US to Pay to go to ISS 636
forgotten_my_nick writes "According to BBC News, Russia has announced that it will no longer ferry US astronauts to space for free (It has been doing so for two years). From 2006 the US will be expected to pay."
Repaid already? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WTG Russia. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ukraine (Score:1, Interesting)
The irony is that Russia is almost in a better position to pay for sending people into space right now. They may not have much money, but they're not at the serious risk of going bankrupt within that next decade that the USA is.
White Elephant (Score:5, Interesting)
We all know the 'great' and 'international' part got scrapped (well, not entirely, but still)... what about the science? With a crew of 2 members and troubles with reapprovisionment, is there any (real) science getting done on the ISS? Or is it only kept up because we already invested too much in it?
Re:Russia seems different since the school inciden (Score:3, Interesting)
The conspiracy theorists have always thought that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a sham to get the west (Regan, Thatcher, JPII, et. al) off their backs and cut their economic losses. The recent business with Yukos makes it seem more likely. After all, a KGB man is running the country.
Re:WTG Russia. (Score:3, Interesting)
You were buying security, not spacecraft (Score:4, Interesting)
That is a myth (Score:2, Interesting)
US space scientists are better paid in private industry these days.
Hollow, empty shell (Score:4, Interesting)
The USSR has ceased to be a "superpower", and the USA has established clear, military dominance. What's the point of NASA today?
What's really interesting is the kickoff of the private/commercial space age begun with SpaceShipOne. The Ansari X-Prize wasn't the goal - it was the starting line.
Within the next 1-2 decades, we'll see the old-style national space agencies dwarfed as pure economics brings scale to the space industry.
Space today is basically a high-dollar, cottage industry. Everything is hand/custom made at high expense, and in painfully small volumes.
It'll start with the obvious - people paying $25,000/seat to fly into space for an hour. Technology will be refined, prices will drop, and by the time I'm an old guy (I'm 32 now) I expect to be able to spend a week in space at a price I could actually afford.
But that's not so big, as the reality that new uses for the reduced-cost space travel will be discovered - uses we have no way of predicting.
Just like Edison could never have predicted micro-electronics, the future holds possibilities we can only begin to imagine!
Ticket price for the Rus Kosmos (Score:3, Interesting)
1 seat on the Russian taxi sells commercially for $25 M US dollars, however that included several weeks of training, as the story goes.
I believe that the Soyuz is a 3-seater. Assuming all passengers are capable astronauts, It isn't unreasonable to still expect the astronauts can travel for the same price as a civilian tourist.
At that price, let's round up and say the seven-person Space Shuttle ride equivalent is $200 M US dollars. I believe that the cargo volume in the Soyuz is much smaller, so tack on $50-100 M US dollars for an additional supply-only launch.
It sure seems to me like no matter how you jiggle the numbers, there really isn't much fiscal sense to fire up the Space Shuttle, for routine, non-assembly missions. A billion-dollar Shuttle launch means 1/3rd to 1/4th the investment value.
Re:White Elephant (Score:1, Interesting)
If it keeps ICBMs away from rogue nations, that's not too bad of an ROI.
..."all that money..." (Score:3, Interesting)
In percentages, it's about 0.12% of our GDP at its peak. [slashdot.org]
Although I can't find substantiation online, I know that Robert Heinlein asserted that the DoD spends NASA's YEARLY budget every single day of the year.
All that money. *snort*
Re:Well then. (Score:4, Interesting)
One Russian flight - $20M
If the shuttle fleet weren't grounded, each US flight would cost as much as, what, 60 Russian launches. Forgive me if I got the numbers wrong; they should be in the ballpark, at least. It's way more cost effective for NASA to pay the Russians for the lift. Russian space tech is crappier than NASA's, but it's also way cheaper than it's crappier:-). Of course, it would be even cheaper to pay these guys, or even these guys, but they are not quite up to the task yet.
Re:Well then. (Score:3, Interesting)
To my knowledge, Russia now has another space port, Plesetsk, and is actively developing it. Perhaps this is to minimise dependency on Kazakhstan and "their" Baikonur.
Re:International relations (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple of days ago at a Collin Powell press conference Powell was talking about how important it was Ukraine get a democraticly elected government without outside interference. The reporter being especially smart, informed and ballsy pointed out the U.S. was funding Yuschenko's party through the National Endowment for Democracy and was in fact interfering in the election just as much as Moscow was. It wouldn't be suprising if the CIA was helping fuel the uprising after the previous election too, they do that sort of thing, all the time. You see "National Endowment for Democracy" is one of those big brotherisms. They don't actually promote democracy where people in a country pick the leader of their choice, they work to bend and twist countries so that only governments friendly to U.S. win, even if that outcome runs counter to the actual democratic will of the people that live there.
It will be interesting to see how deeply the relationship between the U.S. and Russia fractures. It appears poised for a really deep schism that could lead to a new cold war. I'm wondering what will happen to ISS if the U.S. and Russia return to a true adverserial relationship. I'm pretty sure the Russians could with some work, undock the pieces they built and have a functional space station core they could use to build a new MIR while the rest of ISS eventually ends up in cinders.
Re:Well then. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell, if they're that broke, let's buy some of theirs.
How did we end up with such an expensive system, and how did Communists build such a cheap one? Wasn't their society supposed to be extremely wasteful, and ours the efficient one? What the hell happened?
I something think James P. Hogan was right in 'Leapfrog'.
Re:Well then. (Score:5, Interesting)
They couldn't afford an expensive system. They tried [wikipedia.org], too, but had to stop for lack of funds. Then they had no choice but to keep updating their old Soyuz system. In the meanwhile we abandoned ours, because we had the shuttle.
The whole story shows that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, even if you have a lot of eggs, which is a well known fact outside of the context of space programs:-).
Besides, the shuttle is a much bigger ship than Soyuz, and it can do a lot more than just take people in and out of orbit, so they are not really comparable. Just try to imagine a Soyuz-based mission to fix the Hubble.
Re:Well then. (Score:2, Interesting)
and some spefications and history
http://www.asi.org/adb/04/03/09/01/npo-e
http://www.friends-partners.ru/partners/mwa
i'm sure that if you google you'll find tables of comparision between western engines and russian engines, the specific impulse values of the russian engines are brutal, and as someone said in a earlier post, for what? 300 million USd for a shuttle launch, and 20 million USd for a soviet vehicle launch?
Altough western and russian design philosophies are quite different, the tight budget of the russians only forces them to be innovative (and sometimes to take unnecessary risks).
I still don't know where people got this idea of crappy russian space tech, they have closed cycle engines since their (canceled) lunar program, and the Mir lasted twice as much as it was designed to.
Agriculture without space?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Right. Social welfare programmes like the ones we've spent trillions on in the US -- and yet, we've got tons of poor folks at home and abroad.
Right. Agricultural development. Because crop yields would be so much higher without infrared imaging to spot diseased areas (or brush fires) in nearby areas, GPS to send him (or firefighters) out there to fix it, weather satellites to tell him whether or not it's going to rain this week, or other monitoring stations so that he can prepare a year or two in advance for an El Nino or La Nina event.
The reason you have a higher standard of living than Louis XIV could have dreamed of is because people decided to invest in technology rather than bandaid fixes to immediate problems.
At the turn of the century, people were worried that New York City was growing at a rate that would result in the streets being literally knee-deep in horseshit by the 50s.
There was even one chap who printed out handbills at a printing shop called Ink-blot Dot Org, saying "If they'd have taken all that money that people spent on Henry Ford's silly contraption, and put it into hiring the poor as street sweepers, New Yorkers would have been better off!"
Let it burn. (Score:1, Interesting)
RTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
As usual we get the slew of high moderated posts about how the americans built everything, and how the russians are now gouging them.
Some people blame the americans, others the russians. All didn't read the article.
Fact: The russians are currently ferrying everything to the station.
Fact: NASA is grounded.
Fact: The russians are very low on funds, and can't afford to keep doing this.
They've stated that they'll wait to see if NASA meets its May deadline to get their shuttles going again.
They've stated that they want to negotiate something to ease the burden (such as bartering for the man hours they currently owe for other work).
America's response hasn't been made clear yet.
Is this gouging? No. They haven't even entered negotiations yet.
Should they gouge? Some of you "capitalist or die" affictionados may think so, but that kind of thinking is what drives the CEOs who only look to the next quarter's earnings, and what they can get out of it before the thing collapses.
This doesn't work in world politics, as can be seen from the fallout of Iraq.
Re:Repaid already? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually a lot of the problems comes down to the trenches of WWI. The US entered particularly late into that one but it was a common and appalling experience for the rest of Europe.
Re:Repaid already? (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, the U.S. is a brain, heart and soul dead shell with a lot of weapons. Even at our local metropolitan Mensa gathering we have to avoid the "Rush Limbaugh is God" table. This has all been analyzed and put on the bookshelves already. Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Berman's Twilight of American Culture.
Personally, I've decided I don't care. A purposeful Nazi or a pig-ignorant Nazi, they are both repugnant and I'm ashamed of my countrymen. But you have to realize that the American people are pig-ignorant. Forget quality public education, we don't even have free media. I gave up on so-called "liberal" public radio after the drumbeat to war in March of '03 when one of their shows headlined some guy from a military college on "Socrates, the soldiering years!" Talk about pseudo-intellectual target market warmongering taken to the ridiculous. If it weren't for the meager checks and balances of the internet, Clear Channel would probably be telling the U.S. heartland that most of the world has been taken over by aliens, so to speak.
And they'd believe it.
Exploration isn't safe (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact, it seems pretty obvious to me that if you want to be on the frontier, you had better be willing to accept risks or to get out of the way for those that are. I have a lot more faith in corporations that are willing to think outside the box or countries with less lawyers then the US making it happen...
If anyone can ever make manned space travel more then a place for doing expensive research, I think you'd see a potential shift in the world powers
Re:You were buying security, not spacecraft (Score:3, Interesting)
A key reason the U.S. is the sole remaining superpower of the two is because the U.S.S.R got bogged down in a 10 year quagmire in Afghanistan fighting the people who later became the Taliban and Al Qaeda (who were liberally funded, armed and trained by Ronald Reagan and the CIA by the way). Fighting that bloody insurgency decimated the Soviet military and created an entire generation openly disillusioned with the Soviet Union's government. It had a lot in common with Vietnam and today's Iraq. If Iraq continues another ten years and continues to escalate in its savagery the U.S. could easily suffer a similar fate. Making a conventional military fight an insurgency for a decare, where you can't tell friend from foe or insurgent from civilian has devastating effects on soldiers. Some become blood thirsty, indiscriminate killers, and others are eaten up inside by the killing of innocent women and children.
And of course Gorbachev rising to power had a lot to do with it. It will be interesting to discover when documents become declassified if he was just an enlightened leader who brought change, or a CIA mole.
All in all I doubt American "superiority" had a lot to do with it except in the minds of American's who like to think the world revolves around them. Hubris is a wicked mistress. America could fall from its pedestal sometime soon and hubris will be standing behind America giving it a shove when it happens.
The U.S. could easily be shoved aside soon by the EU or China in the very near future. Sure they can't match the U.S. militarily yet but they are also not squandering all their treasure on an oversized, overextended military. If America continues to gut its economy, in particular, by shipping it wholesale to China, a day will come when it can't pay for its overside military, and China can pay for new one, and whats more will have the industrial and technical ability to build one, why because the U.S. is currently engaged in a wholesale transfer of its capital, IP and technical knowledge to China.