nation, except to make it worth defending. This may be true, but we must not send good money after bad. The superconducting supercollider project was cancelled. If even one superconductiong supercollider project, or space telescope, or very large array of telescopes, or interplanetary space probe at the edge of the solar system is cancelled to provide funding for an excercise in political futility, well that's just sad.
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Exotic Projects Capturing the Public's Imagination (Score:5, Insightful)
When President Kennedy pledged that Washington would put an American on the moon, the pledge captured our imagination [wikipedia.org]. We Americans would do something that had never been done in the past. Further, putting an American on the moon was not an incremental advance in technology but was a huge leap that faced a high risk of failure.
NASA should go back to its adventurous roots by devoting 25% of its budget to exotic, high-risk projects. The remaining 75% would go to run-of-the-mill projects.
NASA, not the American military, should be splurging money on building a prototype of a hyperdrive, enabling faster-than-light travel [newscientistspace.com]. Even if the prototype does not work, it would significantly facilitate the breakthroughs that will be necessary for a successful hyperdrive,.
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Re:Exotic Projects Capturing the Public's Imaginat (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly you are NOT American, because it is very obvious to any outsider looking in that the USA will no tolerate any reasonable level of risk at all. Look at the stink when just 7 people die, and only a 2 Billion dollar shuttle is lost? Hell, 7 people is nothing - and Dubya it chucking a billion a week at Iraq - and ALL of those lives and dollars are completely wasted. I don't see anyone reviewing the Military budget (450 Billion) because people keep dying.
Hell, servicing Hubble - arguably the most successful space craft ever - was cancelled because people might die. I bet if you asked ANY rated astronaut if they're prepared to take the risk of servicing Hubble you'd get a 100% affirmative "We'll go!" answer.
No - the USA has turned its back on the pioneering spirit - and the whole "Earth, Moon, Mars and beyond" thing is a joke. It's going to be a debacle of the greatest kind: even worse than the ISS. Jebus, it's no even clear how to build a BDB (Big Dumb Booster) any more. The "Stick" so eloquently argued for is a multibillion dollar development, and not even remotely "using existing hardware" as advertised.
Don't get me wrong, I love the ISS, and if it costs 2 Billion dollars a shot to get my pretty 2560 x 1024 wallpaper - then that's a cost I'm willing for US tax payers to pay! Even if the ISS ends up costing 100 billion Euros, the experience of actually having worked together in space (and yes, many contries HAVE contributed) and the knowledge gained by assembling the thing probably almost justify the expense.
See the thing most of you have forgotten, is that you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes: and NASA has had plenty of failures in recent years. The problem is that NASA isn't being driven by an agenda which requires those lessons to be turned into conventional wisdom, and success!
Hell, it might cost a Trillion US dollars before there's any conventional wisdom about getting to LEO, and how to do things beyond LEO - and if it costs a trillion - or two trillion - or a hundred trillion dollars, then that's the price it costs to buy our way into this galaxy. No one is standing by, watching us, and they don't have a "Key To The Galaxy" waiting for us when we set foot on Mars. Escaping the doomed Earth, and populating the Solar System is going to be the most expensive venture ever undertaken by man. The effort may well cripple the Earth for a long time.
One thing is clear: whatever the cost, we need to know how to get off the planet reliably and cheaply.
Personally, I think sitting atop a million kilos of rocket fuel is the dumbest idea ever!
The future isn't rocket powered: it's laser powered: http://lightcrafttechnologies.com/ [lightcraft...logies.com] or its via space elevators. It most certainly does not make sense to burn 95% (or 99%!) of your payload just toget into orbit! If you're gonna burn fuel, the burn it on the ground.
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Love the post, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, W. is running up a defict like there is no tomorrow. This will force us to cut back at some point.
Second, at this time, we have to rebuild our launch capacity. That means that we need to be able to launch what we had back in the 60s. Nixon killed that capability. W. is restoring it. While I know that many folks hate the CEV (and some hate even the launchers), we will have the same launch capacity that Kennedy got us 40 years ago.
Once we have Oriion, I agree with you that it will be time for NASA to return to the interesting ideas that a commercial company can not and will not do. Of course, I have said for a decade the right thing to be doing is a one-way trip to Mars for colonizing. And the only thing that comes back are goods ; Now, Musk is pushing that concept. That is where the real money will be.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The launch capacity we had in the 60's (the Saturn V) was as expensive as the Shuttle - we don't need expensive shipping, we need cheap shipping.
No, Congress killed it back during the Johnson administration. Nixon inherited a fait accompli - a Congress that wasn't interested in funding NASA's ever more grand
Re:Exotic Projects Capturing the Public's Imaginat (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because of the approach that was chosen. If the US government had listened to Von Braun, there would have been a permanent space station in orbit since the sixties, a platform for ongoing moon missions by the seventies. We would be reaping the benefits of this today.
Instead, they went for the most expensive, dangerous and least permanent route. Because JFK made the mos
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
There is only one member nation with shuttles...
Nasa's shuttle is the only vehicle able to carry big enough loads up there.
That's why.
Re:Cost Versus Utility (Score:5, Informative)
Heres a nice table of vehicles:
http://www.tbs-satellite.com/tse/online/thema_lan
STS is the heavy lifter currently to LEO.
What I cannot find is size and weight tables of each part of ISS. Not that it matters, the whole ISS plan is DESIGNED around the STS. If it were instead designed around the Proton D1...or Energia.
Anyway STS is not the only game in town.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Arguably not so much so far, other than give us half a permanently manned outpost in space. But it would be stupid to abandon the project now, when it's so far along -- better to finish it up and make the best of it. If nothing else, it gives us more experience living and working in space.
And why is it that construction grinds to a halt when only one of the member
nations involved grounds its shuttles? Is this really an "intern
intangibles (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's a subtle thing. But there is a practical difference between a crabbed, pessimistic, Can't-Do defeatist culture and a culture full of ambition and daring that does impractical but spectactular things with a spare 0.1% of its GNP: one produces living descendants a thousand years later, and the other merely produces elegant, sardonic essays written in a dead language that are closely studied by scholars of the future.
Man does not live on bread alone, to paraphrase Moses, but perhaps also on dreams that inspire his best efforts and give him a sense of wonder and hope for the future. I mean, if you don't think this way -- if you're not much interested in things unless there's something in it for Number One -- then you don't have children and your genes get edited out of the species. This is perhaps why clever cynicism is more noteable among societies (and individuals) in decline than in ascendacy.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A sense of joy in life, the spirit of an explorer, the heart of a child, always ready to stand in awe.
However, there is strong reason for disillusionment among the current living generations. When growing up, we saw marvelous representations of climate-controlled, domed cities in harmony with nature, grand space stations rotating in Earth orbit, colonies on the Moon. We were told that we could very well be living in space with our children once we reached...the age we are now.
These and other wo
Re:intangibles (Score:4, Insightful)
But I don't think it's our "institutions" that failed. I think we did. The aerospace engineers didn't turn stupid, or lose heart. They just lost our interest, and we stopped paying their salaries. In the 70s and 80s the country turned its attention back inward to indulge in twenty-five years of narcissist navel gazing. We told ourselves we needed to "fix" things on Earth first, things like poverty, prejudice, war, pollution. I suppose it escaped our attention that these things are as much fixtures of life as bad luck, death and taxes, and we can no more fix them for good than we can make it so all the children are above average. But we had a lot of fun spending all that money, marching, and making fine speeches. And it was actually a lot easier than building spacecraft, and a lot less dangerous than trying to live on an airless minor planet.
So it goes. I suppose I'm disappointed. But I don't think I'm cynical about the years since then. They weren't devoid of miracles. We may not live on the Moon, but we do have amazing electronic widgets, and we've done remarkable things in medicine. I'm not even disgusted with all the money we spent standing on the brink of nuclear annihilation. We guarded half the world's freedom for 50 years, and, amazingly, without having to fight the appalling war everyone thought was coming any moment. That's something remarkable, actually.
In this sense, attitudes of cynicism and pessimism are a reflection of the profound failure by both our public and private institutions...
Maybe. But maybe attitudes of cynicism and pessimism are not the result of, but a major cause of, failures in public and private institutions. I mean, why exactly should we expect our institutions to be more courageous and dedicated than we are as individuals?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the answer lies in recognition that just because an effort is collaborative doesn't mean any given area of responsibility is equally divisible between contributors. Similarly, it doesn't follow that since an operation didn't take place when the chief surgeon was delayed that the chief surgeon operates alone.
Take for instance my own country -- which is folksy, grease-loving and bor
Re:Cost Versus Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the ISS expenditures:
Nontrivial, but less than half of the $5B you incorrectly reported.
And while the utility is certainly important, it's not the only measure of value. The experience itself is a value, in that the people involved are gaining experience with constructing things in orbit, and having a continuous human presence in orbit furthers our knowledge of the physiological effects of living in space.
The ISS may be a small step, but it's a step, and that's ultimately how humanity progresses for the most part -- in steps, not in leaps and bounds. The ISS may only be an incremental progression, but it's progress nonetheless.
That's not to say the ISS hasn't been somewhat disappointing, but that's at least in part due to several modules being cancelled due to complaints about cost. It's the typical bureaucratic Catch-22: People want to see results before upping the ante. Unfortunately, it's not rarely possible to work like that. If you fund everything except the wheels of a car, all you've got is a nice air-conditioned box.
And even if you consider the ISS a failure, it's important to remember that science is progressed by failure just as much as success -- at the very least we should have ideas on what to do, or not to do, the next time.
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Why do you expect any science/discovery from any facility or instrument that isn't completed?
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really funny. There's been an Independent of times of late and Lieberman's only hopes are a tragic accident taking someone's life at the wrong time, and getting in on someone's termination, but get Lieberman in office and you'll hear just what you did with Vermont: "bi-partisan". If there are three parties represented in Congress, how can it be two?
It's obviously a means to make people think in terms of two parties, and only two parties.
A zero-sum game with two participants makes it real easy to kno
Awesome! (Score:3, Funny)
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Someone fill me in... (Score:5, Insightful)
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International Space Station? (Score:2)
Snakes in the ISS (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry - I had to.... (Score:5, Funny)
Moon base! (Score:4, Funny)
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AFAIK, the current plan (or one of) is to launch docking stations up to LEO, using existing lifters (such as the Soyez rockets), then launch vehicles from there to moon orbit. A similar floating dock will be put up in moon orbit, and landers will be launched from there to the surface.
Of course, this all has to be lifted from earth, but I reckon they get better utility using craft
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Oh thank God! .... (Score:2, Funny)
Think about it. (Score:5, Insightful)
The military expenditure of the United States Department of Defense for fiscal year 2006 is:
Total Funding $441.6 Billion
Operations and maintenance $124.3 Bil.
Military Personnel $108.8 Bil.
Procurement $79.1 Bil.
Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation $69.5 Bil.
Military Construction $12.2 Bil.
Department of Energy Defense Activities $17.0 Bil.
ISS doesn't sound very expensive to me. If you want to stop wasting money, stop spending it on lining the pockets of your defense contractors and causing untold grief in the middle east.
And to those who say 'Why are we doing it all? Why aren't there any other countries contributing $$$, vehicles etc?' Think about this:
1. Russia put up the first module.
2. Many countries are constructing ISS modules.
3. The shuttle was designated to transport said modules to ISS. Modules were designed specifically for transportation to ISS -BY_ the shuttle.
4. Many countries supply tech/hardware/people etc.
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Re:Think about it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because the USA spends a lot on military doesn't mean that the unrelated expenditure of the ISS isn't excessive compared to any other uses of the money. What you are REALLY saying is just that from your political perspective, those military expenditures are ones you don't respect and would prefer to see them cut first. That's a red herring from the issue of how much is the correct amount of money to spend on orbiting space station research.
If you cut the spending on the ISS, the gov't could spend that very significant amount money in any number of places or simply return it to the citizens via debt repayments or even tax cuts. Not _just_ the agencies you love to hate. If those agencies are overfunded their budgets ought to be cut, but again this has nothing to do with the funding of the ISS -- once those would be cut the question of how much to fund the ISS still remains.
Fact is, I agree with your implied position that the amount of money the US spends on defense is truly insane, while the amount of money to support the ISS is justified. But the argument you used to support that is total bull.
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a bleak day for science (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:but... (Score:5, Informative)
They have been. Since the Columbia disaster the station has been largely serviced by Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
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Re:but... (Score:4, Informative)
They have. Several pieces of the ISS have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets. The problem is that the entire launching strategy was pre-planned, with some parts launched and deployed by Shuttle, some by other vehicles.
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Not Mars either.
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Maybe so: but compare the size of it and its apparent utility (what the movie showed taking place on it) to this orbital version of'Dogpatch' (http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/136653main_s11 4e7221_high.jpg).
It seems like all they're ever doing is fixing it and waiting for the next food/oxygen delivery (and s
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
NASA: "What ever do you mean?"
Public: "You know, what is its purpose?"
NASA: "Purpose? Oh, right. Ahem, well, me and my buddies get a nice salary, a steady job and we get to play with model rockets sometimes which is really cool...."
Public: "Huh?"
NASA: "Oh. Erm. Oh yes! Research. There's lots of research involved. Of the non-specific kind. Well, mainly about how to prevent space stations breaking apart whilst in orbit. You know - technical stuff. You wouldn't under